The Stranger Things walkman and cassettes: Max's walkman and the music that saves

Max's Stranger Things walkman: a 1983 Sony WM-8

The device Max wears on her belt was not designed for the show. It is a Sony WM-8, put on the market in 1983, recognizable by its matte silver case and its plain face. It only plays: no microphone, no recording, no radio. Its only sophistication is the auto-stop, which cuts the motor at the end of a side.

It fits in a jacket pocket: about nine centimeters by fourteen, and a little under four thick. It runs on stick batteries, for about ten hours of listening. The model was offered in silver and in light blue. Nothing exceptional when it came out: that is what makes it believable in the hands of a Hawkins high school girl.

The headphones, for their part, are not a Sony. They are a Realistic Nova 45, the house brand of an American electronics chain, the very one that sold the Realistic TRC-214, the walkie-talkie of Mike, Lucas, and Dustin. The detail is not trivial: the group's walkie-talkie and Max's headphones come out of the same downtown store.

The device appears from the first chapter of the fourth season, well before it serves any purpose. Max walks the high school corridors, headphones on her ears, cut off from everyone. The object establishes the character before becoming, three episodes later, what brings her back.

Listening to music in 1986: the tape, the battery, and the rewind

The format dates from 1963. A Dutch engineer, Lou Ottens, develops the compact cassette at Philips: two reels and a magnetic tape in a case you hold between two fingers. The lengths standardize around two references, the C60 and the C90, that is thirty or forty-five minutes a side. The length of an album, exactly.

The object becomes portable on July 1, 1979, when Sony puts the TPS-L2 on sale, the first cassette walkman, at around 33 000 yen. The TPS-L2 had two headphone jacks, for listening as a pair, and a "hotline" button that cut the music so you could talk; those details disappeared from the following models. The device even changed names by country, Soundabout in the United States, Stowaway in the United Kingdom, before the original name imposed itself everywhere.

From 1983 on, cassette sales far exceed those of the vinyl record. The reason fits in one word: you carry them. In a car, in a school bag, on a bike. And you make them yourself: record the radio, copy an album, put together a compilation for someone. The blank tape makes the listener a publisher.

That is the gesture the story shows without ever explaining it. Listening to a song then requires owning an object, loading it, rewinding, waiting. You do not skip a track; you move forward blind, your thumb on a button. That slowness has a dramatic consequence: when Max's friends look for her song, they need the right device, the right cassette, and the right passage, in a few seconds.

The scene that changed everything: a cassette against the curse

March 1986. Max lives in the Forest Hills trailer park, has left the group, and writes farewell letters. The signs are the ones she saw in Chrissy Cunningham and in Fred: headaches, nosebleeds, a grandfather clock in the visions. She asks to be driven to the cemetery and reads her letter in front of Billy Hargrove's grave, of whom she is the stepsister.

The trance takes her there. Her body rises above the ground while her mind finds itself inside Vecna's. On the other side, Dustin, Steve, and Lucas have just learned, from Nancy and Robin, that a song can break the hold. They search Max's bag, take the device out, set the headphones on her ears, and start "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)," by Kate Bush, released in 1985.

A gate opens. Max sees her friends, her memories, and runs toward a door of light while the creature pursues her. She falls back into Lucas's arms, alive. The episode is titled "Dear Billy": fourth chapter of the fourth season, seventy-eight minutes, written by Paul Dichter, directed by Shawn Levy, released on May 27, 2022.

What follows belongs to the history of the charts: a title from 1985 came back to number one in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Ireland, in New Zealand, and in Sweden. We devoted an entire article to "Running Up That Hill." What occupies us here is the object, not the track. Without a case in a bag and a tape inside, the scene does not exist: it would have taken a radio, and a radio does not play what you ask of it.

Music as an anchor: the rule the story sets

The rule was not invented for Max. It comes from Victor Creel, committed at Pennhurst, whom Nancy and Robin get to talk by passing themselves off as students. In 1959, the night his family was killed, a song was playing on the radio: "Dream a Little Dream of Me," by Ella Fitzgerald. It held him out of reach. The two young women draw a principle from it, applied that same day.

