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Tales from the Loop (Amazon Prime style) - Printable Version

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Tales from the Loop (Amazon Prime style) - C C - Jun 30, 2020

Taking up where this left off in another thread: https://www.scivillage.com/thread-8732-post-36557.html#pid36557

After watching the first three episodes (one a day), Tales from the Loop seems to slightly echo Stranger Things as far as revolving around kids and their families. But not in any juvenile sense of being unwatchable by adults. Each episode "apparently" introduces a secondary character that gets their own story in the next, kind of like an interlinked chain of rings.

Although the woodsy town environment, quiet pace, and unusually diminished HBO level of profanity lend it a kind of Norman Rockwell ambiance in the beginning, that ends with the appearance of the nipple and angry exchanges in "Stasis".


RE: Tales from the Loop (Amazon Prime style) - Secular Sanity - Jun 30, 2020

I didn't see "Stranger Things", but other people have said the same thing. I'm still in the middle of the 2nd episode. I glanced at his book though. I love this painting.


RE: Tales from the Loop (Amazon Prime style) - C C - Jul 1, 2020

(Jun 30, 2020 02:09 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [...] I'm still in the middle of the 2nd episode. I glanced at his book though. I love this painting.


Can't beat being assigned an image to base a story on -- possibly less chance of being rejected, apart from requests for modifications. OTOH, they've got each of these interwoven episodes conforming to some overall plan and destination, so there's not really that degree of arbitrary freedom.

The painting finally triggers my nose-diving memory processes to vaguely recall us (or at least you and MR) discussing this in the past somewhere (back in April or late March, maybe?). I probably even mentioned I was going to check-out either the TV series or the original source and then -- plffft! -- the mental reminder soon disappeared from immediate storage. (Or maybe it's a false memory -- would still be the result of trying to fill in a Swiss cheese brain of missing information holes, though.)

Appending to the below, "Tales from the Loop" seems more set in the '90s than the '80s, what with the home CRT computer monitors and television sets and the mullet not being so conspicuous. (MR mentioned the '90s version of "Outer Limits", too.)

Quote:I didn't see "Stranger Things", but other people have said the same thing

I expect "Stranger Things" is popular due to childhood nostalgia about the 1980s and watching horror flicks of the era back then (Alien, gremlins, Krueger, Jason, etc) -- a sort of Happy Days with monsters. If only the studio could have given the cute cast members a drug to prevent them from growing up, especially since the pandemic has put season-4 into limbo. (They will have sprouted to college-age by the time production gets going again.)

I'm surprised at the number of those movies I've never even seen before (perhaps gratefully): Top 50 from the 1980s. Barely recognize Terry O'Quinn with the skull thatch, he's so young, long before appearances on "The X-Files", much less playing John Locke on "Lost".


RE: Tales from the Loop (Amazon Prime style) - C C - May 14, 2021

Whoosh. It wasn't until I recently saw Eureka, for the first time in all the years since it originally ran, that I realized the town of Mercer in "Tales From The Loop" was surely inspired by that. As far as Nathaniel Halpern creating a story setting for Simon Stålenhag's artwork. TFTL is akin to a serious (rather than humorous), anthology version of "Eureka".

There could be a mild denial, in the same vein as Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon once declaring they had never seen Planet of the Vampires, in the context of a partial influence on Alien. But if so, I wouldn't buy it, either.