Read this: Let’s take a closer look at all the stores in Stranger Things’ Starcourt Mall
Aux Features Great Job
Sure, the special effects in Stranger Things 3 were impressive, with exploding rats and a spider-y Mind Flayer and powerful Russian lasers trying to re-open the portal into the Upside Down. But…did you notice the endless stacks of bright ’80s clothes in The Gap at Hawkins’ problematic Starcourt Mall? The attention to detail in said mall, from the Orange Julius to the Jazzercise to the Burger King, was spot-on throughout.
The Los Angeles Times offers an in-depth trip on the mall time machine, explaining how “Gwinnett Place Mall, a shopping center in suburban Atlanta that has seen better days,” was transformed into the impressively neon Starcourt, which involved gutting and restoring about 40 different restaurants and stores. For a more sentimental exploration, though, check out eighetiesbaby.net, where writer John Bilancini compares Starcourt to the massive malls of his youth. Things that check out: JC Penney, Sam Goody, Hot Sam, Claire’s Boutique, and oh god, Esprit.
A little more suspect is Hot Dog On A Stick, which would probably be more of a West Coast thing than hot spot in midwestern Hawkins. We also never learn the name of the lingerie shop, and would there really be a store so unimaginatively named as Camera Repair? Scoops Ahoy, of course, is a fictional franchise, but we heard its best employees got hired away by a video store anyway.
176 Comments
Camera Repair is clearly a speed-dating location for photographers.
I don’t ever remember there being a Burger King in any of the malls I ever went to.
Ours had one (Acadiana Mall built ~1980 in Lafayette, LA). It was unlike any other Burger King or even mall fast food I’d seen before. It was pretty big, and had a sunken in dining area in middle with lots of plants around that section. That was the prime eating area, because you just felt so secluded and it was a novelty. Place always packed.
There’s a super themed Burger on Ave U in Brooklyn that is rad because it’s still super themed. I’m guessing it’s a tad more late 80’s early 90’s.
Our Oakdale Mall in Johnson City, NY had one, except it had a raised gazebo in the middle, complete with plants….also the prime seating area.
Ours also had one (Montgomery Mall in Maryland, no idea when it was built but this was in the 90s). It was like you describe and it was separate from the food court, so it had a really large dining area. But the fact that it was at the end of one of the mall wings and not near any other restaurant made it feel a little haunted.
Every mall around me while growing up (80/90s) had one in them.
Dadeland Mall in Miami had two(as corporate headquarters was across the street), and most malls in Florida still do.Also shout out to the 40th anniversary of the shootout at Dadeland Mall and the beginning of the cocaine cowboys, my mom’s salon was in the same strip as the Crown Liquors
Mine had one, but it wasn’t in the food court.
Our ‘newest’ mall had one, in the food court even. It’s also already shuttered and is pending redevelopment as a giant youth athletic center, sure to be shuttered as well in ANOTHER 10 years.The internet has REALLY dinged our appetite for travel to entertainment or commerce.
East Towne Mall (Madison, WI) had one in the 1980s.
Idk why but I thought that said “Poops Ahoy”.
That would be the store selling maritime toilets.
And/or laxatives.Wait… Imma gonna check with the trademark office to see if that’s available…
Technically, those are “heads”. Which would make the shops selling them confusing to the stoner crowd.
There was a very brief shot of a Chess King. I remember that store as where they sold all of the trendy and slightly more urban clothing. It’s where i got my first pair of Z Cavaricci’s. Ah the nostalgia.
And don’t forget the girl version, Contempo Casuals.
When Limited Express first opened, everything it sold was either neon or metallic silver/gold.
Contempo Casuals was where the cool/punk kids shopped! I wanted to be one of them but alas, I usually stuck to Limited or Clothestime.
If you miss your deep v-neck shaker sweaters, they sell them at Express now. I went in there to buy some camisoles and thought I walked into a time machine.
In 1984 I was stationed in the Navy base in North Chicago. The closest mall, of course, had a Chess King where they very wisely employed young attractive women to sell to the young squids from the base. You could always tell when someone had gone Full Chess King by the parachute pants and zippered jackets.
