WandaVision’s premiere is a bewitching journey into sitcom history—and Marvel’s TV future
TV Reviews WandaVision
The Vision (Paul Bettany) is dead. We all saw him die in Avengers: Infinity War. Sure, half the universe died in that film, but Vision’s death was, tragically, permanent. He was killed twice in fact, and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the woman he loved, was responsible for the first one. But the happy couple seems to have moved past all that in the series premiere of WandaVision, the first of several planned Marvel TV shows, now streaming on Disney Plus.
In the first episode, newlyweds Wanda and Vision have settled in suburban Westview. They’re living the American dream, and there’s an intriguing dream-like quality to the show. Wanda and Vision are the stars of what, on the surface, looks like a 1950s TV sitcom, complete with an obvious laugh track.
The canned laughter isn’t necessary because series creator Jac Schaeffer delivers a damn good sitcom that presses all my adolescent, Nick at Nite- viewing buttons. WandaVision lovingly homages classic sitcoms such as The Donna Reed Show and Bewitched. There’s even a nod to The Dick Van Dyke Show when Vision almost trips over misplaced furniture in the intro. Stars Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany are adorable, and they quickly settle into the episode’s comedic conflict: The current date is marked on their kitchen calendar with a heart, but for the life of them (including the Vision, who is both dead and boasts a perfect memory), they can’t recall the day’s significance.
Vision is soon off to work like a good breadwinner, remembering to disguise his inhuman features. Bettany is spot-on as the frazzled sitcom husband. Vision’s computer mind makes him a whiz at his job—whatever it is. He has no idea, nor does his coworker. This is a funny jibe at the vagueness of the jobs of most sitcom dads, who wore a suit and tie to an indistinct office and worried about “reports” and “accounts.” But it was never clear what the company actually produced or sold.
Vision’s boss, Mr. Hart (Fred Melamed), reminds him that he’s coming over for dinner later. Presumably, that’s the meaning of the heart on the calendar, but Wanda and Vision aren’t prepared to host the Harts. Screwing up this dinner could cost Vision a promotion or even his job. Meanwhile, Wanda has met her neighbor “to the right,” Agnes, who is decidedly “wacky.” Kathryn Hahn is a delight who elevates every scene that features her. Agnes and Wanda have determined that the heart refers to Wanda and Vision’s anniversary, so Wanda plans a romantic dinner for two. When the Harts arrive with Vision, the house is dimly lit and Wanda is dressed provocatively. This is not going well.
Vision explains away Wanda’s odd behavior as customs from her homeland of Sokovia. She’s European, which Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp) claims is “exotic” because this is the 1950s. While on the run after the events of Captain America: Civil War, Wanda dropped her heavy Eastern European accent, but now she sounds like Mrs. Middle America. Vision, however, still speaks the Queen’s English. It’s obvious by now that whatever’s going on, Wanda has changed the most. For instance, she has overtly magical powers. This was the case in the comics, but not the films where her abilities were variations on telekinesis and hurling some kind of projectiles. The Scarlet Witch in the comics could manipulate reality itself. Is this what we’re seeing?
The Harts ask their hosts mundane questions about their pasts, and tension builds as it becomes clear they can’t answer. The mood shifts from Sherwood Schwartz to David Lynch when Mr. Hart starts to choke at the table while Mrs. Hart, whose smile remains eerily frozen, demands that her husband “Stop it!” Wanda calmly asks Vision to help Mr. Hart, who’s now collapsed and at the point of death. He’s happy to comply, phasing his hand into his boss’s throat and removing the offending item. The Harts apparently consider any dinner party you can walk away from a successful one because Vision is still on track for his promotion.
Once the Harts leave, Wanda and Vision, snuggling on the couch, declare the day the “anniversary” of surviving their first dinner party. Wanda whips up wedding rings for each of them and they kiss as the credits roll. But the credits aren’t real, and it’s revealed that someone, in a non-black-and-white sitcom reality, is observing these events.
“Episode 2,” written by Gretchen Enders, opens with a cute pre-credits sequence that further highlights Olsen and Bettany’s comic timing and chemistry. There’s also a neat Bewitched-style cartoon opening. Wanda and Vision are rehearsing a magic act for the town’s upcoming talent show. They think this will help them “fit in” at Westview. Wanda leaves the house later and finds a toy helicopter in the bushes. No biggie, right? Wrong: the helicopter is in color, a deep, bright red. Suddenly, Agnes arrives, declaring Wanda “the star of the show.” She’s loaning Wanda her pet rabbit, Señor Scratchy, for Wanda and Vision’s magic act. Señor Scratchy’s credits include playing Baby Jesus in last year’s Christmas pageant.
