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The full 10-episode first season of Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 debuts on Netflix April 23.
Stranger Things is back! Sort of! The new animated spin-off, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, debuts later this month and continues the adventures of the Hawkins kids. But the show is set between Seasons 2 and 3, creating one big head-scratcher for fans of the recently completed live-action series: How can Eleven, Mike, Dustin, and the rest of the gang tangle with supernatural creatures when, at the end of Season 2, the gate to the Upside Down was closed, and things don’t open up again until the Mind Flayer attacks during the summer in Season 3? Is this animated series, which does indeed find new, strange creatures plaguing the Indiana town, in fact canon?
“We respect the canon of it, all right? We respect that,” showrunner Eric Robles told IGN. And while Robles does understand that more than likely, the kids were just hanging out between the seasons, there’s “not a lot of adventure there… The challenge was, how do we bring creatures to life in this world?”
While we won’t spoil at the moment how those creatures come to life, they do. “Once we figured out [how] we can do that, it opened up Pandora’s Box to now telling these bigger stories… and expand[ing] this timeline that we have. We are frozen in time between these two seasons, 2 and 3. But within this frozen time, we’re now going to expand this… mini-universe of Tales from ’85 in a way that it does go big.”
That, of course, raises another question that Robles is extremely aware is a logical issue for fans: Why don’t the kids ever talk about what happened in Tales From ’85 if it does go big? He’s got an answer for that one too.
“Now you could be like, hey, you know what? I don’t remember them talking about pumpkin creatures in Season 3 or 4 or 5, right?” Robles said. “First of all, I didn’t know that the show was going to exist while that was going on, but at the same time, the kids have bigger things to worry about. By the time you’re getting to Season 4, you’re worrying about Vecna. You’re worrying about bigger things than pumpkin creatures… And a lot of times they don’t go back reminiscing about too many things that happen in [previous] seasons… So we just figured, let’s stay within this space, this frozen time, let’s have these great adventures, and then just make sure that we come back by the time we get to the end of however many seasons we do of this thing. Let’s make sure that we respect the audience and make sure that it just comes back and falls in line. Now you can easily remove this whole series out of the timeline and it never exists. Or… Do you want to hang out with your best friends and go on new adventures?”
That’s potentially a minefield of its own given the controversial and divisive nature of the ending of Stranger Things, but Netflix is betting that most fans do want to go on new adventures in Hawkins a mere four months after the main series wrapped for good. In fact, Tales From ’85 has been in the works since at least 2023 (that’s about a year after Season 4 streamed, for those keeping track). Initially, Robles – who previously worked on the series Fanboy & Chum-Chum and Glitch Techs for Netflix – was working on developing another animated series before he got the call from Stranger Things masterminds, the Duffer Brothers, and was brought on board.
True to form for the ’80s-inspired series, Robles calls out classic influences like Ghostbusters, The Lost Boys, and Goonies, not just for their sense of adventure, but their sense of real danger for the characters. “The stakes were real, no matter what,” Robles said, adding that when you have a monster of the week format – which Tales From ’85 does play around with early in the 10-episode season – you feel a little too safe, like “everything’s going to be okay… you lost that sense of stakes. I’ve been craving that for so long… Why not give the viewers the sense of real stakes, so you care more about the journey, you care more about the characters in a different way, and not knowing if everybody’s going to be okay?”
There’s a small issue with that: Everyone is very much alive and well when Season 3 opens with the Starcourt Mall in full effect and everyone having summer fun in the Hawkins public pool. Part of how Robles tackles that is inserting new characters, like the tech-savvy outsider Nikki Baxter (Odessa A’zion), who joins the gang in the Hawkins Investigators Club. But another way Robles explores giving weight to Tales From ’85 is by adding stakes that aren’t life or death.
“Just because you see our main cast in Season 3 of the flagship series, it doesn’t mean that they don’t go through an emotional change and emotional journey within this story that we’re telling,” Robles said. “We grow in relationships. We grow in their personal journeys… The reason why we fell in love with Stranger Things wasn’t just because it was cool and there was a monster. It was because we were invested in the fact that they wanted to save their best friend.”
While initial reports pegged Tales From ’85 as done-in-one mysteries of the week in a 2D format à la classic ’80s/’90s cartoons like The Real Ghostbusters, Dungeons & Dragons, or Men in Black, Robles says that was perhaps wishful thinking on the part of fans. He had just finished working on Glitch Techs, which was a 2D animated series and “checked a certain box” for the creator; instead of going the same route, he became intrigued by more modern technology as in the Spider-Verse film series, or to bring it closer to home, Arcane on Netflix. And there’s another interesting inspiration for the look of the series – the official posters created by Kyle Lambert, which themselves seem like homages to the work of the late, great Drew Struzan (who perhaps not coincidentally crafted the classic poster for The Goonies among many others).
The ultimate result is a combo of 3D CGI designed in collaboration with some of the best in the business, as well as 2D effects straight out of anime – something that Robles thinks has an “illustrative look, while still touching on the 2D aspects of effects… We really bring out a new stylistic look that isn’t just the norm or something that’s already been done.”
