Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 Trailer Brings the Franchise Back to Basics

We’re all sick of Stranger Things, right? After a finale that cost more, ran longer, and disappointed far worse than several Hollywood blockbusters, we’re all a bit over the Upside Down, Vecna, and whatever the heck the Russians were doing. How did a story about weird things happening to four kids from Indiana get so out of control?

Yet, just when we thought we were out returning our Hawkins High T-shirts and WSQK mugs back to Target, Netflix pulls us back in with the trailer to Stranger Things: Tales from ’85. Set, appropriately enough, to the Naked Eyes hit “Always Something There to Remind Me,” the trailer features the main four boys, along with Eleven and Max, riding their bikes, having snowball fights, and getting into trouble, all while dealing with spooky stuff. In short, it has all the stuff we loved about Stranger Things back when it premiered in 2016.

Set between seasons 2 and 3, during the winter of its titular year, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 has plenty of familiar sights. In addition to the kids, we get bits with Hopper and Steve Harrington, the latter with immaculately rendered hair, and sights such as the Hawkins National Laboratory. Further, we get both old monsters, such as a puppy version of the Demodog, and some sort of cool-looking pumpkin creature.

Although we’re glad to see the characters, especially back when they weren’t burdened with so much lore, it’s things like the pumpkin monster that really excites us. According to Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer, Tales from ’85 seeks to replicate the feel of the era’s Saturday morning cartoon shows. The smooth animation on display in the trailer certainly doesn’t match that description, but the pumpkin monster does. That creature feels like the sort of one-off beastie you’d see for a single episode of Scooby-Doo or The Real Ghostbusters (or Ghostbusters, for that matter) and never see again.

Even the show’s decision to use sound-alike voice actors instead of the original cast recalls the cartoons of 40 years ago. The fact that Lorenzo Music and Arsenio Hall were playing Venkman and Winston helped The Real Ghostbusters feel like its own thing from the movie, and that can only help Stranger Things. The cast received quite a bit of criticism toward the final seasons, as the kids clearly aged to young adulthood by the time of season 5 and some lost the natural performance abilities they showed early on.

If Tales from ’85 can distance itself from the mainline show’s later seasons and recover some of the charm of the first two seasons, then the franchise could be saved. We all fell in love with the series when it was about ’80s kids fighting monsters, not because of a dense mythology about one psychic boy who became an evil monster. Shots in the Tales from ’85 trailer showing Lucas holding Max’s hand and the kids hitting each other with snowballs are just enough to remind us that maybe we still love Stranger Things after all.

Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 streams on Netflix on April 23, 2026.