I’d like to interject here how happy I am to know that the US Navy is protecting Chicago from the threat of naval invasion by Canada.
No sneaky Canucks were getting by us! Well they might have, it was just a training base. A very large base that evidently includes the only Navy boot camp these days. There were three (San Diego, Great Lakes, and Orlando) when I was in.
I still had the totally awesome long winter coat I bought at Chess King in 1987 in my basement… until last month, when I discovered the cat had peed all over it. Had to throw it out. I think I still have a (catpee-free) lime green duster jacket from Chess King.somewhere. But my Z Cavaricci’s have been gone for decades.
Sorry. Next time setup a GoFundMe to raise money to properly launder that long coat. We could likely reach that goal even in these desolate Kinjapocalypse days. We would demand a follow-up photo of you wearing it afterwards.
“Had to throw it out.”I hope you’re referring to the cat and not that sweet coat….
I BOUGHT SOME PARACHUTE PANTS THERE.
This is not something you should admit to.
THEY WERE COOL. MY MOM TOLD ME SO.
And a pair of Vans!
Not a Van’s guy! I got some black suede boots at The Wild Pair.
My parents claimed they were too broke to buy me a pair. Perhaps my parents were just shielding their Ginger child from even MORE daily horror/abuse.
Chess King, Jeans West, and… dammit, I can’t think of the other member of that unholy trinity at our mall.IIRC Chess King sold I.O.U. jeans. I will never forget that goddamned jingle.“I-oh-oh-oh, O-oh-oh-oh, U-oh-oh-oh, oh oh oh! All across America, I O U!”
You’re probably thinking of Merry Go Round. That was the case in the mall near me at least.
Yes! That’s exactly the one that I was trying to remember.Merry-Go-Round and Chess King were the trendier ones, and Jeans West was definitely trendier than the regular department stores, but not quite as trendy as MGR and CK.I shopped at Chess King more than Merry-Go-Round; at our mall IIRC Merry-Go-Round was frequented more by the Italian kids, while Chess King was more for the Chads.
There was a very brief shot of a Chess King. I remember that store as where they sold all of the trendy and slightly more urban clothing. It’s where i got my first pair of Z Cavaricci’s. Ah the nostalgia. “first pair”
In 1981 or 1982, I bought several skinny ties from the Evansville, IN branch.
I bought a Genera (think Dockers material, but overly colorful) suit there when I was 15. Fucking god damn, I’m old!
Skidz pants and Used jeans
Yep. My mom took me there the summer before freshman year so I could get a couple “more grown-up outfits, something snazzy”. Miami Vice was my favorite show at the time (Hopper was right, Friday nights was a killer lineup) so I ended up with a pair of black parachute pants, suspenders, and black leather tie, and a pair of white parachute pants with a pastel yellow shirt, pink suspenders, and a pink paisley tie. I’ve never found a picture of that outfit, unfortunately, but here’s my freshman photo in the other:
Let’s go to the mall, everybody!Come on Jessica, come on Tori,
Let’s go to the mall, you won’t be sorry
Put on your jelly bracelets
And your cool graffiti coat
At the mall, having fun is what it’s all about
But don’t forget the robot!
Lets go to the mall… today!
Embarrassingly, I heard that song before I saw that episode of How I Met Your Mother, and I assumed it was a real 80s novelty song. I didn’t listen to the lyrics very closely, in my defense.
“and would there really be a store so unimaginatively named as Camera Repair”In 1985, before “branding” and franchises really took over the world? Absolutely.
Remembering One Hour Photo places.
Those were around even into the early 2000s. Plenty of local, non-chain stores with very boring names are in my local mall now, like a “Jewelry and Watch Repair” lol
or the hat and tshirt places that would “customize” them with iron-on transfers. just foam truckers hats from china, with regular and 3/4 sleeve tshirts.
and lots and lots of shit-quality band “pins” to stick on the hats and shirts, just to make sure everyone knows you love AC/DC and Rush, since its also ironed on your hat and tshirt as well.
im sorry your expectations of gwen inhat are too much.
Even in the 1980’s, you’d still have to have an actual name for a camera repair store — even if it was something as unimaginative as “Joe’s Camera Repair”.
