Explained

Gatorade’s Stranger Things partnership works because of a coincidence most marketing campaigns would have to invent from scratch: the show’s fifth and final season is set in the fall of 1987, the exact same year Gatorade ran its original “No Ordinary Thirst Quencher” campaign. Rather than build something new, Gatorade simply pulled its own decades-old

The LEGO Creel House set isn’t just another licensed tie-in rushed out to coincide with a season premiere. It’s LEGO’s first-ever transforming house model, built after the design team spent nearly a year working directly with Netflix and the Duffer Brothers — and, in a detail few other tie-in products can claim, actually visiting the

The Stranger Things finale theatrical release marked the first time Netflix had ever put an episode of one of its own series into movie theaters. For a company that had spent years publicly downplaying the need for its content to appear on the big screen, putting “The Rightside Up” in over 600 venues represented a

Lenora Hills was invented purely to give the Byers family somewhere new to run to in Stranger Things season 4, and it doesn’t correspond to any real town in California. What makes the fictional setting unusually easy to track down in real life is that Netflix built almost the entire town in New Mexico, and

Hawkins Lab’s real location wasn’t built for Stranger Things at all. Long before Netflix ever needed a building menacing enough to house Dr. Brenner’s experiments, the structure had already spent three decades as an actual psychiatric hospital — one connected, by pure coincidence, to a government-linked medical researcher who conducted real experiments on children just

Bradley’s Big Buy only appears on screen for a few minutes total across two seasons of Stranger Things, and yet it’s become one of the most visited real-world filming locations tied to the entire franchise. Fans don’t come for a monster or a gate to the Upside Down — they come for Eggo waffles, a

Sattler Quarry looks, on screen, like a uniquely Hawkins nightmare — the site where a fake body meant to be Will Byers gets pulled from the water, and where a bully nearly forces Mike Wheeler to jump to his death. In reality, the same quarry has hosted Rick Grimes’s survivor camp and Katniss Everdeen’s most

Kamchatka Prison exists in Stranger Things as a remote, fictional Soviet facility somewhere in eastern Russia, holding Jim Hopper captive for the better part of a season. The building actually used to film those scenes carries a history far heavier than anything the show ever puts on screen — one involving Nazi occupation, mass executions,

Skull Rock exists in Stranger Things as the perfect hideout: remote, hard to find, tucked away from the manhunt closing in on Eddie Munson. What most viewers don’t know is that its real-world counterpart nearly didn’t survive long enough to be filmed at all, saved from bulldozers by a group of climbers years before any

Melvald’s General Store never gets the dramatic treatment other Stranger Things locations do. There’s no monster attack, no secret Russian base underneath it, no gateway to the Upside Down hidden in a back room. It’s just where Joyce Byers goes to work every day — and that ordinariness is exactly the point. Table of Contents