Rothweiler Event Design

Back in 1955, Las Vegas printed bomb schedules so tourists could watch atomic blasts from the hotel pool. Netflix just set the new Stranger Things show right in the middle of that. The teaser opens on a title card that says April 19, 1955, Nevada. Four days earlier, the government set off a 22-kiloton bomb about 65 miles from Las Vegas, and a week earlier the CIA had picked out the empty lakebed that became Area 51. People really did party for it. The Chamber of Commerce put out calendars with blast times and the best places to watch from, and casinos threw rooftop parties that went until the sky flashed white. That spring alone, Operation Teapot set off 14 bombs at the test site, about one every six days. This is the part that gets creepy if you watched the show. In canon, Henry Creel, the kid who grows up to be Vecna, was born in Nevada in 1947. In The First Shadow, the Broadway prequel, Brenner tells him he vanished for about 12 hours after his eighth birthday near a military base in Lincoln County. That puts his disappearance right around 1955, in the same county as Area 51. Netflix says the new show has all-new characters, so Henry might never appear. I still don't buy that the Duffers landed on that year in that state by accident. About two weeks after the teaser's date, the government built a fake American town out in the desert. It had houses, cars, fridges stocked with food, and mannequins dressed up and posed inside like families. Then they set off 29 kilotons right next to it, filmed the whole thing, and sent it around the country as a civil defense movie. Meanwhile the CIA was building a secret runway at Groom Lake for the U-2 spy plane, about 25 miles from the town the play says Henry's family lived in. The plane first flew there that August. Years later, the CIA's own declassified history admitted its spy planes were behind more than half of America's UFO reports in the late 1950s. Now rewatch the teaser. You see a kid's bike knocked over in the dirt at night by a barbed wire fence, a radio still sitting in the basket, and a boom that rips the sky open. Netflix posted it on November 6, the same date Will Byers disappeared in 1983, when his bike turned up in the woods. Five seasons of this show ran on a made-up government lab in Indiana, and for the prequel the Duffers picked the one week in real American history when the actual government was doing weirder stuff than anything they ever wrote.