Agnes takes Wanda to meet the neighborhood queen bee Dottie, who’s played by Emma Caulfield (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) because God loves us and wants us to be happy after a tough year. Dottie’s a bouffant nightmare who everyone is desperate to impress. She’s organizing the town talent show, the big fundraiser for Westview Elementary. She repeats the phrase “for the children” like a mantra. Vision joins the neighborhood watch group, eager to determine the source of the strange noises from the previous night. He’s a hit with the guys, but Wanda is less successful with Dottie, who has “heard things” about her and Vision. Wanda insists that she doesn’t mean anyone any harm, but Dottie doesn’t believe her. “Help Me, Rhonda” is playing on Dottie’s radio but it starts to break up, and a man is heard asking, “Wanda, can you hear me?” and “Who is doing this to you, Wanda?”
What was once just strange is now officially unsettling. What has happened to Wanda? The glass in Dottie’s hand shatters, and the blood on her palm is as red as the toy helicopter, another intrusion of color in this black-and-white reality. Dottie makes a joke and leaves. The talent show must go on.
Vision swallowed chewing gum at the neighborhood watch meeting, which compromised his operating system or, you could say, “gummed up” his works. He shows up for their magic act late and seemingly drunk off his metal ass. I’ve probably seen countless versions of this plot but I still love it. “Drunk” Vision explains that he and Wanda are going to lie to the audience but they’ll buy the couple’s deceptions because “human beings are easily fooled due to their limited understanding of the inner workings of the universe.” And he’s right, you know. The magic show is a disaster, but if you’ve ever watched a classic sitcom, you’d correctly predict that the audience finds Wanda and Vision hilarious. Even Dottie’s a fan of their act. Bettany and Olsen kill this scene with some masterful physical comedy. These two were grimly fighting aliens the last time we saw them, and now they’re effortlessly busting guts.
When Wanda and Vision return home triumphant, successful in their attempt to “fit in,” they reveal one last trick: Wanda’s visibly pregnant now. “Is this really happening?” she asks, and Vision assures her it is before that strange noise returns. They go outside to investigate and discover someone in a beekeeper’s outfit emerging from a manhole cover in the street. Vision is alarmed, but Wanda forcefully says, “No,” and time reverses to the happy moment when they learned they were parents to be. They kiss and Vision’s face is now red, as well. Soon, the entire house and Wanda herself are in full color. The man’s voice from before asks again, “Who’s doing this to you, Wanda?” But it seems like Wanda is the one in control.
Stray observations
- Red as the color that breaks through the black-and-white reality reminds me of similar moments in Schindler’s List. It also references Wanda’s codename from the comics, the Scarlet Witch. When the show switches to color, Wanda is dressed entirely in red, similar to her comic book counterpart.
- Wanda had an equally improbable pregnancy in the comics, which produced twin boys named Thomas and William.
- Reviews have speculated that Kathryn Hahn is playing the MCU’s version of Agatha Harkness, but they describe Harkness as a villain. That’s a little unfair. In the comics, she was Wanda’s friend and confidante, just as we see here.
- There’s a recurring gag about how Vision doesn’t eat. This could just reflect his synthetic nature, but it might also serve as a subtle reminder that he’s not actually alive.
- The Beach Boys released “Help Me, Rhonda” in 1965. This fits my theory that the first two episodes are set in the early to mid-1960s, which everyone confuses with the 1950s. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Wanda, Agnes, and Dottie’s hair and wardrobe are clearly post-Jackie Kennedy.
- The commercial “break” in each episode offer some Easter Egg clues. The toaster advertised in episode one is from Stark Industries, and the watch promoted in episode two is a “Strucker.” Tony Stark and Baron Strucker played key roles in Wanda’s life.
- Schaeffer previously worked with Caulfield in the sci-fi rom com, Timer. Go watch it.
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Stark Toaster: Would buy.
If there’s not a Stark Toaster available for sale by mid-November, an entire department at Disney is getting fired.
I’m holding out for the far cuter BABY Stark toaster.
Baby Stark? Doot-do, do-doot, do-do.
As the father of a 2 and a 4 year old who is enjoying his morning coffee and quiet time, I hate you.
Making grilled cheese? Heating up pie or meatloaf in non-microwaved manner? AND toast? Fuck, yeah.
Why would you buy a Stark Toaster?The toast would be drunk.
Drunk toast? How about French toast with maple syrup aged in whiskey barrels… *goes off into a brief reverie*(that syrup is totally a thing, by the way; a local distillery makes it and right now I really want some)
EXACTLY!!!!
“Drunken toast” sounds like an early 2010s hipster concoction.
