The Duffer Brothers Took Inspiration From ‘Lord of the Rings’ for the ‘Stranger Things’ End Credits

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…