Walkie-talkies, teen romance, hideous monsters … this animated series has everything that made the original series so lovable. It might go nowhere, but that’s not such a bad thing
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tranger Things takes us back to simpler times. The original Netflix series plonked us in a fantasy past where kids in small American towns rode bikes, chewed gum, listened to cassettes and played Dungeons and Dragons in their friend’s basement; or, if you weren’t American, it reminded you of movies you’d seen where that was the vibe. Either way, it was access to an era before the internet, 9/11, the banking crash, the pandemic and Trump, when life seemed easier.
The cartoon spin-off Tales from ’85 does something similar for Stranger Things itself. It rewinds to a happy, straightforward time, namely between seasons two and three. In that moment, the world of Hawkins, Indiana had been established, but we were yet to endure the show’s bumpy late period, when it got long and boring, then supersized itself and became breathtakingly spectacular, then lost control of the monster it had created and became both spectacular and boring at the same time.
So now it’s January 1985 again. Mike, Dustin and Lucas (Luca Diaz, Braxton Quinney and Elisha Williams, respectively) have been reunited with their friend Will (Benjamin Plessala) after a monster captured him and took him to the Upside Down, the netherworld lurking beneath Hawkins. Cool girl Max (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) is in the gang, as is telekinetic foundling Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt), who has become the ward of heroic cop Jim Hopper (Brett Gipson) and whose mind powers are a closely guarded secret. Playboy-with-a-heart Steve (Jeremy Jordan) is yet to be converted to the wonders of nerdy demon-hunting, but he’s about to be drawn in, which means his love/hate bromance with Dustin is reset to the start. Following Eleven’s epic effort to close the gate to the Upside Down at the end of the main show’s second season, all is relatively quiet.