Well it was Joe’s camera repair but then Ed bought it and he didn’t want to spend the money to make it Ed’s so he just took Joe’s name off and left it as camera repair
You can call a store whatever you want as long as no one complains about the name. Then and now, there are many stores with similar names. “camera repair” “shoe repair” “phone repair”.
Well, there’s no law certainly, but especially before the Internet and cell phones, people found businesses via the Yellow Pages. Not having a unique name isn’t going to help you.
Ah so many fond memories of telling my parents I was going to the Waldenbooks, when really I was sneaking into Spencer Gifts.
The mall by me had Spencer’s I and II. One of them was very adult oriented (bongs and sex toys) and the other was more gag gifts and t-shirts. Eventually, in the early 90’s, it was just Spencer’s Gifts.
Interesting! I only had Spencer Gifts, and the more fun stuff was toward the front of the store, and the heady/adult stuff in the rear. I can remember a few times, my parents would let me visit, but ONLY to look at the practical jokes. They would always say “Stay near the front, don’t go in back.”
They would always say “Stay near the front, don’t go in back.”
‘adult stuff in the rear’ Go on.
I may or may not have bought a couple of blacklight velvet posters from Spencer’s Gifts.
I remember Spender Gifts having the regular stuff in the front of the store and then a sectioned off back area where they kept the sex toys and saucy greeting cards and whatnot.
Now they just put that shit right in the middle with everything else.
But then you would miss out on going to Waldenbooks…
Oh I’d dash back in time. I mean, I had to see if the latest Goosebumps book was in stock.
Who knew we would come to miss mall bookstores?
Or even non-mall bookstores like Borders (RIP 2011) and Barnes & Noble (still barely alive, but closing many of its stores, which have become more gift shops than book stores anyway). Such a difference from the 1990s when (as in “You’ve Got Mail”) the issue was these big stores killing off the mom & pop bookstores.
Ironically, the biggest third-party beneficiaries of Amazon have been local booksellers that now have a national sales channel through Marketplace. I buy long out-of-print hardbacks all the time that I could probably never find in a local shop. I wanted to read the LA Quartet a few years ago and got all four in good shape w/ jackets for maybe $30, all from different sellers.The B&N near my house is still going pretty strong, but it does have a well-visited Starbucks and big children’s section. I like going in there, so fingers crossed.
I only remember the magazine rack at Waldenbooks. It was where we would frantically try to memorize Metallica tabs out of the back of Guitar Player as musically inept thirteen year olds. Also, the one in my mall had a staggering variety of adult magazines at the back of the rack. If they caught you touching them they threw you out, but you could see the titles over the black wrappers. They catered to fetishes I was unaware of as a teenager.
They had some of the first graphic novels.
I first read Watchmen, one chapter at a time, freeloading at Waldenbooks.
And I should add – I found it in the ‘Humor’ section, along with Garfield and Hi and Lois and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns- that was where all comics went back then.
I did both. Waldens had those big tables of stuff like:”Modern battle aircraft ILLUSTRATED” and “Secret Weapons of WW2″ and shit. Maybe I was just a little creep fascinated by weapons…
Loved Spencer’s tho. I was too young for WEED and ACID, so all of the black light posters and weird lights just seemed like magic to me. Got a flickering light bulb in a 7-up can fixture there. Went great with a silver mylar Kiss poster.
I had a lava lamp, and this fountain that looked like water was flowing perpetually from a suspending spigot.
Oh yeah. If I’d ever had any girls in my room, they’d been totally impressed.
HOLY SHIT HE LOOKS SO YOUNG!!!
ok … reading your post makes me think we were separated at birth … and then admitting to parachute pants is clearly where its apparent you’re the evil twin that was sent to the orphanage. I was always drawn to those illustrated non-fiction books but never had enough $s to buy all the ones I wanted.
Last time I checked, we still had Spencer’s in both of the big malls left here in town. A couple of years ago, an employee in one of them got bit by a woman while trying to stop her from stealing a stripper pole, my all-time favorite local news story.
I actually went to the Waldenbooks…
Oh yeah, I did too. Clothes and apparel bored me, so the only places I liked in the mall were Waldenbooks, Spencer Gifts, Natural Wonders, Kay Bee Toy and Sam Goody.
