What happened between season two and season three of Stranger Things? As mysteries go, it’s not exactly the lost years of Jesus, or the missing 18-and-a-half minutes of the Richard Nixon tapes. Most casual viewers would be forgiven for assuming that the half-year chunk omitted from the Netflix series’ chronology amounted to nothing but ligament – dramatically inert connective tissue between two narratively significant moments in time. But it’s a question that Netflix are nevertheless intent on answering in the new animated spin-off series, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85.
Set in the months-long narrative void between the end of Stranger Things’s 2017 season and the start of its 2019 one, Tales from ’85 is a fractionally lighter, zippier take on Matt and Ross Duffer’s sci-fi horror universe. The major characters all return, albeit with new actors voicing them: instead of Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard, we have Brooklyn Davey Norstedt and Luca Diaz; instead of David Harbour, we have Brett Gipson. A few better-known actors are brought in to voice new characters: Marty Supreme’s Odessa A’Zion plays a punky new girl, while Janeane Garofalo voices her mother. The series – the first of a number of planned spin-offs – is part of an extensive effort to expand Netflix’s hit series beyond the ambit of its original nine-year, five-season run: Tales From ’85 adds to a sprawling canon that includes tie-in novels, video games, and a lavish West End show (Stranger Things: The First Shadow) that’s been running since 2023.
This is, it seems, the end goal for a modern franchise such as this: ubiquity. A Starbucks on every corner, so to speak. Not that Stranger Things is the only hit TV show to have taken this approach: a good corollary might be Game of Thrones, which finished its run in 2019 and has already birthed two (moderately well-received) spin-off series, with more forthcoming. And Tales from ’85, for what it’s worth, is no catastrophe. The writing is clunky, but dialogue was never Stranger Things’s strong suit; the animation is a little jerky, but the character design is expressive and the detail rich and expensive-seeming. The problem, though, is that the series has no reason to exist.
To some extent, Tales from ’85 is a sign that the creators of Stranger Things have fundamentally misunderstood its own appeal. Conventional wisdom has it that Stranger Things’s primary currency is nostalgia. Set in the neon haze of the 1980s, it was almost gluttonous in its evocation of a bygone pop cultural past – it was a show indebted to the novels of Stephen King, to the movies of John Carpenter and early Steven Spielberg, to the synthy music of the time. It was why actors like Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddie Krueger) and Linda Hamilton (The Terminator’s Sarah Connor) were brought in. Nostalgia was king.
But as the series went on, it increasingly became clear that there was more to it than this. More than anything, Stranger Things was a series that thrived on the specific charms of star power. For its first series, most of the kudos went to the more seasoned actors Winona Ryder – then kickstarting something of a career renaissance – and David Harbour, who was in his early forties when Stranger Things made him famous. But later seasons would serve as launch-pads for new, young stars: Sadie Sink and Joe Keery, who joined the cast in season two, then Maya Hawke, who joined in season three. These were actors that audiences simply liked. In discarding the flagship show’s core cast, Tales From ’85 removes one of the core pillars of its appeal. The lore of Stranger Things is fine, but it’s not what kept people coming back.
Netflix’s insistence on returning to the world of Stranger Things also risks undermining its own nostalgic potency. Perhaps the key ingredient for nostalgia is absence: it is a pining for something that no longer exists. Increasingly, Stranger Things is delivering something that not only does exist, but exists in very recent memory. It no longer resembles Carpenter and Spielberg, but instead resembles Stranger Things, a show that still floats on the surface of our memories.
Showrunner Eric Robles has said that the “north star” for Tales of ’85 was the schlocky old spin-off animation The Real Ghostbusters. Cranked out after the success of the 1984 Bill Murray-Dan Aykroyd film, The Real Ghostbusters was part of a trend in the 1980s and 1990s: genre films such as Ace Venture, Beetlejuice, and Back to the Future were similarly given their own animated TV spin-offs.
These shows may have been just as cynical as Tales of ‘85 in their conception, but the execution was a different kettle of fish. Playing fast and loose with their various universe’s mythologies, they were – as Americans would say – janky undertakings. This new Stranger Things cartoon, in comparison, is slick and on-message. And that’s very much the problem.
Tales From ’85 looks like Stranger Things, feels like Stranger Things, and nestles itself obediently into the chronology of Stranger Things so as to not upend the canon. But this only calls attention to what’s missing: the people. The idiosyncrasies of those original, well-liked cast members. To put it as glibly as possible: the real Stranger Things was the friends we made along the way. And if this franchise refuses to stop going, it’ll have to reckon with the fact that those friends are no longer around.
‘Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85’ is available to stream on Netflix now
