WE! are not like Papa.
It’s why, as a friend, we’d never lie about the fact that another Stranger Thingsseries is headed your way. And this time, the clocks are being wound all the way back to the 1950s.
Get ready to sock hop your way back a few decades with Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure. Netflixannounced the live action prequel series on Nov. 6, confirming Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer will remain at the helm of the franchise along with the series’ longtime writer, showrunner and co-creator Katie Tefry.
Other Worldspredates even the events of the stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which chronicles a teenaged Henry Creel’s path from a high school outcast to the evil Vecna.
For the Duffer Brothers, they were more than ready to run back up that hill and into the Upside Down.
“We’ve been dreaming of Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventurefor many years now, and to see it become a reality is surreal and exhilarating,” they said in the announcement. “It’s Stranger Things, but also thrillingly fresh, with a new setting, new heroes and villains, and new … actually, we’re not allowed to say any more.”
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And as they set their sights on casting the series, they added, “In the meantime—watch the skies, nerds!”
But for anyone who are desperate for the exact details of the series, searching for additional meaning in the tidbits of information shared might prove to be as hard as interpreting flickering Christmas lights. (Maybe ask Joyce Byers for help.)
After all, Tefry only teased, “We have had the time of our lives returning to all the horror, wonder and mystery of the flagship, while also telling a wholly new story, one we hope will blow your minds and break your hearts all over again. There are so many more mysteries to explore.”
Executive producer and director Shawn Levy, meanwhile, hinted that the series is aptly named, likely taking viewers far beyond the Midwest setting of the original series.
“With Other Worlds, the Duffer Brothers and Kate Trefry craft a new ensemble and adventure that is imbued with the DNA of our flagship series,” he shared, “while exploring a new era, setting, and all-new characters, themes, and mythology—the seeds of which may have been planted in Hawkins, but now venture into other worlds of spectacle, action, and emotion.”
After all, the door was still kept open three inches at the end of Stranger Things, allowing for more stories and history to slip through the crack.
However, and don’t call us a mouthbreather for saying it, but it will likely take a long time for Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventureto hit screens.
In the meantime, read on to relive all the b–chin’ secrets behind the original series.
Netfix
“It’s very hard when your brain is latched onto a title, it’s really, really hard to get people to agree and accept another title,” Matt told The Daily Beast in 2016. “Initially when we came up with this title Stranger Things, it was hard for people to embrace.”
“We liked Montauk, because we liked the coastal setting, and Montauk was the basis for Amity, and Jaws is probably our favorite movie, so I thought that that would be really cool,” Matt explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “Then it was really going to be impossible to shoot in or around Long Island in the wintertime. It was just going to be miserable and expensive.”
Atlanta ultimately became the home base for production.
“The day I shaved my head was the most empowering moment of my whole life,” the actress reflected during PaleyFest in 2018. “The last strand of hair cut off was the moment my whole face was on show and I couldn’t hide behind my hair like I used to. As I looked in the mirror I realized I had one job to do: inspire…You don’t need hair to be beautiful.”
“Winona looked cool back in the day with the pixie cut,” she shared, “and I thought maybe I could bring it back!”
“Originally Mike was a sigher, he was a dreamer, he was much more like Mikey in The Goonies in a lot of ways,” Matt told The Daily Beast in 2016. “But Finn had this really anxious, twitchy energy about him and we thought that that was really great and we just kind of wrote the character to match him and his personality.”
As he wrote on Instagram at the time. “Voted most likely to hijack someone’s high school senior photos 24 years later.”
“He wanted to let me know he was, like, kissing me then,” she explained during a 2017 appearance on The Tonight Show. “So he was like, ‘I’m coming in,’ and he was like a ventriloquist! It was the craziest thing.”
“That’s something important to me—with my family, with my friends, I really like to keep it for me,” Natalia told Refinery 29, though she did admit, “It’s an interesting thing to work with somebody who you go home with. It’s always really fun.”
But, “we fell in love with him during the making of season one, which is why we ended up writing that arc for him where he’s helping to save the day with Jonathan and Nancy,” Ross told The Hollywood Reporter. “Steve was supposed to be this jocky douchebag, and Joe was so much more than that.”
“Eleven was going to sacrifice herself to save the day,” Ross said in the 2018 book Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down. “That was always the end game. But once we realized that the show was potentially going to go on longer than one season, we needed to leave it more up in the air, because deep down we knew the show just wouldn’t really work without Eleven. And at that point, we knew how special Millie was. If there was going to be more Stranger Things, Eleven had to come back.”
“When we got to the point of writing the episode, we wanted to see if we really needed it or not,” Matt explained. “We actually did toy with pulling the episode completely, but then the ending with Eleven didn’t work at all. It just didn’t land at all. Then we ended up deciding we needed it.”
But after the audition was opened up to all young actors, it was Linnea Berthelsen who landed the part, and the episode ultimately featured Eleven meeting her “sister” Kali.”Linnea and Millie really had a connection,” Matt said, “Millie was like, ‘I want to do this with Linnea.'”
She added, “It’s a good lesson to actors: Watch the stuff you didn’t get, because you’ll totally understand how it’s not personal. You’re just right for some things and you’re not right for other things.”
That meant filming himself dancing to classic 1980s songs like “Come on Eileen” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” in nothing but a G-string. Dacre admitted he had some hesitation about sending it, saying, “Either I’m never going to work again, or somebody somewhere is going to see one thing in me, and they’ll give me a chance.” Fortunately, his risk paid off.
“It’s crazy,” costume designer Kim Wilcox told E! News. “We had one kid we could not keep in shoes, like every three weeks he grew a half-size.” Her solution was to find heritage brands that make the same product in multiple sizes. “We’d buy five of them so that when somebody grew we’d have something.”
“When we billed the project to Netflix, we had this big two-and-a-half-minute trailer that had about 20 or 30 of these movies kind of woven together to try and tell the story of Stranger Things, but obviously all these images or ideas were in our heads,” Matt told The Daily Beast. “Those are the movies that we grew up on and they’re so much a part of our DNA. But then when you get into the writers’ room and you’re working on individual episodes, actually very little time is spent referencing other movies. Mostly you’re just trying to tell the story, letting the characters guide where everything’s going. Otherwise it would just be a jumble and a mess.”
“The funny thing is that the original goal was to do entirely practical effects. But what we realized—and it really made us admire those guys who did The Thing and Alien and whatever—is that doing practical is really hard,” Ross explained. “It takes a lot of time and preparation. We were turning out scripts as quickly as we could but they don’t have six months to prep this stuff. You show up on set and stuff that seemed like it would be a great idea to do in that old school way, we didn’t have time to do.”
“We do have an idea for a spin-off that we’re super excited about,” they said in an email interview with Variety, “but we haven’t told anyone the idea yet, much less written it.”Despite their efforts to keep it a surprise, Matt and Ross admitted that Finn already guessed the premise of the series, which they described as “very, very different.” They added, “Aside from Finn, no one else knows!”