Aw, KB Toys was where I bought my iD software demo sampler. Evidently I was the only person who owned one of those things and didn’t manage to crack the full versions.
Their best employee also helped Scoops Ahoy’s second best employee get a job at the same video store.
I loved that Robin lied that Steve was a chick magnet when they worked at the ice cream shop to get him the job at the video store, when in the first episode her research had definitely proven that he was a loser. Robin and Steve being besties (and both interacting with their “strange child friend” Dustin) was the best thing about season 3 and is reason enough to do 1 or 2 more seasons
I adored Robin and thought she was a fantastic breath of fresh air. Maya Hawke did a great job with her.
Yes but she would have known that he wouldn’t be required to wear a hat at the video store, so his best feature would have come back into play.
Okay, I buy that. Plus I would imagine that Robin and Steve will be good wingmen for each other
Her deadpan ”Just how many of your friends are children?” was brilliant.
You just know Dustin is going to be blowing his allowance hanging out at the video store with Robin and Steve.
I would imagine there will be some mystery involving videos that they will have to study and decipher together
Scoops Troop was 110% my favorite part of season three. I loved seeing Steve and Robin’s friendship evolve episode-to-episode.
I hope the video store becomes one of the main hangout places for season 3.
Season 4 and 5 with them working there and then season six is just Clerks.
I can totally see Robin and Steve knocking over the casket at a funeral.
Who was also the best employee at the non-mall arcade.
Does ST3 take place 8 months or 20 months after ST2? Because that mall had to be built and everything and you have to imagine there would be a lot of promotion for it leading up to its unveiling which had to happen a not insignificant amount of time before ST3.
the mall in my town that’s currently dying a slow death was built without any fanfare. it took the first mall to permanently close except for the attached sams club for people to really start going to it.
That mall was rather large for a town the size of Hawkins. I grew up near a Midwestern college town and our mall was a 3-anchor (Bergner’s, Sears, JC Penny) single level job. No wonder people thought something odd was going on there.
As a child of the 80’s who grew up in a mall, I’d say Starcourt was damn near perfect.Seriously, my mom worked at Macy’s in our local mall. Sometimes I’d tag along with her when school was out and spent the day running around the whole place.The only thing missing from the Hawkins Mall was a free-standing arcade with a futuristic name like “Space Port”, “Star Command” or “Mission Control”.
Aladdin’s Castle or bust.
Dang I remember the Space Port. Galaga ftw
Our was ‘Lazer illusions’ so rad.
There was a “Time Out” (an actual arcade chain) in the background of some scenes.
I remember Time Out!Huh. Must have missed that. I’ll have to look for it in a rewatch.
We had Captain Video near my house. (And like nine others because I live[d] in Los Angeles.)Of course, we also had the Beverly Center, which is a three-story mall on top of a five-story parking garage. It’s a giant beige whale in the middle of Los Angeles. It has glass-enclosed escalators that go up the outside of the building. In the 1980s it was the coolest fucking place in the world.
I love this video of the cast discussing their favorite mall stores. Millie Bobby Brown goes super-hard at the kid that plays Will for saying the pretzel place Auntie Em’s, which she finds disgusting. I agree with him, but still love how she shuts him down. (“NOBODY CARES!”)And Maya Hawke says Krispy Kreme, apparently not understanding what constitutes a mall (there is one in Penn Station…) which Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) ridicules her for, while Joe Kerry (Steve) her BFF this season, just seems quietly amused
So…Winona Ryder just has no idea what her face is up to when she’s not specifically acting…
I think Winona just has very strong but confused reactions to David Harbour
Winona was gonna say Saks Fifth Avenue, but couldn’t get a word in.
LOl, the kid who plays Will has never heard of Cinnabon? Does he not visit airports?Also, why does Maya Hawke look like she’s auditioning for Abba?
I would watch that biopic.
Maybe like Hop with Eleven, the kid who plays Will’s parents don’t let him go to the mall. But no, he knew about Auntie Em…
Wait, does Millie have an… ENGLISH ACCENT?!
Born in Spain, grew up in England.
