So have you watched Netflix’s latest hit series Stranger Things yet? Chances are that you have since it was the talk of the internet almost immediately after it was released.
Of course with any TV series that becomes super popular (i.e. Game of Thrones) it has been dissected to death.
One of the more fun things people had with the series was discovering all of the little homages to 70s and 80s movies the show contained. In fact, we even shared a video that pointed out almost all of them.
I say almost all of them because, according to the Duffer brothers Matt and Ross, the directors of Stranger Things, most people missed one.
Now thanks to a very revealing and in-depth interview with Esquire we know what it is…
It’s a reference to the 1985 Harrison Ford movie Witness, directed by Peter Weir. In the original scene, a young Amish boy is walking through a police station when he sees the photograph of the man whom he identifies as the perpetrator of a murder investigation. That the Internet failed to catch this one is rather shocking, considering entire fan-made videos point out dozens of intentional and not-intentional Stranger Things nods to the classics.
“The Internet’s fucking amazing,” Matt Duffer told Esquire. “I mean, they find anything. Even when we’re referencing an obscure—or I guess I thought it was kinda more obscure—anime.”
As for plans to produce a second season of Stranger Things, something everyone who watched it wants, here’s what they had to say…
I know you guys have been asked probably hundreds of times at this point, but how is the process going about looking at a second season? Because I know you haven’t confirmed anything yet.
MD: We’re just batting around ideas and trying to figure out what it would be and Netflix is, I think, smartly letting the show breath for a little bit, letting people find it.
RD: They were happy. We’re excited to move on, and hopefully that official green light will come soon, but in the meantime it’s not like we’re doing other stuff. Matt and I are fully focused on Stranger Things and trying to start batting around and figuring out what—well, we’re calling it a sequel—will be, and so far the ideas we have, we’re pretty excited about it. But I do think that a lot of people feel like it should end, and a second season should be an anthology. What I would say to that is that we did purposely want it to feel like an end because we wanted to treat it like you treat a movie where you have a main tension and main resolve to that tension. I guess that’s why we’re saying a Season Two would actually be more of a sequel and there would be a new main tension, and we would, in one way or another, resolve that tension at the end. And so the idea became this “sequel.” We’re leaving a few threads to revisit. It’s almost treating it more like a big movie.
Right, so the idea would be to stick with these characters but have a new set of problems.
RD: Exactly! So that’s tied into this sort of bigger mythology.
MD: It’ll be all tied in, but it’s a different thing.
RD: It’s weird, because tonally it’s so not comparable really, but we do talk a lot about Harry Potter. It’s all one big mythology, but there’s a different mystery each year and you skip a year and you stay with these kids for a long time. That worked out pretty well for J.K. Rowling. So we look at her and her books for inspiration, even though it feels like we couldn’t be more different tonally.
That’s good news as far as I am concerned, keeping the same characters. As we saw with True Detective, changing them didn’t work out so well.
Be sure the check out the rest of the interview for much more on Stranger Things over at Esquire.
Now Watch: Is Disney Planning A Young Han Solo Trilogy?