Behind the scenes, Tales From ’85 is a mix of something old and something new. Robles admits that his voice will never be the exact same as live-action showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer, but they found a middle ground with the storytelling where “I brought these ideas. They got excited about it, then I got excited about their ideas, and then we just kept building.” On top of Robles throwing his own POV into the mix, Tales From ’85 brought on Stranger Things staff writer and director’s assistant Caitlin Schneiderhan as story editor for the animated series; she has writing credits on the Season 4 episode, “The Monster and the Superhero,” as well as Season 5’s “The Turnbow Trap” and two spin-off novels.
The cast, though? That’s all new. With the live-action folks grown and moving on to other projects, the animated series sports a whole new cast of kids (and adults) voicing the characters you know and love. Robles sees this as an asset, with his actors bringing a “kid point of view” to something he’s started to think of as a “lost season” of the original series.
“When they’re reading these scripts, they’re yelling and they’re screaming, and they’re having these real serious conversations as kids, and they’re not bringing that adult point of view or that adult baggage to the table,” Robles explained. “They’re really… creating these characters and adding to these stories and adding to these personalities in a way that… the ownership belongs to them now… You really get caught up in loving these kids and these new adventures that they’re on, as opposed to trying to make it feel one to one with anything that was done after the season, after this show.”
Obviously, fans of Stranger Things will draw their own conclusions about how successful the individual voice actors are – or are not – though Robles shared an anecdote about Gaten Matarazzo visiting the studio to watch the process, and after hearing Braxton Quinney’s performance as Dustin in the series asked, confused: “…Is that me?”
But there is that one, big original member of the cast: Nikki Baxter. Given the long lead time of the series, Robles and company got extremely lucky in snagging A’zion, who is in the middle of a hot streak thanks to her performance in the Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme as well as a lead role in HBO’s I Love LA.
“One of the wonderful things that the Duffer Brothers do so well is introduce us to new characters,” Robles said, calling out Robin, Max, and Eddie as examples. “It’s really difficult, because you’re so in love with your core characters that you don’t want anybody else… But then you start seeing what they’re bringing to the table… When we were talking about Nikki Baxter, where not only is this a show for the existing audience that has been a part of this world forever from Seasons 1 to 5, but it’s also a way to introduce a whole new generation of kids to a world that they’re not familiar with. So having a character that’s coming in with the audience point of view has always been really important for the Duffer Brothers, and we decided to do that with Nikki Baxter as well.”
Baxter adds to the Dungeons & Dragons-loving team by being a “tinker” and becoming the “barbarian of the group… A new muscle to the group that has added to the adventure.” But more importantly – and considering Robles’ focus on emotional arcs – Baxter is also crucial to Will’s (Ben Plessala) place in Tales From ’85. With Mike (Luca Diaz) and Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt) romantically involved, as well as Lucas (Elisha Williams) and Max (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), following Season 2’s climactic Snow Ball dance, Will is – as usual – feeling very much on his own. Even Dustin, to give a little tease, might get a pseudo-romantic interest of his own in Tales From ’85 (nobody tell Suzie); Will, meanwhile, is a few seasons away from rattling off a few of his favorite things and telling the gang he’s gay. So instead, he’s grappling with his classmates derogatorily calling him “zombie boy.” What Nikki suggests is: What if that’s “freaking cool, dude?”
“We decided to bring Nikki Baxter in as somebody that he can actually have a conversation with and get a little bit deeper in these conversations that you normally wouldn’t get from the flagship series,” Robles explained. “There was a gap there… All of a sudden, Will is a bit of an outsider, even with his own group. What the series does, it allows you to get to know Will in a new way, because he has somebody to really share what he’s feeling, or what he’s going through.”
Curious about what’s in store in Tales From ’85? While all 10 episodes will hit Netflix on April 23, fans can get a preview of what to expect when the first two episodes premiere in limited release in movie theaters on April 18, which is a rarity for a Netflix series. Robles, for his part, is thrilled, and not just because he makes sure episodes are “cinema ready” from the sound mix to the look of the show (the point is that this won’t just be someone playing off their Netflix account).
“We’re in a unique place that I really, really want to express how important it is for all of us who love [animation] to go watch this at a theater,” Robles said. “Because if our response is just that big [then] guess what, it opens up the doors for the next series that wants that… It opens up the potential for the industry to realize the importance of debuting something really special in an environment that’s surrounded by people who love what they’re about to go see. This is not just you going to the theater and watching a movie… It’s like going to a concert, right? You all love the same artist, and you’re about to experience something, you don’t get that anymore. And I feel we’re losing that in theaters, right? So this is a very unique opportunity… It’s bigger than our show.”
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https://www.ign.com/articles/stranger-things-tales-from-85-showrunner-promises-the-animated-spin-off-will-respect-the-canon
Arnold T. Blumberg
Almontather Rassoul
