Certainly, some incredible animation came out during the 1980s, films such as Akira and The Little Mermaid and we all still love DuckTales and The Real Ghostbusters. But the overwhelming majority of the cartoons of the era where cheap and janky-looking—especially those that would have been watched by kids in a small Midwestern town (this writer, a 40-something Michigander, assures you).
And the teaser seems to know that this isn’t an ’80s cartoon. “With the animation there’s really no limits. Eric and his team can just go wild” observes Ross Duffer. Robles concurs, adding, “What we’ve been able to capture is the magic of Hawkins in a new way.”
That phrase “a new way” particularly stands out. The few clips we see do include signifiers of the decade, including Dustin’s blue and orange jacket and a Jaws poster on Mike’s wall. But they are little more than signifiers, and they don’t feel like part of the actual day to day life of someone who lived in the ’80s. The clean digital animation only exacerbates the problem, heightening the difference between a fantasy world and lived experience.
Such problems have always plagued Stranger Things, which uses its ’80s trappings—the mall, the Cold War, various record drops—as tone setting more than realism. The show wants to evoke the feel of reading a yellowed King paperback, not the actual experience of picking up a new copy of Pet Sematary from K-Mart in 1983. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mixing timeframes and signifiers for a particular effect, and clearly it’s worked for Stranger Things.
But when the Duffers start comparing Tales from ’85 to actual ’80s cartoons, the attachment to the era sounds, frankly, desperate. It sounds almost as if they’re clinging to an idea long past its point of viability, sticking to it not because it’s a good idea, but because it’s the thing to do… and that sense of empty desperation probably isn’t something Netflix wants to highlight as it starts milking its prime franchise past its natural end point.
Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 comes to Netflix in 2026.
