‘Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85’ Review: Netflix Spinoff Is Haunted by Missed Opportunities

In the world of fully optional animated spinoffs made for streaming, a companion to “Stranger Things” may be the easiest layup imaginable. Plenty of contemporary animated supplements play like elevated versions of the janky Saturday morning cartoons of yore, and of course that kind of throwback is the whole “Stranger Things” deal, at least when “yore” refers to its cherished 1980s setting.

With Saturday morning material — “The Real Ghostbusters,” say, or “Back to the Future: The Animated Series” — in mind, even the potential drawbacks of Netflix’s “Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85” start to look like TV-history verisimilitude. Of course the animation will look more like cute caricature than an exact replication of famous faces, and of course that caricature will extend to zero principal cast members reprising their roles through vocal performances, with the show instead relying on uneven imitations. The high stakes of the recent final season won’t be there, either. That’s all part of the charm: bringing out some of the show’s most fanciful elements without adhering so closely to the established lore or live-action look.

Less charming, though, and more baffling is the way that “Tales From ‘85” betrays its title almost immediately. Rather than delivering episodic kids-on-bikes adventures set during one of several time jumps from the mothership series, the show offers a “Stranger Things” season in miniature, with a mostly continuous story taking place in the early days of 1985, between Seasons 2 and 3 — “chapter” episode titles and all. The opportunity for unpredictable side quests that might zero in on different characters is largely ignored in favor of Mike (Luca Diaz), Dustin (Braxton Quinney), Lucas (Elisha Williams), Will (Ben Plessala), Max (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and superpowered Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt) teaming with one new Hawkins transplant, the punky Nikki (Odessa A’zion), to vanquish a very spun-off form of Upside Down-spawned monsters.

For hardcore fans of the original series, or even casual fans of ’80s-style Amblin pastiches, that’s not the worst thing in the world. For one thing, the cast for the later seasons got so sprawling that it became increasingly rare to see the core younger kids hanging out together, rather than split into various subplots. Here, characters like Steve, Nancy and Hopper make appearances, but don’t receive obligatory every-episode check-ins, giving the cartoon’s core cast more space. A’zion brings her distinctively scratchy tones to the likable Nikki (carrying on the family business, as it were, given that her mom Pamela Adlon is the voice of Bobby on “King of the Hill,” among other vocal gigs), and less heavily used characters like Max and Will get more to do, even if “more” in the world of “Stranger Things” often means to an increased volume of bickering.

Those standbys could have been mitigated by a different approach to the animated version, so the decision to mostly not capitalize on a “Tales” format is bizarre — especially given that the show is most satisfying when it’s not replaying the repetitive big-monster conflicts of “Stranger Things.” The best installment of this 10-episode batch focuses on the kids attempting to break into the office of a local tabloid to retrieve a crucial piece of evidence that could expose Eleven to outside interlopers. It’s exactly the kind of story that would be difficult to depict believably in live-action form, particularly in its flexing of Eleven’s powers.

With Dustin forming a makeshift “Scooby Doo”-ish mystery-solving club early in the season, “Tales From ‘85” seems to be teeing up more standalone adventures, but they never really arrive. Even setting aside the stated influence of Saturday morning cartoons, the structure of any given “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” season, where individual episodes deal with unique monsters while a master plot develops on the side, might have made more sense here. There are a few other episodes that flirt with this balance between individual stories and broader arcs, but the primary monster stuff, neat as the vaguely Spider-Verse-biting animation style can look, grows numbingly repetitive well before the season’s halfway point.

Without the eclecticism of different storylines, the weaker aspects of both the original show and a Saturday morning cartoon version are thrown into sharper relief: The banter is more loud and frantic than funny, the pacing can be uneven, and in retrospect it’s a little weird that the kids had this whole other monster-fighting adventure in their downtime that was never mentioned before. That’s a minor point, of course, and younger fans of the show will probably be satisfied by this extra bit of flashbacking.

“Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85” has its high points. It just seems like maybe the show’s creators aren’t fully aware of what they are.

“Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85” is now streaming on Netflix.

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