Curio: "Stranger Things" Owns Fandom Right Now

Do you miss our Curio series? I miss Alexa who loved to compile fan art for us. So in honor of that departed series, which we will perhaps revive whenever it occurs to us like, uh, right now, a tip of our hat to the Duffer Brothers for creating such a fansation with their Netflix series Stranger Things. My own feelings are kind of mixed on the series -- especially in regards to the need for a second season (I like my loose ends, thank you very much) -- but I can't disagree that it's totally addictive.

It's not just internet artists adopting the series everywhere you look but restaurants, too.

As AV Club reports a pizzeria did several days of Stranger Things specials. Check out those awesome menu options above. This wasn't even all of it. I'd have been torn between ordering the Telekine Sauce or the The DemoGorgonzola

comic by Brandon Chapman

The twitter account Sketch Dailies which encourages internet people to draw a specific topic each day has held a whole week in honor of Stranger Things with different character topics by day. So check those out if you're so inclined. If you love illustrators as we do, it'll offer you abundant choices of artists you could be following on the internet right now.

Related TFE Posts:
Kieran's Top 10 Things About Stranger Things
Daniel's Favorite Homages Within the Show
Nathaniel's Best of David Harbour (Chief Hopper)

Top 7 David Harbour

A surprise list to start your morning off right. We've been thinking a lot about Stranger Things these past couple of weeks, and many of those thoughts have revolved around the unexpectedly hefty role for usual supporting player David Harbour. I personally think he's Best in Show in that sci-fi fantasy 80s nostalgia trip. The first time I remember seeing him was on Broadway in 2001 as the object of Robert Sean Leonard's crushing in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. His profile has been growing slowly ever since and its a treat to see him make so much of such a big opportunity in the Netflix hit.

Favorite David Harbour Performances

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Linkdale

The Ringer Who is winning the Chris wars: Evans, Pine, or Hemsworth?
/Film Stranger Things will get a sequel season, Netflix confirms. I'm a bit disappointed honestly because I thought an anthology approach would be more satisifying, with a whole new story. Season 1 was resolved satisfyingly. Who needs every story thread neatly tied up? Boo.
The Metrograph has a Madonna week in August which will include a Q&A with Truth or Dare director Alek Keshishian - alas, the latter is already sold out. They also have a fun series in a week called "This is PG?!" featuring movies from the late 70s to the mid 80s when the MPAA was pressured into adding "PG-13" (I really have to get better at this Metrograph thing. They're big nights with Q&As seem to sell out instantly so I keep missing them.)

IGN interviews Joss Whedon at Comic Con. They talk Buffy comic book, secret projects, and whether a Black Widow movie would lure him back to Marvel
EW on the pilot for Riverdale, the new CW series that will rethink the Archie comic books. Unfortunately it sounds like all TV high school dramas mixed with Twin Peaks (???) and not much like Archie apart from the character names.
The New Yorker has a really interesting review of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
The Hairpin on the 20th anniversary of Fiona Apple's awesome "Tidal". Fun read.
Current Affairs isn't happy that our political leaders love Hamilton the musical 

"New" Musicals and Plays
Playbill This sounds interesting -there's a new stage musical in readings called Flying Over Sunset about Hollywood's LSD craze in the late 50s the main characters are Claire Booth Luce, Aldous Huxley, and Cary Grant. Good luck casting Cary Grant!
Playbill another movie to stage adaptation - the animated feature The Prince of Egypt has been adapted into a full musical and gets a free concert next month in Sag Harbor, NY
Variety wonders if the new Harry Potter play is the next Hamilton. It's sold out in London and expected on Broadway eventually 

Trekkies Rejoice
Coming Soon Bryan Fuller, who makes such good television (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls) has two new series coming up in 2017. The first Star Trek Discovery, due in January, now has a visual teaser. American Gods has no air date yet but is also expected in 2017.
Forbes argues that Star Trek's movie franchise division would be smart to go smaller for bigger payoffs at the box office: Agreed.
Space a Star Trek art exhibition called "Star Trek: 50 Artists. 50 Years" debuted at Comic Con and will now be touring conventions and museums, including NYC's Paley Center for Visual Media in September
THR Gene Rodenberry's son is playing release rare unseen footage from the original Star Trek series 

Today's Watch
This reworking of the Cheers theme song by K Anderson & Rosered to celebrate LGBT history is really cool and poignant. [Hat Tip: Towleroad]

Ten Favorite Things About Stranger Things

Kieran, here.  There’s something to be said about earnest storytelling in television.  It often comes packaged in projects that are deeply flawed, but somehow those flaws contribute to what make the show a singular experience. Such is the case with Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” which premiered a week ago to much fanfare and online discussion.

Though “Stranger Things,” created by Matt and Ross Duffer very blatantly poaches elements from some very familiar markers it doesn’t resemble anything else on television at the moment. The aforementioned earnestness of this series about supernatural and…well, stranger things happening in 1983 small town Indiana could have easily served as a liability, but becomes one of the show’s greatest strengths. 

All of my defenses were up going into my viewing of “Stranger Things”. 80s-era Spielberg holds little personal resonance as it does for others. I’ve never seen The Goonies. I have a really sensitive gag reflex when it comes to inauthentic portrayals of children in movies and film. I was suspicious in the beginning, but "Stranger Things" won me over...

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Pick Your Poison: The Hallmark Homages of Stranger Things

Daniel Crooke here. For the past two weeks, I've walled myself off from any pop cultural offering that doesn't include the letters LGBT while working around the clock at Outfest Los Angeles, our seminal, international queer film festival here in the City of Angels. Naturally the only external filmic force strong enough to infiltrate this border includes the words Winona Ryder. Slay, queen, slay.

I too have taken a long, hungry taste of the ananchronistic (and extra-colorful) Kool-Aid that is Netflix's '80s-set Stranger Things, the sci-fi outing that investigates a humdrum Indiana small town as a local young 'un mysteriously disappears in their midsts without warning. Much has been made of the homage-heavy layers that bake into its Spielbergian, Carpenteresque, Lynchian, and Stephen King-adjacent baklava; although the reason it succeeds beyond the hat-tip recipe can be found within the rich, nitty gritty filling of its heart-achingly true familial dynamics, of which Super 8 would have been smart to expand upon beyond the basic ingredients. So let's take a big bite and revel in its delicious influences. My personal favorite so far - despite Ryder's irresistible parallel to Melinda Dillon's momma bear on a misson from Close Encounters of the Third Kind - goes beyond bicycles and plunges the references to disturbing depths.

Jonathan's secret photo shoot in the woods recalls Blue Velvet's voyeuristic view from the closet; despite their quests for homegrown veracity, neither he nor Jeffrey were invited to the peep shows of a teenage pool party or a transgressive Rossellini-Hopper assault, but they've shown up in the shadows nonetheless. And yet we're still glad to be in on the drama. We've spent some time getting to know the traumatic roots of their curiosity via their displaced family units but these Peeping Toms challenge that sympathy through sensually clandestine invasions of personal space.

Apart from the bedroom posters of The Thing and Evil Dead, which Stranger Things visual reference sets your bicycle afloat?