‘Stranger Things 4’: Netflix Issues Content Warning In Wake Of Texas Shooting - People are losing their shit over the opening

‘Stranger Things 4’: Netflix Issues Content Warning In Wake Of Texas Shooting​

By Denise Petski
May 26, 2022 4:40pm
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UPDATED with Stranger Things‘ premiere preview removed from YouTube: Ahead of its midnight premiere, Netflix has added a content warning to the fourth season of Stranger Things following the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

The warning card reads: “We filmed this season of Stranger Things a year ago. But given the recent tragic shooting at a school in Texas, viewers may find the opening scene of episode 1 distressing. We are deeply saddened by this unspeakable violence, and our hearts go out to every family mourning a loved one.”

The warning card will be on the service when the new season premieres at midnight PT tonight. The card appears before the Season 3 recap that auto-plays at the beginning of season 4, episode 1 for viewers in the U.S. only.


Netflix also has edited the description for episode 1 to include: “Warning: Contains graphic violence involving children” and also has added “disturbing images” to the show rating advisories.

The card was added given the proximity of the launch to the Texas tragedy, and because the opening scene is very graphic, we’re told.

Additionally, original video of the first eight minutes of the Season 4 premiere, which contained graphic images of dead children, was removed from Stranger Things’ YouTube page following the shooting. Deadline and other websites had previewed the sneak peek clip last week and the video is now unavailable and the clip marked “private.”

Nineteen children and two adults were killed Tuesday in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX.
In Season 4, per the logline, it’s been six months since the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins. Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time – and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.

Created by Matt and Ross Duffer, Stranger Things is produced by Monkey Massacre Productions & 21 Laps Entertainment. The twin brothers serve as writers, directors, executive producers and showrunners on the series alongside executive producer/director Shawn Levy and exec producer Dan Cohen of 21 Laps and exec producer Iain Paterson.


The first seven episodes of the nine-episode fourth season, which will air in two parts, will drop at midnight May 27 and the final two episodes will be released on July 1.
 
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Criticallacitirc said:
No joke. The latest episode of Drag Race has that exact trigger message. One of the challenges was to make an outfit inspired by a location + color . So like "purple lavender fields of france" , one was "Red square Moscow " and they had to put a trigger warning for it.
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And never for frightening children?
 
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Additionally, original video of the first eight minutes of the Season 4 premiere, which contained graphic images of dead children, was removed from Stranger Things’ YouTube page following the shooting.
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The moral I'm getting out of this story is that graphic images of dead children are usually okay, but sometimes not.

It's not a great moral.
 
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Pokemonquistador2 said:
I suppose it's better than Millennial nostalgia-baiting, which is going to be as relentless as Boomer nostalgia-baiting was during the 1980s.
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We're already at the stage where Millennial nostalgia-baiting is a thing, just look at the endless Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings spinoffs. It'll be interesting to see what Gen Z nostalgia-baiting eventually looks like, though. Maybe fidget spinners make a comeback? Lmao
 
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Beautiful Border said:
We're already at the stage where Millennial nostalgia-baiting is a thing, just look at the endless Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings spinoffs. It'll be interesting to see what Gen Z nostalgia-baiting eventually looks like, though. Maybe fidget spinners make a comeback? Lmao
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It's going to a reboot of all the marvel movies again and live action nick and disney shows.
 
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Beautiful Border said:
Stranger Things, Ready Player One, vaporwave, the endless reboots and remakes of mouldy old franchises... fuck off with the Gen X nostalgia-baiting already
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I agree with you on everything, but Vaporwave. Don't get me wrong, way too many artists rely explicitly on nostalgia-baiting and it really doesn't help that the genre is viewed so cynically. Way too many people jumped on that bandwagon when Floral Shoppe came out and thought the whole point of the genre was "membah da ting?!".





I've never understood the popularity of this dumb show, I just know I like that image macro of that El Goblino child.

Until School Shootings stop (which as time marches on seems like it will never happen) it will always be a very touchy subject to portray. As much as I hate the idea of "trigger warnings", because it encourages infantilism, this was simply the respectful thing to do. I don't think you shouldn't be allowed to portray these things, but for the love of fuck please don't glorify it in the climate we're in, have some responsibility (not saying the show is, just something needed to be said).
 
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Stranger things season 2 and 3 were mediocre and bad, respectively. I was expecting the episode to end in the school getting shot up but instead episode 1 is lame
 
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Nick Gars said:
I agree with you on everything, but Vaporwave. Don't get me wrong, way too many artists rely explicitly on nostalgia-baiting and it really doesn't help that the genre is viewed so cynically. Way too many people jumped on that bandwagon when Floral Shoppe came out and thought the whole point of the genre was "membah da ting?!".
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Vaporwave is an incredibly lazy genre. You just get an old song, slow it down by 30%, add some reverb and call it a day. On a conceptual level it's not even original, people like Thomas Bangalter were doing similar stuff a full 15 years before Floral Shoppe. The other thing that bothers me about vaporwave is that most of its fans weren't alive during the period it's riffing, it's not even derived from their own experience. How can you have nostalgia for the 1980s when you were born in 1999, for fuck's sake.
 
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Beautiful Border said:
Stranger Things, Ready Player One, vaporwave, the endless reboots and remakes of mouldy old franchises... fuck off with the Gen X nostalgia-baiting already
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I wouldn't even have cared if they had kept up the season one quality... but they had no idea what to do after the first season, and it is obvious.

Hollywood: please never cast Finn Wolfhard in anything ever again unless you're playing against type and reinventing his image a la Matthew McConaughey in True Detective.
 
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frozenrunner said:
I wouldn't even have cared if they had kept up the season one quality... but they had no idea what to do after the first season, and it is obvious
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Yeah, season two killed any interest I had in the show. Bizarre that people persevere with watching them flog a dead horse.

I assumed they were going to have each season be a completely different concept, sort of like what John Carpenter had in mind originally for the Halloween series. But for them to do that, they'd need more than one idea.
 
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round robin said:
Stranger Things is unadulterated garbage and if you have ever enjoyed even a single second of this boring, lazy cash-grab you are a cuck and a faggot.
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The first season was fantastic.

Season two was... Decent. Not terrible but not great.

Season three was crap.

It should have been a one off miniseries that lasted one season.
 
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Fish Fudge said:
Yeah, season two killed any interest I had in the show. Bizarre that people persevere with watching them flog a dead horse.

I assumed they were going to have each season be a completely different concept, sort of like what John Carpenter had in mind originally for the Halloween series. But for them to do that, they'd need more than one idea.
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I was pissed off that they just did a rerun one of the first season, but I realized the premise has a problem baked into it: the kids aren't going to plausibly be all moving from location to location between seasons, and they're kids in a fairly grounded world, so they can't be solving different Scooby Doo mysteries every season either. They have to stay in one place, and the mystery has to always be connected to the mystery in the first season. And the kids are going to age over multiple seasons, ruining the "kids in the 80s" thing.

This kills any possibility of real surprise in the narrative, and yes, it's why they should have made the show an anthology series with a different cast every time. But as you can see, they did not think one step ahead. Probably didn't have a clue the show would be a hit and were caught flat-footed. I'm sure Netflix didn't give them much room to maneuver after it was a success, either.
 
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So what actually happens in the episode?

Note well that I gave up on the show halfway through season one so I don't actually care.
 
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