In the past few weeks, there’s been a persistent rumor that the creators of Stranger Things are quietly editing past seasons of the show for a variety of reasons. It seems to have started with the Duffer brothers giving an interview about the show’s fourth season, where they acknowledged a minor continuity gaffe: Episode 2 was set on March 22, which an earlier season established as Will’s birthday. And yet no one on the episode acknowledge that fact. (Happy birthday Will, by the way.)
In the interview, the Duffers admitted that they simply forgot that they had previously established March 22 as Will’s birthday, and revealed they were thinking about “George Lucas-ing the situation” by going back into the show and dubbing the character who said March 22 to say “May 22” to remove the error. (Before George Lucas sold his company to Disney, he frequently changed the old Star Wars movies based on improvements in technology or his own general whims, often without even telling fans he was doing it.) In another interview, the Duffers claimed “We have George Lucas’d things also that people don’t know about” — which sent fans looking into the show’s archives, trying to find examples.
But that can be a dangerous game to play, because our memories sometimes play tricks on us, and make us believe things are different when we simply misremembered them in the first place. The George Lucas-ing quotes led some fans to claim that the show had trimmed (or completely removed) a scene from Season 1 where Charlie Heaton’s Jonathan secretly takes photographs of Nancy (Natalia Dyer).
But after some websites started reporting the scene’s removal as fact, and writing entire opinion pieces about it as the start of a potentially dangerous trend, the official Stranger Things writers Twitter account posted a note that read “PSA: no scenes from previous seasons have ever been cut or re-edited. And they never will be.”
They also responded directly to a fan who asked whether that included this infamous (and apparently misremembered) scene from Season 1 of Jonathan spying on Nancy, saying that there have been no post-production shenanigans on that sequence as well.
The lesson here: Don’t just assume something is true because someone you don’t know claimed it was so on TikTok or Twitter. Verify this stuff yourself. The complete fourth season of Stranger Things is now streaming on Netflix.
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