Stranger Things was designed as a throwback to the Eighties pop culture that the Duffer Brothers grew up loving: Stephen King novels, Steven Spielberg movies, and YA adventures about kids on bicycles, among other things. With the new Stranger Things: Tales From '85, the franchise deploys another Eighties pop culture trope: the animated spin-off of a live action show.
Alan Sepinwall
Tales From '85 takes place in between the events of Season Two and Season Three, with new voice actors playing Mike, Eleven, and the rest. Reviews of it are embargoed til after it premieres, so look for some thoughts on that in this Friday's newsletter. But simply watching the thing sent my mind back to childhood Saturday mornings where there was an improbably high number of cartoons based on sitcoms and dramas l was already watching.
And they were weird objects. Where Tales From '85 is more or less trying to offer a lower-stakes, somewhat more child-friendly version of a regular Stranger Things season, many of these cartoons took the characters into wildly different directions — and almost always involved Scooby-Doo-esque anthromoprhic animals. I swear I am not making up any of the details about these:
- In the early Seventies, ABC did a straightforward Gilligan's Island cartoon called The New Adventures of Gilligan. It lasted only a season. So in 1982, CBS took a page from Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space by making Gilligan's Planet. The premise: the Professor finally figured out a way off the island, building a rocket ship. Somehow, instead of taking the castaways to the mainland, it sent them off into deep space, where they crash landed on a planet, damaging the rocket enough to strand them there. Now they kept encountering aliens rather than mad scientists and runaway heiresses. Oh, and Gilligan acquired a pet alien reptile named Bumper.