No matter how you felt about what went down in “The Rightside Up,” the Stranger Things finale did have one undeniably cool flourish: the end credits, which transformed characters across the show’s five seasons into drawings that perfectly evoked a Dungeons & Dragons manual.
It was a note-perfect style choice given the game’s importance to the Netflix show, but the Duffer Brothers didn’t have the idea in mind at first. Instead, they were thinking of an earlier fantasy franchise with a rather long epilogue at the end of its final installment: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“We thought about Return of the King a lot, just in terms of the length of the epilogue,” Matt Duffer told Deadline. “I’m one of those hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, to the point where I’ve watched all extended editions in a row on a single day. If you do that, the epilogue feels absolutely perfect and not long at all.”
“The Rightside Up” has a nearly 45-minute epilogue, so that influence is surely felt.
He continued. “Then we love the credits at the end of Return of the King. So that was the initial idea, and they were these very simple illustrations … We started to talk with Imaginary Forces, which is the title company that did the main title sequence for the show, who we absolutely love and adore. We pitched that maybe it was Will’s notebook of drawings, and then they came back like a week later and suggested, ‘What if it was done actually in the style of a real D&D manual?’”
The end result is what you see at the end of the series finale. “What’s cool about these D&D manuals is there’s color images, and, also, over the years, the style of illustration changes,” Matt Duffer said. “They brought back illustrators from the actual 1980s who drew in the manuals all the way back then. So it really came full circle, and, mainly, we wanted it to feel finite, right? I mean, that was really the key. We wanted to feel like ‘The End.’”
Also, added Ross Duffer, “We wanted to pay tribute, I think, to all of our actors, and even the ones where we can’t list their names contractually”—including Joseph Quinn, who played Eddie (RIP), and Shannon Purser, who played Barb (also RIP).
The Duffers did not address a fan theory fueled by the credits: that perhaps Stranger Things was a role-playing game all along, and the audience was watching the story as it was being crafted by Mike (Finn Wolfhard). If you want to take that a step further, Dungeons & Dragons already has some Netflix tie-in editions for your next tabletop campaign.
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