Mind.Blown.O_O
I love her English accent, and it makes her telling Will “NOBODY CARES!” especially devastating and funny
She didn’t get that many chances to speak in that vid, but after the first couple of words, I kept thinking I’d made up the accent so I kept listening closely. In all these years I can’t believe that’s the first time I’ve heard her actual voice much less find out she’s English :/
Speaking of Millie, she’s starting to pick up an Elizabeth Perkins thing, isn’t she?
That seems to be a thing in this show. Charlie Heaton (Jonathan) is also British and Dacre Montgomery (Billy) is Australian! You’d think it would be easier to find American actors to play these parts rather than foreign actors who can do an American accent, but to be fair, Millie, Charlie, and Dacre manage pretty well.
I know, right? I’m also pretty sure that she has kind of a regional accent, which makes it that much more surprising when she speaks in her natural voice. Also she’s both English and a teenager, the two groups with the most natural capacity for offhand disdain.
Maya’s the daughter of two movie stars, so this may be the first time she’s been in a mall, honestly.
Maybe The Manhattan Mall, but that’s been sad for a while and half the size now. Plus I really don’t see Uma Thurman or Ethan Hawke going there for any reason? Maybe the brief moment The Limelight was kind of a mall or one of the nicer ones in White Plains or Jersey.
Auntie Anne’s. (Is it Auntie Em’s some places?)
No I think you are right actually
Max in those sunglasses, that she picked up during her mall shopping spree with El, was the coolest thing in season 3
One of the malls I grew up in/at was the same one used in Back To The Future. True story. Puente Hills Mall. I had a group of friends that resembled the ST crew (minus the girls) who would ride the bus to the mall with our skateboards and then just do stupid stuff all day/every day during the summer. And it looked exactly like Starcourt.Seriously, the Duffer Bros. need to be recognized with some sort of lifetime achievement award/whatever just for the re-creation of that mall.
I grew up right around Puente Hills too! Howdy.
I grew up in Diamond Bar and split my time between Puente Hills and the Brea Mall. And I’d go to the Montclair mall too but needed a ride to get there!
I grew up in Hacienda Heights. Puente Hills was our main mall, West Covina for something different and Brea if we were feeling fancy!
Ha! Brea mall was definitely the fancy one except for it was kind of boring. Almost forgot about West Covina…I spent 100’s of hours in that Tower Records. I went to high school in La Puente.
It just needed a Buster Brown and they would have had the Sunrise Mall on Long Island down pat.
I didn’t grow up in Massapequa but my mom did and I went to that mall numerous times when visiting her family in the ‘80s and ‘90s.Hi 5 Sunrise Mall buddy!
I’ve become very confused on how small Hawkins is. It’s a small Indiana town with a big, busy, elaborate mall full of chain stores, a multi-story general hospital, and an elaborate pool with sauna. What’s the economic base here, other than secret government facilities?
That mall wouldn’t depend on just Hawkins – it would draw people from all over.
My local mall in Maryland was built when basically everything around it was one main road and then lots of trees and farmland. The sense I get is that in the 70s and 80s you could plop a mall down literally anywhere and make money, because, well, where the hell else was everyone who actually lived there supposed to go? And you could always count on people from an even smaller town making a day trip out of going to the mall.Even when I was a kid in 90s and 2000s, we’d jump on the Metro to go to Pentagon City, which is literally just in a mall in the DC/Virginia area. Just to go. They had Boardwalk Fries. It was fuckin’ rad.My point is I can totally say how a small town in Indiana had a multi-story mall. Malls were just the thing to build and go to at the time.
Yeah, our suburb had two malls within five miles of one another. In the 70s at least, it was mostly housing developments and farms. And when you’re bored you would just… go hang out at the mall. It’s why this joke, based on an actual item, worked:
My credit cards are grateful everyday that you could only get to Pentagon City and not Tyson’s Corner by metro when I was in college in the late 90s. We had to have gone there at least one weekend a month and probably spent one weekend a month at the mall in Georgetown. There was a sad mall at the Ballston stop, but we only went there because that was the closest IHOP if we were hungover and needed pancakes on a Sunday a.m.
