The kids are not all right.
The original Stranger Things may have been a cultural phenomenon, but the new animated version — titled Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 — isn’t charming most critics. With aggregate scores of just 70% on Rotten Tomatoes and 51 on Metacritic, reviewers are declaring the spin-off, which sketches in the story between Seasons 2 and 3, a pale imitation of the original.
THE RAVES
Tales From ’85 is “fun-filled,” “entertaining” and “a welcome return” — says Greer Riddell in her review for Collider. “Visually, Tales From ‘85 keeps you hooked with bright, luminous lighting and bold colors,” she says, adding that the character designs are “especially gratifying”
The Los Angeles Times‘ Robert Lloyd finds this version a “streamlined, supercharged telling,” given that it’s been stripped of “soap operatics” from the original and the adult characters. “What matters most is the overall environment, which is completely recognizable, down to the settings, product placements, period references and pop songs, but also, in its painterly representation, something new,” he writes. “It feels at once familiar and fresh.”
THE RANTS
But Variety‘s Alison Herman was far less enthused, calling the spinoff a “depressing, cynical retread” in the headline. “Tales From ‘85 is a transparent attempt to preserve Stranger Things in pixels rather than amber, allowing Netflix to keep capitalizing on the phenomenon long after its original faces have moved on to other projects,” she says. “If Stranger Things was already a nostalgia exercise, then Tales From ‘85 caters to nostalgia for nostalgia, a recursive loop with a predictably diminished impact.”
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Angie Han says the only bright spot in the otherwise “dull and unambitious” spinoff is Odessa A’zion. “Burly, brash and topped with a strawberry-pink mohawk, the new character is just fresh and charming enough that it seems a shame Original Flavor Stranger Things didn’t dream her up in time to give her a live-action counterpart,” writes Han. But she’s still not quite enough to justify watching the series that “otherwise just feels like more of the same, only less.”
And then there’s Brian Tallerico, writing for RogerEbert.com, who declares the series “an insulting waste of time.” “Every chance to do something inventive and interesting in Tales From ‘85 is ignored for lazy fan-fic writing, slack plotting, and inconsistent characters,” he says. “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.”
