Yes, on the one hand, even doing an animated spin-off of Netflix’s pop culture juggernaut “Stranger Things” feels a bit like a cash grab, but cartoon installments in hit franchises, especially those with young audiences, are common across the TV landscape. It’s not just trying to squeeze as much as possible out of an aging fandom; it’s trying to embed a world in a new one by getting them young.
They were common in the Saturday-morning cartoon era in which the show is set (I’m old enough to remember “The Real Ghostbusters”), so the news that the Duffer brothers were producing their own spin on the form in “Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85” actually sounded pretty cool. Making an animated show that feels like something Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin would have watched between trips to the Upside Down? It’s certainly better than just another spin-off.
Although maybe it’s not. Every chance to do something inventive and interesting in “Tales from ‘85” is ignored for lazy fan-fic writing, slack plotting, and inconsistent characters. It never feels like canon, even though it’s supposed to be, not so much connecting the second and third seasons of “Stranger Things” as much as feeling like a half-baked Reddit post about what might have happened during the prime of the show.
In a stunningly misguided choice from inception, the team behind the show, including showrunner Eric Robles, ignores one of the key words in their title: “Tales.” Those Saturday morning cartoons? Usually told self-contained stories within their familiar universes and just consider that possibility for a moment here. The writers could have highlighted different characters in each episode, even playing with genre if they had any ambition, but instead, they just wrote a ten-episode variation on what people already know about “Stranger Things” and cut it into chapters. Half the characters are missing, and half of the ones who are here don’t feel like their live-action counterparts. Other than a few interesting choices in terms of character design, “Tales from ‘85” does nothing memorable, a shadow of things people liked years ago instead of a vision of the future of this franchise.
“Tales from ‘85” unfolds early in that year, between the prom that ended season two and the post-summer mall adventure that took place during season three. Fans should remember where these characters are in their series-long arcs: Mike (Luca Diaz) and Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt) are figuring out their newly romantic relationship; Will (Ben Plessala) is confronting the awkwardness of being the town “Zombie Boy”; Lucas (Elisha Williams) and Max (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) have only begun to flirt; Dustin (Braxton Quinney) is exploring his role as a potential hero; Hopper (Brett Gipson) is overprotective of a surrogate daughter who can likely protect herself. Other major characters like Joyce, Billy, Murray, and Robin are missing entirely because they haven’t been introduced or are just off doing their own thing. Even Jonathan is M.I.A.
The focus on the kids makes sense given the intended audience, but most of them don’t feel of a piece with their live-action versions. Dustin actually becomes the de facto lead as the group investigates a series of Upside-Down-related incidents, and Quinney’s voice work is awkward in ways that don’t match the source. The writers can’t figure out where Eleven is on the spectrum of her powers, turning her into practically a Jedi early in the season before diving right into a climax that replicates the end of season two almost to a parodic degree. Jeremy Jordan has fun as Steve Harrington, and Alessandra Antonelli gets the best episode as Nancy Wheeler, but it’s a problem when the older kids steal an animated show from the younger ones.
Another problem comes from the familiarity of another “new kid in town” storyline, this one centering on Nikki Baxter (Odessa A’zion) and her parents. Again, we get an outsider narrative about a kid who’s not like anyone else at school, becoming a major part of the storytelling.
It’s all so aggressively uninspired, a sign that the producers were terrified to do anything different from what the live-action show had already done. Presenting kids with their own version of a hit isn’t a bad idea; giving them a watered-down, less interesting shadow of the same thing is an insulting one.
Whole series screened for review. Now on Netflix.