Stranger Things has Happened:
When Nostalgia gets Nostalgic
The Upside Down of Original Ideas
Stranger Things season five is here! It cost half a billion US dollars, stars a cast of “kids” some of whom have kids of their own, and is being promoted by an apparent sex pest who’s just come out of a very messy and very public divorce. Wow! What actually happened in season five? I don’t know! It was so uninteresting that I stopped paying attention almost instantly.
Did you also zone out at the start of season five? Do you wish you could fling yourself back to the halcyon days of season one, when the kids were actually kids, Vecna wasn’t a thing, and nobody knew how terrible those involved in the show are? Well you can! (Mostly. The Duffer brothers are still involved.)
Welcome to '85, Where Nobody Has Aged
Here comes Tales from ‘85 to the rescue. Revell at this entirely disingenuous Stranger Things cartoon made for kids in order to make them nostalgic for a show they haven’t seen which is itself nostalgic for a time that might as well be prehistory to them. Why is this made? I’m sure there’s a business reason like “it grows the brand”. Or a creative one like “we want to explore new dimensions for these characters”. No doubt it’s all bollocks and it’s just a cash grab. Which brings up the most important point, animations can’t grow old like pesky living children do, so the kids of Tales will stay miniature, and profitable, forever. Huzzah!
The Boy Who Lived. And Lived. And Lived Again.
Stranger Things is hardly the only offender of being nostalgic for nostalgia. Harry Potter will release a new TV series soon retelling the entire story of the boy wizard. So we’re getting a tv series which is nostalgic for the movies of the books which are nostalgic for a version of English boarding school history that never happened and carefully avoids all that uncomfortable hazing.
Who is this new Potter for? Are Millennials clamouring for more HP even if it treads no new ground? Perhaps they’re so unable to connect with their children that they’ll force them to enjoy the same things they did.
What role does this show serve? We’ve already seen Harry and his friends as children. Twice. Why not just read the books? The movies themselves aren’t even that old, why not watch them?
And if it’s not for Millennials and their kids to grow with known and loved characters or to experience them in a new light, what is really happening here? It’s hard to see these shows as anything more than cynical cash grab designed to extend IPs ad infinitum rather than developing anything innovative. Are we so bereft of ideas that we’re now just doomed to endlessly repeat the same media within years of it first being released? Are companies so afraid of committing to not just new IP, but new ideas within the same IP that everything is simply a remix of what was? Are we so miserable in the modern age that we’re nostalgic not just for the past, but the media that reminds us of that imagined past? It’s probably a mix of all of these things, but what’s clear is that those in charge of our creative industries are severely lacking in the spark needed to generate new and exciting ideas. We’re simply treading creative water as a society and hoping what came before will sustain us.
Carrie Fisher Deserved Better Than This
Nostalgia was already eating so much of our creative energy with endless Star Wars and Star Trek spin-offs, more Ghostbusters than you can shake a proton pack at, digitally resurrected Val Kilmers and Carrie Fishers, and on and on. But what happens when nostalgia becomes an ouroboros and begins eating itself? What happens when the new product becomes indistinguishable from the original? Are we no longer creating at all at this point? Our cinematic top ten lists already contain almost nothing beyond sequels and reboots. Will we regress to the point where every decade or two we simply release the same movies in a different format or with a different cast?
Aliens Gave My Cat a Beard: A Manifesto
I don’t think so. I have faith in all you wonderful creatives out there. I may have no trust in business, but I trust in people and the creative soul of humanity. Let’s get out there and make some new and weird stuff! Also, if things don’t change it’ll be very hard to get funding for my movie based on my favourite t-shirt. Aliens Gave My Cat A Beard, The Shirt: The Movie! There will presumably be other, less important, effects too.
 | A guest post by
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The nostalgia in Stranger Things is turtles all the way down!
"This entirely disingenuous Stranger Things cartoon made for kids in order to make them nostalgic for a show they haven’t seen which is itself nostalgic for a time that might as well be prehistory to them. Why is this made?"
I am HERE for the shade!! I agree that the 'Stranger Things Tales From '85' is beating a dead horse at this point for the money. They've milked the hell out of the Netflix's show plot line with both the animation spin-off, and the live-action play — exclusive to London & New York, and not available on streaming.
At the end of the Stranger Things Netflix series, I genuinely made a promise to myself to not watch any media that drags out for years while playing in their fanbase's faces. As for any new media the Duffer Brothers create? I could care less, the way that they've written Women characters has them on my banned media consumption list.