Gotta be a regional mall for everyone within a 60+ Mike radius, that’s what I’m going with🤔
oh god Mike was insufferable enough this season, we don’t need 60+ of them
In the 80’s Malls were destinations. People came from all around to go to the mall.
and now just about everything can be found on the internet, and walmart/target/costco are the destinations.
We drove 30 miles to get to ours (we lived in the sticks in the 70s/early 80s). Mom driving us to the mall on Saturday was a TREAT.
Yeah malls existed, but most were not that large. That’s like an Indianapolis class mall.
That’s the answer though, secret government facilities. The Star Court didn’t exist because it was a sound economic investment based on thorough market research, it exists to hide 17 miles of corridors and the portal to Hell. The sauna in the municipal pool I can’t explain.
This is a standard trope that has always confused me. I grew up in the coyote-howling boondocks 50 miles northwest of center city Philadelphia, and even though my neck of the woods was pretty sparsely populated, the notion of a singular town confuses the hell out of me.
My school district comprised 8 separate towns, and all of the neighboring ones covered at least three or four, even ones named for the town their high school was in. We had to drive 20-30 minutes just to get *into* a town, and while that’s a haul, it never felt particularly far, never felt like the neighboring towns were “foreign.” I had friends in all the neighboring school districts due to various connections.
I’m saying this through the lens of being 8 in 1985, so I’m not exactly missing this from a time period perspective. It has always itched at my brain when stories take place in rural-yet-strangely-populated areas that comprise only a single town.
Also, I’ve never been to a carnival where there was a marching band and the local mayor giving a speech.
Almost reminds me of another small Indiana town with a curiously vast set of amenities…I wonder how close Hawkins and Pawnee are on the map.
The weirdest thing I discovered working in – all the malls (seriously malls in over 20 different states) in the 80′ and 90’s: The level of uniformity across the entire country – down to the color of the tile floors.There were only about three development companies that built and controlled them all. General Growth out of Minniapolis, Simon – Heitman?..and a couple of others. Remember early on, have a distinct memory of working at a mall in Houston (or maybe Lake Jackson) getting on a plane, flying to Wisconsin and – walking into the exact same mall – down to the benches.
All of the various retailers in the malls signed multi store deals with the same development companies and got plugged into the same spots in the various food courts and wings.
It was downright disconcerting traveling to them all the time over the years. It became so easy to forget what town you were in. You would set out to go some store, turn a corner and realize that no – that is where that store is in Kansas City (and realize you were in Yakima).
The one thing I missed, especially given the proclivities of the main characters: An arcade. My parents would basically deposit me there while they did their shopping in my early mall days.
A fiver could provide hours of entertainment, if rationed wisely.
Agreed, but the show covered arcade culture in Season 2. The Arcade in Hawkins was built as its own brick and mortar location on the main drag.
I worked in a department store in suburban New Orleans for most of the early 80’s. Towards the end of that time my entire social life seemed like it revolved around the mall. Many many of my friends worked there (because my sister worked in personnel and I had a lot of smart friends) and we would even hang out there on our days off. It was a great feeling to be there and know that we could do what we wanted and leave when we want. All of that is to say that I’m really digging the mall settings this season.
My wife and I are midway through Season 3 right now and we were just commenting last night about how on point the mall is. We were both blown away with the accurate stores and the perfect fashion and spot on hair.I mentioned to her that I suspected that they are filming in an old vacant mall that they probably spent a few million restoring for the show. I can’t wait to tell her I was right! (Kids, this is what marriage does to you, LOL)I’m not sure why other recent movies and shows set in the 80’s have been unable to do match the era as successfully as ST has.
I honestly wonder how much the producers stowed away for IP law and branding. It’s not just the mall – it’s all the products the characters come into contact with. Any other show would just manufacture generic brand names but this one really embraces the real shit. I think it’s part of the nostalgia and tone that Stranger Things is try to lay on like a ton of bricks. You can’t tell a Steven King-esque story about nerdy kids in the 80s without heavily embracing the consumerist culture that comes with it.And it’s not just that they give themselves the license to do it, it’s that they choose settings where these products and stores would be ALL OVER THE PLACE. The mall with its stores, the 7-11 with its Hostesses and cigarette brands, the grocery store with aisles and aisles of real cereal… it’s impressive. But hoo boy would I not want to be a lawyer for this show.
