Stranger Things Rings in The New Year With Season 3 Release Date & Hidden Messages

If you kept an eye on the Stranger Things Instagram feed last night you were treated to two things: The below teaser image that reveals the release date for season three of the popular Netflix series and a live video of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 1985.

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A post shared by Stranger Things (@strangerthingstv) on Dec 31, 2018 at 9:01pm PST

The live video, which was made to look like a New Years Eve broadcast from the Hawkins, Indiana television station WIYZ 5 featured actual footage from Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve from 1984 and features an ad for Starcourt Mall, which we were introduced to when season three of “Stranger Things” was teased back in July, 2018. We also learned in early December from the list of episode titles that it would likely be a prominent location in the new season based on episodes titled “The Mallrats” and “The Battle of Starcourt.”

But aside from kicking up the nostalgia with actual New Year’s Eve footage from 1984 and doubling down on the emphasis of the Starcourt Mall, the live video featured a number of glitches that suggested something more sinister might be at play.

The roughly four-minute long “live” video was interrupted multiple times not by what appears to be some sort of third party interference. Each time the screen flickered an old monochrome DOS-like prompt would appear on the screen from an entity called “Lynx Corp.” The first significant interruption flashes a random string of letters on the screen before ultimately highlighting a string of words that appear to for the sentence, “WHEN BLUE AND YELLOW MEET IN THE WEST.”

Then, later in the broadcast, you see a remote entity execute and run the program “SilverCatFeeds.exe.” Once executed the video returns to the live broadcast of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, but then slowly turns the broadcast upside down.

In typical “Stranger Things” fashion we’re left with more questions than answers, but it has us talking about the Netflix favorite seven months ahead of the season three release. An edited down version of the live broadcast is available from Netflix on YouTube. Who else is excited?