To honour a decade since the debut of their smash-hit cultural powerhouse sci-fi adventure series, Stranger Things, Netflix has unveiled a special rework of the first season in VHS footage to embody its 1980s setting. This new format includes revised audio and an overlay of retro visuals, allowing viewers to watch the show the same way the protagonists of the series would, except for the video store rental.
“Rewind and relive the first season with a video store vibe that’s glitchy, grainy and gloriously vintage,” Netflix shares. “Just like you’d have rented it in 1983.”
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Stranger Things is the five-season sci-fi show created by Matt and Ross Duffer for Netflix and debuted on the platform on 15th July, 2016. The first season, which focused on a gang of friends trying to solve the mystery of their missing friend while a test subject gifted with telekinetic powers runs amok, starred Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Cara Buono, and Matthew Modine.
Joe Keery and Shannon Purser also made appearances.
Season one of Stranger Things garnered 14.07 million adults as viewers within 36 days of its release, becoming Netflix’s third most-watched show of the time, behind Fuller House season one and Orange is the New Black season four. It also gained a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97% and was nominated for 18 Primetime Emmy Awards, five of which it won for Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series and Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing.
The show was then followed by four seasons, introducing Sadie Sink and Dacre Montgomery as new cast members, released in 2017 and 2019, with season four being released in two parts in 2022 and the final season released in two more parts and concluding with its individually released finale. The later seasons of the show reached 64 million households in viewership, setting a new record for Netflix.
The Stranger Things media franchise includes an animated spin-off, Stranger Things: Tales from 1985, a prequel stage play called The First Shadow and an inspired thread of board games, comic books, novels, and pop-up shops.
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