That is what lawyers get paid to do. You do want to be a lawyer working on this show. 😉
I mean yes, you get rewarded handsomely. I work for a large CPG company (I won’t say which one, but yes, our product showed up in this season and I know my company didn’t request or pay for it) and knowing how our legal infrastructure works I just know my brain would explode.
Hot Dog On A Stick wasn’t just West Coast, we had ‘em in Atlanta as late as 1998 or ‘99.
They had the best lemonade.
I’ve never seen a Hotdog on a Stick in the Philadelphia area. What we did have in the mall near me was Der Dog Haus, which was my absolute favorite “restaurant” when I was a kid.
We had one in OKC. My asshole manager at my company used to make ridicule the female counter staff about those tall hats…
In Texas we had Corndog 7. I think there’s still a few hanging on in random malls.
We had hot dog on a stick in El Paso. What about Spencer’s gifts, and the ubiquitous candle shops of the era.
I was just looking at the pictures the guy above posted from his visit there and saw Wicks and Sticks and I had totally forgot about that store until now.
Hot Dog on a Stick was a fixture in Randall Park Mall outside of Cleveland so it definitely made its way into the midwest.
I’m not going to lie, as a Family Video regular I got pretty excited by their extremely meta cameo in the final episode.
Hot Dog on a Stick/Corn Dog on a Stick (I guess the founders had a break-up at some point) did make it sporadically across the country. There was a location in the New River Valley Mall in Southwest Virginia at one point, for instance. (It may still be there, for all I know.)
Gwinnett Place Mall fell upon hard times once the Russian infiltrators that moved out rather than pay the rent spike.
Remember when there was a tiny backlash about casting a Hollywood celeb kid for season 3? A bunch of dingus (dingii?). I’m happy for Maya Hawke for hitting that role out of the park.
For me the backlash would have been Gary Buseys kid Jake, his scenes totally took me out of the series for a few moments each time he was on screen. Maya I did not know before and I thought she was great.
I actually forgot about her celebrity parental lineage while watching the whole series. Then when I read the recaps that mentioned her background, I remembered articles and comments criticizing her casting.
For me, Jake Busey was fine. He fit the 80’s stereotypical, annoying guy role who ends up getting it in the end.
Here are my photos from it. I live nearby and went in last weekend before they started to bring it all down.
https://www.facebook.com/pagemasterjim/media_set?set=a.10156383500791918&type=3
There would not be a Hotdog on a Stick in Indiana in the 80s. There is one today. There has never been one in Michigan or Ohio.Orange Julius is awfully suspect too. I never saw one before 1996. But DQ bought them in 87, so 2 years after the show, they could be in Indiana.
There was an Orange Julius in the mall by me starting in like 81 or 82
In central North Carolina, malls had Orange Juliuses in the 70s.
There were Orange Juliuses in Cincinnati back then, and as far as I know, you’re right about Ohio not having Hot Dog on a Stick. I thought they made that up for the Bumblebee movie as a joke.
Someone mentioned how people from smaller towns would make a day trip out of going to the mall…and that is absolutely what we did when I was a teen in the early 80’s. Our day trip was the West Park Mall in Cape Girardeau Missouri. It was VERY 80’s in the BEST ways possible. The mall still stands, surprisingly, and seems to be holding on.
A little more suspect is Hot Dog On A Stick, which would probably be
more of a West Coast thing than hot spot in midwestern Hawkins.
Gotta call bullshit on eightiesbaby.net here. We had several malls in the greater Cleveland area that had them.
I like that they included the generic Camera Repair. At least where I lived there were some Mom & Pop places that made it off Main Street and went to the mall, but they stuck out like a sore thumb amongst all the branded national stores. They were always off in a corner no one went down. Maybe rent is cheaper on the side off-shoots.
I haven’t watched ST3, but… was there a store in the mall named “Fenton Mudd”? That would earn a grin from me.
Where’s the Merry Go Round?
I was born in 89 so I couldn’t tell the difference.
We had a Hot Dog on A Stick in Oklahoma.