‘Stranger Things: Tales From ’85’ Review: Netflix’s Animated Spinoff

By my count, there are exactly two and a half good reasons to watch Netflix’s animated spinoff, Stranger Things: Tales From ’85.

One: You are a child, by which I mean a literal child and not an adult who’s whimsically childlike at heart. You’ve heard good things about Stranger Things, but Mom and Dad have deemed you too young for its TV-14 rating. The slightly mellower Tales From ’85, with its TV-PG rating, could be enough to sate your curiosity for now.

Two: You’re a Stranger Things fan who expresses your devotion through fanatical completionism — you will not rest until you’ve consumed every last scrap of footage or word of dialogue this universe has to offer. In that case, go with God. Nothing I’m about to say here will matter to you anyway.

The half-reason is Odessa A’zion’s Nikki. 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. But unless you already fit into categories one or two, even she’s not quite enough to justify sitting through a series that otherwise just feels like more of the same, only less.

As the new story, developed by Jennifer Muro and showrunner Eric Robles, opens in early 1985 — that’s between seasons two and three, for those as bad as Mike’s dad is at keeping track of ages and timelines — our young heroes are still riding high off their recent victory. Having closed the gates to the Upside Down for good, or so they believe, they have happily returned to ordinary kid lives stuffed with junk food, Dungeons & Dragons and awkward tween flirting.

What we know that they don’t, of course, is that they’ve still got years’ worth of battles left to fight. This idyllic winter break is just that: a break, and a short-lived one at that. Once people around Hawkins start getting snatched by sentient, otherworldly vines, middle school buds Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, Max and El are all back on the case — this time with a bit of additional help from Nikki, daughter of the new substitute science teacher (Janeane Garofalo as Mrs. Baxter).

Tales From ’85 indicates very little interest in rocking the Stranger Things boat, narratively or tonally or any other-ly. Even the shift in medium from live-action to animation seems rooted more in a desire to return the story to its stronger early seasons, when the kids still looked and acted like, well, kids, than to shake things up. (That the crisp, polished, colorful cartoon version is actually much prettier than the murky CG of later seasons is a nice bonus, though.) Otherwise, it’s all business as usual.

So while the monsters are never-before-seen creations, they more or less amount to Demogorgons cross-pollinated with Audrey II. When the characters get embroiled in interpersonal drama, they’re only rehashing arguments we’ve seen before. Although Nikki, who has a knack for DIY mechanical engineering, is able to furnish the gang with new gadgets, their plans pretty much always come down to almost getting eaten by some enormous otherworldly creature before being rescued at the last possible millisecond by El’s telekinesis.

Speaking of El, the character remains so dramatically overpowered that the only real tension across the season’s 10 half-hour episodes comes from wondering what new excuse the show will come up with to incapacitate her long enough that she can swoop in for that “surprise” save. It’s not the only persistent narrative issue to follow Stranger Things into Tales From ’85, but like Mike’s overbearing protectiveness of El or Dustin’s obnoxiously arrogant genius, it’s one that felt easier to forgive in live-action, when the young actors’ superb individual performances and crackling collective chemistry often papered over shortcomings in the script.

By contrast, the all-new voice cast for Tales From ’85 is stuck trying to duplicate the performances that came before, though only Braxton Quinney, who plays Dustin, and sometimes Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, who plays Max, are true soundalikes. Were these actors (including Luca Diaz as Mike, Elisha Williams as Lucas, Ben Plessala as Will and Brooklyn Davey Norstedt as El) granted space to make these characters their own, the discrepancies might not be a problem. But the series dares not let their performances dig very deep, lest they turn up anything inconveniently contradictory.

These versions of the characters might go through the motions of a joke Max might crack or a declaration (“Friends help friends”) El might make, and in flashes it almost feels like enough. But lacking the nuance and naturalism that once made them so lovable, these pale imitations quickly grow tiresome, then irritating. It doesn’t seem a coincidence that the only true bright spot in this ensemble is Nikki. As a new girl who figures not at all in seasons three through five, she’s allowed to evolve or grow her relationships in ways that the more familiar faces cannot, lest they break from established canon.

In Nikki, Tales From ’85 offers a taste of the potential this project could have had were it not so determined to play by the rulebook. Instead — for better if you’re an executive jealously protecting your golden goose IP, maybe, but mostly for worse if you’re anyone else — it plays things as safe as a brand extension can. I suspect viewers content to settle for a diet version of Stranger Things, whether because they’re too little for the real thing or too fanatical to pass it over, will find little to object to in the spinoff’s faithful if watered-down recreation of the original’s appeal. But I can’t imagine most of them finding much to adore about it, either.