It was thought by people that Netflix had lost one of their biggest tentpoles as Stranger Things came to an end earlier this year after releasing in three parts. We’ve not seen the last of Hawkins, as the Duffer brothers have had Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 in the works for some time now. Not only has it been released for people to watch on Netflix, but it has also been renewed for a second season. 

Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 is an animated show that takes place during Seasons 2 and 3 of the main show. It follows Mike (Luca Diaz), Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt), Dustin (Braxton Quinney), Lucas (Elisha Williams), Will (Ben Plessla), and Max (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) as they face a new threat after having closed the gate to the Upside Down while also teaming up with new faces like Nikki Baxter (Odessa A’zion). 

I got the chance to sit down with the Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85 showrunner, Eric Robles, as we discussed how they came about this specific idea for a spin-off, the inspirations behind the art style, and the decision surrounding the recasts. 

Christopher Mills: What were you allowed to touch with Stranger Things when it came to its lore, and what general creative boundaries were there when developing this show?

Eric Robles: The Duffer brothers were in post-production on season 4 at the time when we first started talking about developing and what the possibilities of this can be. So it wasn’t like it was the master plan.

Technically, Season 1 was gonna be it. There was no plan for the entirety of what it ended up being. And just like anything else, they really just were excited about what the possibilities could be for an animated series. As kids, they grew up watching a lot of things like The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice or the animated versions of them, and they were like, “Hey, what if we did some version of something like this for Stranger Things?” But something that wouldn’t really interfere with the main storyline that they were already establishing, but we can still build out adventures.

When Netflix approached me about this, I saw their issue. They were like, “We’d like to do something between season 2 and season 3.” But the gate’s closed, right? Everything from the Upside Down should be dead in our world. So how do you create a whole new adventure with monsters when you can’t open up a new gate?

And I was like, “Oh my God! OK, let me figure this out.” I went back and I started watching some of the old 80s movies I grew up with, and one of them that really hit for me was Re-animator.

Re-animator is a movie about a scientist who uses a formula to bring dead bodies back to life. And I said, “Well, what if you have this Hawkins lab science meets Upside Down matter? What would happen if you brought something back to life in this way?” So that’s when the wheels started spinning. I talked to the Duffer brothers about it, and they were very excited about the idea. They were like: “That’s so awesome!” Then we just started riffing, like literally just riffing back and forth on what we could do with something like this.

They were like, “As long as you can keep it contained between Seasons 2 and 3 and you don’t go into the world of opening up the gate or having the kids literally go to the upside down and mess with anything Vecna or Mind Flayer in that moment, I think you could be good. Just isolate the show between those seasons.”

So that was where we started.

One of the things I will say is the creativity is organic. We have no idea where it’s gonna go. We just start playing. It’s like, you and me, if we got in a room and we just started talking about an idea, it will just start growing. By the end of the day, we’ll have this cool idea. It’s just gonna keep manifesting.

Christopher Mills: 100% agree on that. It’s something where there’s no end to it. It’s like unlimited possibilities when it comes to creativity.

Eric Robles: Absolutely! As we started developing the series, we saw how much fun we could have within this little timeline that we had. But what really started happening for us was the joy. We started hanging out with our friends. Hanging out with Mike, hanging out with Eleven, hanging out with Dustin, and going on new adventures was so much fun.

It ended up becoming this new thing. We’re hanging out with our best friends, going on new adventures, and that joy in itself started creating what you’re seeing in Tales From ’85, this new adventure that you get so caught up in. Is it gonna fit perfectly back into the box at the end of season three? I don’t know. I’m gonna try my best, Christopher. I’m gonna try my best, but I’m gonna tell you this, what I will promise you is a freaking great ride, man.

Christopher Mills: That’s all that matters at the end of everything. You just want people to have fun, go on this adventure, and come out of it going, you know what, this was fun.

I want to ask about the question that everyone keeps on asking, and it’s obviously regarding whether Tales from ’85 is canon, and you’ve just said something that’s made me kind of realize that, sometimes, it’s a question that doesn’t need to be asked, because as long as it’s good and as long as you’re having fun with it, at the end of the day, it shouldn’t really matter whether something’s canon or not, but obviously fans are so passionate about the things they love, and obviously they want things to connect and they want things to make sense. What other conversations were going on behind the scenes regarding, trying to keep this canon in the world of Stranger Things and trying to stick to the continuity that existed with seasons 1 and 2?

