“Sequel.”

“Remake.”

“Reboot.”

“Reimagining.”

No, “Stranger Things” was a wholly original confection, one with a pleasing synth-soundtrack aftertaste. It’s the story of a trio of boys teaming up with a little girl who has superpowers to track down a friend who has been kidnapped by a monster. And it’s the story of a mother’s love for her lost son, her refusal to give up searching for him in the face of interference (and worse) by the federal government. And it’s also the story of teenage angst, young lovers coming to grips with the desires and their responsibilities in a world that doesn’t particularly care for, or about, them.

AD

AD

Sure, there are echoes of “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” and “It” and “The Thing” and even “Pretty in Pink” and “The Breakfast Club.” Yes, there are classic 1980s touchstones, like Dungeons & Dragons and walkie-talkies and “Evil Dead” posters and cassette mix tapes. But any sense of nostalgia “Stranger Things” inspires in viewers is healthy, earned — because it comes wrapped in an original story, one that stands on its own whether or not you ever rolled a 20-sided die or swooned over a John Hughes creation.

The characters we remember from our childhood — the Goonies and Gremlins and Ghostbusters — are mere surface memories. It’s what’s beneath that truly affected us: friendships forged in fear and fright; feds in vans chasing kids on bikes in a classic symbol of the powerlessness — and the stubbornness — of youth. When you’re bingeing on “Stranger Things,” you’re not simply remembering characters from your childhood or a VHS you watched until the tape unspooled: You’re feeling the very themes and moods that dominated 1980s cinema. It’s a sensation triggered by the title sequence, which comes with prepackaged VHS-style digital fuzz in the image, like an MP3 designed to mimic the scratches and pops of an LP hitting a turntable.

Matt and Ross Duffer (collectively, the Duffer Brothers, the show’s creators) let their influences leak through, like TV Tarantinos. And, like the auteur behind “Pulp Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds,” the Duffers understand that pastiche isn’t enough. You need to have an original story that people are drawn to, one that stands on its own and can win the approval of everyone who doesn’t grok your references and recognize your recycled shots and covet your cameos from character actors whose prime has long passed.

AD

AD

This is why “Stranger Things” succeeded where so many other nostalgia grabs have failed this summer. I can’t help but think patrons of the arts are pretty tired of “pre-awareness.” Did we really need yet another “Ben-Hur,” one that pays homage to the Charlton Heston classic, itself adapted from an 1880 novel and appearing on the big screen a handful of times prior to 1959? Was the world clamoring for a Will Smith-free “Independence Day: Resurgence” two decades after the original’s debut? Yet another iteration of “Tarzan” hit theaters this summer, answering the pleas of … no one, as best as I can tell.

Indeed, the biggest tragedy of “Ghostbusters” isn’t that it bombed at the box office and singlehandedly killed feminism or that it ruined the childhood of so many YouTube commenters.

It’s that Paul Feig, one of the few directors of original mid-budget pictures, got caught up in the franchise game. If you look through his body of work, you could see ways to make most of his pictures into franchise reboots: With a few simple tweaks, “The Heat” could have been “Lady Lethal Weapon” or “Lady 48 Hours”; “Spy” could have easily been reframed as “Lady Austin Powers.” Rather than enjoying original and entertaining properties, audiences instead would have spent their time in the theaters comparing the new films with their predecessor properties, experiencing a curdled and angst-inducing form of nostalgia.