The Immersive Side of Hawkins: From Scoops Ahoy to WSQK Radio

The final episode of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix on December 31st, allowing fans of the series to say goodbye to one of the platform’s biggest hits before ringing in the new year. But that wasn’t the final transmission from the franchise: for the past six weeks, the UK company Global had been operating the in-universe radio station WSQK: The Squawk as a live broadcast, and the station had one final broadcast to get through before going dark due to “transmission problems”.

Stranger Things leaned in to the story’s 80s nostalgia to engage in an aggressive list of brand partnerships over the years, and many of those partnerships took a decidedly immersive turn. So while it’s worth exploring what six weeks of radio broadcasting looked like for Stranger Things fans, this also marks an opportunity to reflect at the show’s immersive history.

WSQK The Squawk: Radio Hawkins with “Global” Reach

Partners in workplace crime Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley worked at quite a few jobs over the course of Stranger Things: they became friends at the mall ice cream shop Scoops Ahoy for season 3 before switching over to Family Video to enter the video rental business in season 4. The premiere of season 5 saw the pair taking over programming at Hawkins’ local radio station WSQK, completing the nostalgic career trifecta.

Leaning in on that nostalgia, the UK broadcaster Global partnered with Netflix to produce six weeks of content broadcast to coincide with the show’s release. Every few hours a radio bumper does remind listeners that WSQK was presented by Stranger Things, but for the most part the programming is presented as authentically as possible.

In an interview about the project, Global stressed to Rolling Stone how seriously they took getting the sound right, noting:

“Most music and sound-design elements came from genuine pre-Nineties libraries like Bruton; anything newly created was shaped to avoid anachronism. ReelWorld dissected classic American jingle packages and rebuilt them to sound as though they’d aired on a Midwestern station for decades. Modern analog-emulating plugins were used sparingly and intentionally, then remastered through a final signal chain before broadcast.

For true period accuracy, the on-air signal passes through a vintage Inovonics FM250 processor — the same model found in thousands of U.S. stations in the mid-Eighties.”

And while the focus of the broadcasts are solidly fixed on playing classic tunes, a number of interactive segments help the show come alive like Mindy Flare’s “Rewind at 9” segment that tested listeners with song identification challenges. “Talk With Tammy” invited listeners to ask for advice, while “Dial A Dedication” allowed listeners to send in messages to the show’s request line.

A Light Narrative, From an Alternate Version of Hawkins

There’s even a loose narrative that ties together the broadcasts of on air disc jockeys Vance Goodman and Mindy Flare, leading to the station’s eventual shuttering. In the lead-up to New Year’s Eve, news segments start mentioning the radio tower’s signal has started to cut out, providing updates on the station engineers’ efforts to fix it. On January 1st, realizing the station would be going offline for good, the pair offer a heartfelt farewell that manages to namecheck a frightening number of 80s hits.

Because of those engineering troubles the station is canonically offline now, but a fan archived the broadcasts, allowing for segment-by-segment replays on their website.

While the WSQK broadcasts were riddled with references to the town of Hawkins and the events of the series, they don’t appear to be canonical – at least, not unless you believe the “Conformity Gate” theories that ascribe secondary meaning to the details in season 5 that seem oddly out of place.

For instance, season 5 opens with Robin celebrating her 500th broadcast with WSQK, holding down the fort after the station’s former shock jock, Jimmy “Fast Hands” Lee, abandoned the station. Within Global’s iteration of Hawkins, Robin understandably doesn’t make an appearance…but neither does Jimmy. Instead, the main DJ’s names are nods to the series’ primary antagonists: “Mindy Flare” anagrams to Mind Flayer, while “Vance” anagrams to Vecna.

Man in the High Castle also experimented with spinning up an in-universe radio broadcast for fans of the series, back in 2017. Like WSQK, Resistance Radio created programming around three in-universe radio hosts. The centerpiece of Resistance Radio were a series of 18 original covers that imagined American classics if they were written for the resistance during a Nazi occupation.

Phone Numbers That Still Work, 40 Years Later

A more direct integration with Stranger Things can be found in the many phone numbers that appeared on the show over the years: for the most part, dialing the numbers shown on screen would be acknowledged in some fashion.

Find yourself missing Argyle? Dialing up the number for Surfer Boy Pizza would treat you to a borderline hilarious message of the man himself sharing the hyper-specific order he just received, along with a handful of other messages that were swapped out over time. Caught a phone number on a Missing Persons poster in the final season? You can call in to help find “Jane Hopper”. These relatively light touches are typically as deep as the show goes with direct integrations within episodes, although the tactic has been used to dive deeper, for other shows.

Most recently, Pluribus recently had some fun with an in-universe phone number, using a brief on-screen appearance to kick off a text adventure puzzle hunt to close out the first season. One of its more outlandish puzzles challenged solvers with decrypting RNA codon sequences hidden in the spectrogram of an audio file.

Stranger Things does have a host of spinoff books and comics extending the story, but the series was often at its immersive best when it opened the property up for other brands to play.

