Stranger Things: The Upside Down To Disney

The World Stranger Things Built

From its very first season, it was evident that Stranger Things was not a show for kids – and its creators, the Duffer Brothers, were not setting out to be the new Disney. On Stranger Things Day, going back to where it all began:

SINCE it appeared on Netflix in July 2016, Stranger Things has attracted a cult following. From the outset, the show – set in 1980s Indiana – used the toys, games and fashions of the decade to draw in its young adult viewers. It served as the perfect nostalgic throwback for a generation which grew up on a diet of Steven Spielberg-style fantasy films such as ET, The Goonies and Jumanji – films where children go on epic adventures to return an alien to his home planet, dig up missing pirate treasure, or complete a magical board game.

As with these films, Stranger Things’ group of leading child characters have an adventure thrust upon them. The Dungeons and Dragons-playing middle schoolers are geeky outsiders – members of the audio-visual club, whose schooldays are plagued by bullying. And yet when one of their number goes missing they take it upon themselves to find him – and in the process uncover supernatural secrets in their hometown.

The premise was all-too familiar – thanks to many a movie from Disney. The animation giant has told of the plight of the lost child in its movies for decades now. Films such as The Lion King – along with older animations such as Bambi and Dumbo – urge the viewer to identify with a child deprived of (or separated from) one or both parents.

But Stranger Things was not a show for kids – and its creators, the Duffer Brothers, did not set out to be the new Disney. With a terrifying demo-gorgon on the loose and the prospect of spending eternity in the Upside Down – a parallel universe where monsters roam – Stranger Things instead took this plot theme in a very different direction, pushing grown-up viewers to relate instead to the adults of the story.

It felt familiar, but it was not the same: Stranger Things became the Upside Down to Disney’s universe.

Rewatch Stranger Things S1-4

STRANGE TWIST TO A FAMILIAR FORMULA

How Stranger Things Became The Upside Down To Disney’s Universe

By Nick Lee

IN Disney’s The Lion King, we follow young Simba after he is told to flee the pridelands by uncle Scar after the death of his father Mufasa. In Stranger Things, on the other hand, when 12-year-old Will Byers is taken into the Upside Down, we follow the story in equal measures from the perspective of his mother and his young friends and older brother. In fact it is the adult characters that are either temporarily or permanently separated from their children who transformed the well-used plight from old trope to fresh take.

Will’s mother Joyce Byers, police chief Jim Hopper, scientist Dr Martin Brenner – we were told that all of these characters have lost children and are either engaged in a struggle to be reunited with them or are defined by their grief. The characters and plot were initially all motivated by the hole left by an absent child – a void which cannot be filled by anything but the child itself.

During that first season, viewers felt the familiar fear of being the lost child, but were given a new, almost schizophrenic identification, as they also related to the bereft parents. And though there was a sense of relief in Will Byers’ reunion with his mother, the same could be said for Eleven, who Will’s friends teamed up with as they embarked on their search. Eleven, a girl with supernatural abilities, was taken from her biological mother Terry Ives and brought up in a secret laboratory where her powers were pushed to the limits by Dr Brenner.

Throughout that first season we wanted Eleven to find a new family, for her pain to be assuaged and for her to be welcomed into a human society from which she has always been alienated. The theme demands that the horror of the lost child be put to an end. It is the reason we watch. Yet we were handed a peculiar and frustrating ending: Eleven vanishes into the Upside Down – and though Will is returns, he has brought some of its terrors back with him.

We sympathise with parents separated from their children, yet at the last moment in season one, Eleven was deprived of her new family, unable to return to her catatonic mother. Identifying with the parents of lost children, we were forced to bear that very fact – we do not get our lost child back and the family is not restored. Even though Will was back at home, he too did not have the happy ending that we had come to expect.

At the end of that first season, no one quite knew the thrilling ride Stranger Things would take over the subsequent three. But even then, eight years away from what will be its fifth and final season, one thing was clear to viewers: this wasn't going to be a Disney-esque tale of friendly woodland creatures and fairy godmothers.

Nick Lee is a Teaching Fellow in Film History and Critical Theory, Royal Holloway University of London. This article originally appeared in The Conversation and has been republished here under the Creative Commons Licence.

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