The mechanism is consistent with the way the curse attacks. Vecna enters through the most painful memory and locks his victim in it. A song you care about is a competing memory, attached to people and to happy moments. It destroys nothing; it reopens a door. Hence the demand for the exact track, that person's track.

Eddie Munson gives a variant of it in the last chapter of the same season. On the roof of his trailer, in the Upside Down, he plays "Master of Puppets" by Metallica to draw the Demobats away from the Creel house. It is no longer a protection, it is bait. In two episodes, music has gone from the status of a refuge to that of a weapon.

The rule has a limit, and the story sets it itself. In the fall of 1987, Max has been in a coma for nineteen months; Lucas plays her the same song through the headphones, every day, without that being enough. What brings her back is Lucas. Music protects, it does not work a miracle, and that nuance is what keeps the rule from becoming a magic trick.

The story's other tapes, from 1983 to 1987

Max's walkman is neither the first nor the last magnetic tape of the story. Over five seasons, the show comes back to the same gesture: record something, carry it, play it for someone. That is how information circulates, in a town without a cell phone.

Two families of objects have to be distinguished. The audio cassette, which you listen to and record yourself. And the video cassette, the entire set of the video store where Steve and Robin work. The two share the same magnetic tape and the same logic: a content you own, you lend, you return.

Set end to end, these tapes tell a single idea, already present in Joyce Byers's string of lights: in Hawkins, you talk through the walls with the means of your time. At the start, it is a compilation made for a little brother. Four years later, it is a song played on the air to warn a whole town.

1. 1983 Jonathan's compilation for Will

   Jonathan Byers plays rock for his little brother to give him courage, "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by the Clash at the top. At the hospital, at the end of the first season, he brings him a compiled cassette.

2. 1984 The tape that closes the laboratory

   At the Hawkins laboratory, Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan record Dr. Owens acknowledging Barbara Holland's death, then take the tape to Murray Bauman. Rewritten by him as a chemical leak and passed to the press, it is enough to get the site closed.

3. 1985 The message picked up by Cerebro

   Dustin builds a ham-radio antenna to reach Suzie, in Utah, and picks up a transmission in Russian. Robin decodes the recording in one night.

4. 1986 The walkman at the cemetery

   Four minutes of song pull Max out of the trance, in front of her stepbrother's grave. It is one of the most commented sequences of the show.

5. 1986 The shelves at Family Video

   Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley spend the season behind a video-store counter. The video cassette is a set there, a job, and a cover for an investigation.

6. 1987 A song as a coded message

   On the pirate radio WSQK, playing "Upside Down" by Diana Ross, released in 1980, announces an expedition that same evening. The army hears a hit; the group hears an order.

7. 1987 The headphones at Max's bedside

   During nineteen months of coma, Lucas Sinclair puts the same song back on at the hospital. The object has changed function: it no longer saves, it calls.

What the object has become since

Sony stopped producing cassette walkmans in Japan in 2010, after about 220 million units sold. The last model offered in the United States, the WM-FX290W, dated from 2004. The format seemed closed.

The fourth season coincided with two movements. The first concerns the cassette itself: in the United Kingdom, album sales on that format rose by 5,2 % in 2022, to 195 000 units, a tenth consecutive year of increase and the highest total since 2003. The figure remains tiny at the scale of the market; the curve, for its part, is clear.

The second effect concerns the device. The WM-8, ordinary for thirty years, became a sought-after object:. Replicas without electronics and models to print in three dimensions followed, for costumes.

The production played along. The soundtrack of the third season came out on cassette on July 5, 2019, a nod to the summer of 1985 that it accompanies, and the final season's compilation on red cassette on January 30, 2026. The video box sets of seasons 1 and 2, released in the United States in 2017 and 2018, imitated, for their part, period video-cassette cases.

The hardest thing to put a number on remains. A generation born after 2000 discovered, through a cemetery scene in Hawkins, that listening to music had long been a manual gesture: load, rewind, wait. That is perhaps what the object really passed on.

Frequently asked questions

Read next