Review: From Hawkins to NYC: 'Stranger Things: Tales of '85' and 'Kevin' transport to animated otherworlds

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Welcome again to Cartoon Corner, a semi-regular feature of this space where we review cartoons.They’ve had their ups and downs over the years, creatively, commercially, but for a long while it’s been mostly ups.

Originally they were made for everyone, then seemingly for kids but interesting to adults, and eventually just for adults; they come in all flavors now.With the right people attached, they seem to be easier to greenlight than a live-action show; actors like them for not having to rise for early morning calls, or sit in makeup chairs being glued into prosthetics that an artist can just draw; and of course, they allow for varieties of strangeness difficult to render otherwise.

We’re not in Bedrock anymore.“Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, shoehorns a new story between the events of the second and third season, after Eleven sealed the gate to the Upside Down and before the Russians messed everything up again.It isn’t rare for a series to fill in the blanks between seasons or extend a series post-cancellation via novels or comics or radio shows.

This is most common among genre shows — the 2016 “Batman ’66 Meets the Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is right up my alley — but you can find comic books devoted to the Brady Bunch, the Monkees and “Bonanza” as well.Stories want to continue, and the fans will take whatever they can get.

The “Stranger Things: Tales from Hawkins” graphic novels have previously performed that service.“Tales from ‘85” is like that, with movement, sound and acting added.It would be, of course, impossible, if possibly amusing, to tell a “Stranger Things” tale set in this time with the original actors, and horrifying, if not immoral, to tell it with AI clones.

(The salary asks would be prohibitive anyway.) There are practical advantages as well to animation: a fight with a demogorgon will c...