Eric Robles: When we first started, we had no idea how big this was gonna get. And it was literally an organic thing that started happening creatively.

I think that the defining rule for them was that as long as you’re not interfering with Vecna’s story and you’re not interfering with the Mind Flayer’s story, that’s gonna be part of the main thing. They allowed us to just make sure that we were touching base with certain elements of what happens between seasons 2 and 3 and the characters. We still have Nancy and Jonathan in that story. And even now in my mind, if this continues, I know exactly where Jonathan and Nancy are in their relationship. I know exactly where Steve’s at and how in love he still is with Nancy. So in this series, we do get to touch on that just a little bit, as you’ve already seen I think…

Christopher Mills: Yes, in episode 4.

Eric Robles: So in episode 4 you see that Steve’s still in love with Nancy. So there’s elements that are connected to the universe of the main storyline. But it’s not ever gonna be something so dramatic like Nancy and Steve getting back together. We’re not gonna do that. We’re not gonna break certain elements. We wanna respect those elements that are there, but when it comes to the adventure. When it comes to that adventure, that’s something we’re gonna have fun with.

That’s something we’re gonna allow you to be a part of, that ride, and hopefully you’ll fall in love with that ride. But again, we’re not trying to redefine or figure out things that weren’t answered. All we’re trying to do is really to just have fun in this little time period and tell this really great story. Now, you got to the finale, I’m guessing?

Christopher Mills: I haven’t yet gotten to the finale, but before this interview, I was like I need to at least see some bits, so I was kind of like skimming around, but I haven’t got like the full context or anything just yet.

Eric Robles: OK, just wait man! That finale, now you gotta like reach out to me on Instagram and tell me what you thought of that finale, man, because holy smoke, it’s probably the most epic thing I have ever been a part of with my team.

Christopher Mills: 100%, I will. I just love seeing how enthusiastic you are about the show and the love that you have for this show. So obviously, it’s great to see. Something you mentioned earlier were some of the inspirations with Stranger Things in general, The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, and some of those 80s cartoons. I was wondering with you, was there anything that was a part of your childhood that helped inspire the art style, or the animation style, or even like the overall story of Tales from ’85?

Eric Robles: Well, yeah! I appreciate that question. Look, the truth is I was born and raised out here in LA in the 80s. So in 1985, I was about 8 or 9 years old so I literally was that kid getting on my bike, going to pick up my friends at each of their houses and saying hi to their parents, “Oh, hello, Mr. and Mrs. so and so,” and then you act like you’re all innocent.

And then you’re just like, “Let’s go!,” and you get into trouble with your friends, going to construction sites, going to the park… I lived that life. So that energy and genuine enthusiasm that these kids have, it’s just literally going back to my childhood and putting that energy into it. Hawkins Investigators Club was something I always wanted. I always wanted to be a part of some cool investigative club. To go out there and solve mysteries. and stuff like that… So I created the Hawkins Investigators Club for them, allowing them to try to solve these mysteries and go on these adventures. That was a big inspiration just as far as character and story for myself and really bringing that energy to the animated series.

When it came to the art and the style of the show, it’s such a huge challenge, Christopher. When they say “Hey, you gotta create a look that just defines itself,” you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, the pressure of that is huge!”

So what I did is that I started looking at different artists, and different styles, but I had the answer in front of me the whole time. This, the original Stranger Things posters, the Kyle Lambert posters… I was like, “Holy smokes!”

You see the illustrative look that those things have, and you see the dark colors along with the vibrant colors of those things. I was like, “If I can bring those posters to life, I have myself a pretty kick ass animated series, man.” And so that became the target: How do we bring these posters to life where you see the brush strokes?

I follow so many amazing artists because in my industry that’s what I do. I love artists so much. And one of the artists that I followed was Maybis Ruiz Cruz, which is our lead designer on the series, and she happens to know how to design in a way that captures stylized realism, allowing you to capture Mike Wheeler or Eleven right in a real stylized way with real sharp angles and really cool style.

And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I love Meybis so much,” so I brought her in early development days, and she really started defining the look of that of those characters along with Benjamin Plouffe, our production designer, which brought this really cool brush stroke-y look to the show. We use a lot of these triangles. I don’t know if you’ve seen those in the show yet, but even in the flare in the flashlights when they go across, you’ll see these flares. But even with triangles, it’s just all based off of the shapes and art I wanted. One of the things that I kept telling our production team was that we need to bring the art to life.

