Yep, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Noticed That Jokey Reference To Him On ‘Stranger Things’

The new season of Stranger Things dropped on Friday, or at least most of it. Netflix did the unthinkable, which is break up the latest batch of episodes into parts, the first seven of nine episodes arriving in time for the holiday weekend, and the other two set to drop this coming week. (The reason Probably because some of these new episodes are really, really long.) There’s a lot of increasingly dense mythology to get through, but there’s still room for some hang-time and Tarantino-esque pop culture name-dropping.

One of them came in episode three (the shortest one, at a mere 64 minutes). The boys are in the cafeteria, eating lunch, when Joseph Quinn’s Eddie Munson, leader of the Hellfire Club, turns to Gaten Matarazzo’s Dustin Henderson and Finn Wolfhard’s Mike Wheeler, taking a moment to reflect on their friendship.

“I knew it the moment I saw you,” Munson tell them. “You sat at that table right over there, looking like two little lost sheep.” He then turns to Dustin, adding, “You were wearing a ‘Weird Al’ T-shirt, which I thought was brave.” (It’s not a non-sequitur. Dustin really did wear a “Weird Al” shirt in an episode of Season 3.)

The moment did not go unnoticed by the man himself, who simply turned the adjective into a hashtag.

— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) May 27, 2022

The response also elicited a remark by The New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff, who reflected on the novelty musician’s 1986 album Polka Party!, which features such classicsd as “Living with a Hernia,” “Addicted to Spuds,” and, yes, one of his polka medleys, this one including takes on “Sledgehammer!”, “Sussidio,” Party all the Time,” and many more.

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) May 27, 2022

It’s a big time for “Weird Al.” Roku will be nipping further into original content with the forthcoming biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, starring Daniel Radcliffe, who already knows his way around novelty songs.