DVDs in the 80s
Dear people writing Stranger Things fanfiction,
First of all: Go you! You're writing! That's amazing! Keep! It! Up!
Secondly: I don't give a shit about research. I hardly do any myself, except when it comes to important things. And when it comes to writing in the past, it often becomes important because we don't always realize how old/young certain things are.
Which brings me to point 3:
DVDs are not as old as you think they are.
Steve and Robin at Family Video? They don't rent out DVDs. They rent out video tapes. VHS. The first movies on DVD came out in 1997.
That's a whole ass 11 years after 1986.
In 2003, DVDs rentals surpassed VHS rentals for the first time.
I literally saw a tag say the timeline was ambiguous because they 'use Instagram but also own DVDs'. Sure, it's ambiguous in the sense that it could be anywhere between 2010 and today, but they clearly meant a much larger time frame than that, because according to what is apparently the popular belief, DVDs are no longer a Thing.
I can promise you that they are very much still a thing.
Netflix started streaming in 2007 (which is the same year VHS went out of production, coincidentally); that gives 3 years before Instagram in which apparently according to some DVDs were replaced. Netflix still sends out DVDs to this day in some places. DVDs are very much alive, and it's incredibly jarring to either see DVDs in fics over a decade too early, or to see them dismissed as no longer a thing (though the former is the absolute worst).
Imagine seeing a character use TikTok in a fic that's clearly not set in modern times, how jarring that would be.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
TLDR: DVDs were not a thing in the 80s, and not popular until early 2000s.