Stranger Things ARGs: From Ice Cream Parlors to Lite Brite Boards

During Stranger Things season 3, Netflix handed over creative reins of their show to Baskin-Robbins and Mssng P eces, which transformed two locations into Scoops Ahoy shops, as well as hiding cryptic signage at their store locations across the United States. But that was only scratching the surface.

Players realized that a morse code message hidden on the specialty ice cream flavor USS Butterscotch helped gain access to an SSH server inviting sleuths to join Operation Scoop Snoop. Once registered, fans were tasked with daily missions in preparation for gaining remote access to Cold War bunkers…only to realize their handler was a Russian spy all along. The ARG concluded with one final mission to help stop the Russians, and prevent a Demo-dog from escaping into the real world. Evocative ASCII art graphics complemented the final mission, which palyed out like a text adventure version of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, cross-referencing operating manuals.

The final challenge of the ARG proved to be the hardest, but also the most rewarding: send a fax to a phone number, with the first player to finish winning a lifetime supply of Baskin-Robbins ice cream, and the promise of a set visit. This was by far the most expansive ARG for the show, and remains one of my favorite alternate reality games to this day.

Season 4’s ARG was handed over to the NFT collectible company Candy, but still managed to construct an impressive game: during the season’s official trailer, a brightly colored rift flashed on the screen, with timestamps next to the six breaches in reality. Overlaying the rift over the timestamps in the video revealed a message, and website: I Am Hell’s Master.

This became the hub for a puzzle game that resulted in entering “passwords” by following instructions to make intricate art on a virtual Lite Brite game board…including one pizza-themed puzzle that actually made use of the mixed-up order Surfer Boy Pizza’s curious voicemail message, mentioned earlier in this article.

I Am Hell’s Master didn’t go out of its way to tell a narrative, but the creative ways the game hid Lite Brite coordinates made constructing the visually arresting pieces of nostalgic art even more satisfying, for season 4’s puzzle trail.

Beyond Broadway: From Screen to Immersive Stage

Even before Netflix brought Stranger Things: The First Shadow to Broadway, the company partnered with Fever to send Stranger Things: The Experience on tour. For the experience, attendees were welcomed to Hawkins Labs as test subjects and realize that they have super powers that can be used to advance through the experience. Unfortunately the labs become overrun with Demo-dogs, slaughtering researchers until the Stranger Things crew arrives to save the day. The final showdown with Vecna was particularly impressive, as a live actress playing Eleven is somewhat seamlessly replaced by a video counterpart to work the show’s final magic.

You can get a sense of the experience from this fan recording, but the real treat was the Mix-Tape experience at the end, which recreated a version of the Starcourt Mall with roving actors looking to engage in some light Larping, as well as offering assistance in a secret scavenger hunt, to find a series of rifts hidden in the set design.

The newly launched Netflix House features yet another immersive theater production, in the form of Stranger Things: Escape the Dark.

Picking Up on Clues: Introduction to Conformity Gate

Reception to the Stranger Things finale has been mixed, with segments of the fanbase frustrated at how some of the narrative threads resolved. But one corner of the fandom has come up with a creative theory that implies that was by design known as “Confirmity Gate”.

According to Conformity Gate, the final episode in particular features a lot of details that don’t make sense, both narratively and from a continuity perspective. One of the more curious continuity swaps involved an Instagram Story post from actor Finn Wolfhard, showing the characters’ D&D binders, rearranged from their appearance in the series to spell out “A LIE”. One of the main branches of the theory claims that this ending is a pleasant fiction, planted by the Mind Flayer to lull the series protagonists into a false sense of security.

Some leave the theory at that, while others are hunting for clues that imply there might be a secret final episode to the series that serves as the “true” end. And while the existence of a secret ending is unlikely, Stranger Things‘ engagement with fans for the past five seasons doesn’t rule that out as impossible. Hundreds of ice cream parlors were decorated with morse code messages and a Russian code wheel that helped unlock secret messages. A throwaway voicemail number was reused to deliver a Lite Brite passcode. The show’s licensed merchandise even included branded flashlights with secret UV messages on the packaging.

If anything, the factor leaving me skeptical regarding grand plans for a secret episode is how much of Stranger Things‘ immersive surprises relied on brand partnerships to fuel them. Operation Scoop Snoop was a Baskin Robbins partnership. Stranger Things: The Experience gave Fever a major brand to help expand its live event footprint. And even WSQK drew upon Europe’s largest commercial radio broadcaster to make it happen.

Indeed, one of Stranger Things‘ legacies might well be how open the brand was to letting other companies play within their playground in hundreds of different ways.

To listen to Global’s WSQK archives, check out LivingHuman.Host/WSQK
For Baskin-Robbins’ ARG, read ARGNet’s coverage of Operation Scoop Snoop
For Candy’s ARG / puzzle trail, read ARGNet’s Coverage of I Am Hell’s Master
For a video of Stranger Things: The Experience, check out this YouTube video
…and for more on Conformity Gate, search for the hashtag on your fan platform of choice.

UPDATED TO ADD: Secret Cinema also created a large-scale immersive theater production reenacting season 3 of the show in London, as covered in No Proscenium.