Credit: Dangerous Minds / NBC

In a small town of about 15,000 people in Indiana, a teenage boy and his loveable coterie of dorky friends come of age in a sea of Generation X nostalgia while mysterious events happen all around them.

Investigating the “stranger things” that the town throws at them brings this group of friends closer together while shedding light on the actions of suspicious adults seemingly pulling the strings of a conspiracy from behind the scenes that threatens to grow far beyond their sleepy little town.

No, I gave up on Stranger Things after season two. Why do you ask?

Would you believe it, Hawkins is not the only town in Indiana to have a bunch of adorable moppets investigating spooky happenings that are mildly derivative of works by Stephen King. In fact, the Duffer Brothers’ pop-cultural juggernaut was beaten to the punch 25 years before by the NBC kids TV series Eerie, Indiana. So if you’re also burnt out by the discourse surrounding the Stranger Things finale, don’t worry. You’re in safe hands here, even if things might seem distractingly similar to the adventures of Eleven, Mike and Co.

Created by Karl Schaefer and celebrated Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera, who were also assisted by Gremlins director Joe Dante as a creative consultant, Eerie, Indiana was described by USA Today as “Stephen King by way of The Simpsons“. The comparison holds up today, both in the whip-smart comedy writing on offer, but also in the surprisingly effective horror filmmaking at the heart of what is, ostensibly, a kids’ TV series from the early 1990s. Dante himself directed the pilot, but you can see his fingerprints all over the rest of the series.

So, weird cult TV series from the early 1990s, what else is new? Except it wasn’t, Eerie, Indiana was something of a phenomenon of the time.

Was Eerie, Indiana the Stranger Things of its day?

Right from the off, people could tell there was something very special about Eerie, Indiana. Critics were all over the show from the start, something of a minor miracle for what was otherwise an NBC kids show. Praising how well the series handled its very particular blend of comedy and horror while never talking down or sugar-coating its topics for its child audience. This is a show that, over the course of its initial 19-episode run, features some wonderful concepts for a kids’ horror series.

The very first episode deals with a woman named Betty, who sells Tupperware that can keep anything fresh, including her kids, who have been kept as children for 30 years and are desperate to grow up. Episode eight features a young Tobey Maguire as the ghost of a child from the 1920s, trying to communicate with someone who can deliver a letter to his now 80-year-old childhood sweetheart. There’s even a wonderfully meta, wonderfully silly penultimate episode. One where Omri Katz’s character, Marshall Teller, is transported to the “real world” where everything he knew was a TV show that is, hilariously, trying to be taken over by the actor playing his in-universe best friend.

Critics loved the show, and it developed a huge cult following, but it never quite broke into the mainstream enough to become a ratings hit. Despite the show being cancelled after one season, anyone who watched the show would know that you can’t keep a good horror story down. After becoming a hit on syndication and a series of tie-in novels becoming bestsellers, the show was rebooted in 1998 as Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension. This new version was nowhere near the original and suffered a similar fate to the original.

Despite all that, the legacy of Eerie, Indiana is still around, and not just in the obvious option. It’s difficult to imagine that Jane Schoenbrun wasn’t thinking about a show like Eerie, Indiana when making I Saw The TV Glow, a film about a fictional horror kids TV show from the 1990s called The Pink Opaque. In the so-called real world, though, Alex Hirsch has said on a number of occasions that his animated masterpiece, Gravity Falls, was heavily inspired by Eerie, Indiana.

So if you’re still jonesing for some spooky adventures in the Midwest, give Eerie, Indiana a try. You never know what you might find!