I want this to feel like artistic portraits on their own. Every piece, every still should feel like a piece of concept art. That’s how our target was for the style of the show. And then when it came to the animation, I reached out to one of my best collaborators and friends, which is Ian Graham. Ian Graham was working at Flying Bark Animation Studios in Sydney. He’s based out here in LA, but we had worked together on Glitch Techs prior to that. And also, Ian had been a director on The Legend of Korra, so he brought his airbending skills of amazing talent. So I’m like, “Dude, we need to elevate the animated series where Eleven can use her powers in a whole different way because we can keep doing this.” And we do! But what if she starts pulling and and using her powers in unique ways?

That’s the purpose of animation. If we were not gonna create Gourd Hordes, pumpkin creatures, and all this stuff, then we might as well just do the live action version. But animation is meant to go extreme.

Animation is meant to expand your imagination in a whole new way. That’s why we do animation because we’re able to go in places that a live action normally doesn’t go. And the reason why everybody’s converting all these comic books like X-Men and Avengers and this and that. Why? Because comics and animation can go extreme, do big things and let your imagination go into new territories, and that’s what we’re doing with Tales from ’85. We’re allowing this Stranger Things universe to expand and hopefully create excitement into new adventures, allowing the audience to really be excited about what the possibilities could be for an animated series and a new story.

Oh, this is such an amazing extensive answer. I’m sure fans are gonna love to just hear everything you’re saying. I’m gonna have to rewatch to see all the little details in the animation.

It’s also a new cast, original cast with no returning members. I was wondering how that discussion went behind the scenes on production to go for a new cast and not bring any returning members, or if you had planned to bring any returning members and it just fell through.

Eric Robles: Imagine this: You have 12-year-old Mike Wheeler with a 20-something year-old voice. That’s all I gotta say. So when a lot of fans out there might get upset about, “Hey, why aren’t they bringing back the original cast?”

But if you start just making simple sense of looking at a 12-year-old design and genuinely just being kids, but yet you have the adult voice now… It’s just not gonna sound right. And so that’s the simple math of it all.

Now, there’s another layer to this that a lot of people don’t realize. When you go back to seasons one and two, there’s little cute isms that these kids do and did. You wanna know why they did those. It’s because only kids can think like that. Only kids can talk the way they do. They can come up with ideas and funny ways of acting because they’re kids. When you’re an adult, you lose that certain innocence of kind of things that you do as a kid. So a lot of times when we are in the records with the kids that we have for the series, sometimes your voice will crack, or sometimes they’ll do just cute ad-libs, and I’m like, “That’s funny, let’s use that” because kids being kids. You can never get such a genuine performance than a kid being a kid.

And that’s what I really wanted to highlight. Let these kids speak like kids, think like kids, and act like kids. That way, the performance feels genuine and as pure as possible. Even awkward moments between Eleven and Mike, or Lucas and Max… There’s this pure innocence to kids figuring out their young love, and who they are, and what they’re doing, and doing it in a way where kids are actually performing that you get the most genuine like acting out of that. So that’s just like the simple math of it all.

Now once we cast our kids for this series, then it felt a little wrong to just say like “We’re gonna exclude these kids here, but we’re gonna bring everybody else,” and it just started feeling like we’re just excluding too many people, so we decided to reset, clean slate, and just bring people who are excited about the show.

Now, I’m not saying that the original actors wouldn’t do that. All I’m saying is that we just wanted to cast kids who wanted to genuinely bring that excitement to the show that we currently have.

When it comes to future seasons and all that stuff, I see this timeline. They don’t take place in between months. They take place like literally weeks. And if you follow our timeline, it’s a very short timeline. It feels like it’s long, but it’s not. Even Stranger Things like literally happen in like two weeks sometimes or something like this.

We’re in that same pocket where we’re just starting in January, which means we got February, March, April, May, June, July. So we got plenty of time between where we start in episode one of our show. So by the time we get to the summer or July – 4th of July in season 3.

So if we’re gonna continue this thing, I have some pretty fun ideas of where this is gonna go. And now I don’t want it to last like a long time of course. I keep it in a small little pocket. I wanna keep it fun. I wanna get in, I wanna have fun, and then I just wanna get out because I think some of the best shows and the best movies that exist are the ones that don’t overstay their welcome.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 is now streaming on Netflix.