Stranger Things wooed audiences with a mix of childhood nostalgia and horror, and the animated spinoff Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85 is trying to recapture that magic. Showrunner Eric Robles told Polygon that he drew on his favorite ‘80s movies like The Goonies and The Lost Boys for ideas on how to craft adventures, but one of his biggest influences was the 1986 animated series The Real Ghostbusters.
“You have some really scary episodes within that series, whether it was the Boogieman or the Sandman episodes, and I just remember as a kid feeling that there was a difference in that kind of storytelling,” Robles said. “If I can tap into that feeling again with a series like this – where the stakes felt real, where the danger felt real, and these kids are genuinely trying their best to figure out a mystery – that’s the show I want to make.”
The followup to the original Ghostbusters film turned the ghost Slimer into a mascot for the paranormal investigators. Robles said he considered doing something similar with Dart, the Demodog Dustin adopted in Stranger Things season 2.
“There were some development drawings done by one of the artists,” Robles said. “Then we just started realizing that it started leaning a bit too young and started taking away the stakes and the reality of what we were trying to aim for. Because we’re animation, we can be dismissed as just being young.”
The Real Ghostbusters ran for seven seasons of episodic adventures, but Robles always envisioned Tales from ‘85 as a serialized story.
“I wanted the adventure to feel like it was going somewhere. The mystery was something that we all had to solve together,” he said. “I think some of the best stories are the ones where I feel I’m a participant.”
A mutating monster threatening Hawkins during the winter of ‘85 provides the opportunity for multiple arcs with their own cultural touchstones. The creature’s complex lifecycle leads to comparisons with 1979’s Alien. In the first few episodes, the kids have to play a deadly version of the floor is lava as they avoid an unseen foe.
“These kids are looking at a sea of white snow, but what is underneath that snow,” Robles said. “We created our own version of Jaws for this series based on the Upside Down. We do a lot of the things that the Duffer Brothers do and say What are the things that really spoke to you when you were younger in some of these films that we would watch? and we just try to implement that in our own unique way in the storytelling that we do.”
Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85 is now streaming on Netflix.
