A couple of months ago, Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of “Stranger Things”, cited “Akira” and “Elfen Lied” as inspirations for Netflix’s hit series in an interview with The Daily Beast:
DB: Nice. Are there images or movies that helped shape “Stranger Things” that you haven’t seen a lot of people catch onto yet? One I was happy to see somebody point out yesterday was the anime movie Akira.
Ross: Yes, I saw that. Akira was obviously a big one.
Matt: But then weirdly it’s like, I haven’t seen it for a long time. More recently I had seen an anime called “Elfen Lied” that is clearly inspired by Akira. And that was really influential. When I watched it I thought it felt like an ultraviolent E.T. There were a lot of things in there that I really liked and that made their way into the show, particularly related to the character of Eleven.
In the Mutant Universe, there is a clearly defined scale accounting for the power level of the various superheroes, villains, robots, mutants and aliens that bum around, because of course there is. We geeks need something tangible to hang our terrible arguments about “who would win in a fight” on, which is exactly what this scale does. At the lower end of the spectrum you have the everyday shmoes – the comic book equivalent of us civilians – and at the very top of the scale is where you’ll find the so-called “Omega level” superpeople.