https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY
TGIF! What are you guys up to this weekend? We’re planning to catch up on Netflix’s Stranger Things. In case you haven’t heard about it, it’s the latest Netflix hit starring Winona Ryder, a love letter to 80s supernatural films, right down to the typefaces. Via Vox:
Stranger Things is a knowing genre pastiche, an attempt to recreate the feeling of 1980s movies by assembling famous motifs and moments from them as if making a collage. Even the story is largely a riff on Stephen King’s novels of the period. Why does Stranger Things get to be “original” when a more direct remake doesn’t?
The answer is simple: We don’t really want original stories. We want to hear stories we’ve already heard, retold in slightly different ways.
And for more about its great title sequence:
To give the show its retro opening look, Imaginary Forces, the production studio behind the sequence, actually went back to an old-fashioned credits-making process. The team printed out the main logo on film and set up camera tests to see what it looked like when light passed through the film sheet. Using those camera shots as references, they then animated the sequence digitally.
The main logo was based off novel covers that Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer collected. The final result — riffing somewhere between Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and Nick Sharman’s The Cats — uses ITC Benguiat, a vaguely art nouveau font that has appeared on everything from Choose Your Own Adventure books to a 1987 album by the Smiths.