I don’t even drink and don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
The Stark Toaster is the FIRST thing that shows color, the warning light is red.
Also in the comics villains would call vision a toaster to tease him
Yup, noticed that too.
Much like the stark bomb that beeped but didn’t explode Wanda & Pietro and scarred them for life?
What I wouldn’t give for a John Slattery cameo as Howard Stark saying “It’s toasted.”
Rest assured, if Disney doesn’t have one out soon, you’ll be able to find one on Etsy before next week.
It was so cute! The knobs little tickmarks look like eyelashes, and the tray is a mouth.
I recently got it in my head to research what various mid-century appliances looked like, because I had just reread The Brave Little Toaster which was written in 1980 and describes some of the appliance heroes as being older models. The titular brave toaster (who isn’t that old, so probably mid to late 70s) is a Sunbeam, and it turns out Sunbeam was very popular for a long time and had lots of different models, some of which look pretty cool. It’s not hard to imagine that putting one of these things on your kitchen counter would make you feel futuristic, even if it didn’t have a big dashboard like the Stark one, just because of the nice design sense and phrases like RADIANT CONTROL.
Me too, with repulsor power up sound effect.
Pretty sure that Stark toaster is allegorical for the bomb that blew up Wanda’s parents.
It’s no coincidence that the first two commercials were Stark and Strucker.
But, the Strucker watch is… problematic.
What the hail are you implying?
I mean, apparently it’ll toast you a pie. My toaster doesn’t toast me a pie.
My toaster just wants to “burn the fucking world”. His words, not mine.
Thus far this show is painfully tense to navigate, for the better. I appreciate that while a lot of the MCU rewards viewers for keeping up with events, this one holds that knowledge over the viewer. The moment the premiere shifts from Sitcom framing to the close-ups of Wanda and Vision is handled pitch-perfectly.
But even so, WV feels like a particularly jaunty minefield thanks to Olsen and Bellamy’s comic chops. So far, so good.
It’s impressive too that Bettany and Olsen are playing characters inside of other characters with quirks that are clues to the overall mystery. Bettany drunk reminds me of a weird hybrid of Dudley Moore and David Bowie. We’re going to have to watch for Wanda’s original accent to slip in.All this is by way of saying… yeah. This show makes sense now – as far as why Marvel went with Scarlet Witch and Vision – to spin off into a show. It’s puzzling in retrospect why Marvel would hire in two Academy Award caliber actors and not use them to their fullest potential. Vision had a great origin and then barely appeared in any of the subsequent movies. Wanda had even less! And they’re both arguably the two most powerful Earth-bound superheroes of the Avengers current lineup. Captain Marvel notwithstanding. (Which in turn must have been one of the reasons to put them on ice for most of Infinity War & Endgame.) But here they get their chance. It’s a good fit. As with The Mandalorian and his whole plot revolving around Grogu, (must it be the whole show? Does anyone NOT want it to be the whole show? What is The Mandalorian without Grogu?) one has to wonder how long they can keep Wanda and Vision trapped in this universe before they must bust out and go full-superhero upon whomever has them captive (assuming). What will WandaVision be if the two are free? Wouldn’t this necessitate the two being trapped for the length of the series? Which might be okay. This has shades of The Good Place wafting through it among the older classic sitcoms. Vision’s head stone was what? 85% … 90% completely rebuilt in Wakanda before he was killed? My first guess is that his brain/soul was saved within the Wakanda computer network, he’s now being rebuilt, and they finished filling in the rest of his head with pop-culture junk: sitcoms and every TV show ever – for example. Or maybe not. Either way I’m pretty well hooked. Bring it on.Dollars to donuts: Norm really is a Communist.
Dollars to donuts: Norm really is a Communist.
It’s the stache, isn’t it? A little Stalineque?You know, I was thinking about Wanda’s voice and how that could play out; she’s lived long enough in the US that it could have faded out on its own, but maybe that’s a smaller manifestation of her power and her want to “fit in.” On the downside, too bad she didn’t pick up on the local dialect during the Scotland Trip.
Norm doesn’t have a mustache, Phil Jones does. Norm is Vision’s workplace proximity associate. Phil Jones, if you recall, was the one who was fired for his hippie turtleneck.
Wanda and Vision are frequently put on ice in the movies because they’re too powerful not to. Same reason Captain Marvel showed up late to the Thanos fight. Captain America and Winter Soldier are pretty damn useless next to omega level mutants and gods.And Vision’s mind stone was 80-90% removed from his head. They were working on separating him from the stone, not rebuilding it…
MCU Vision is so weak. He’s been so misused in the movies and spent most of Infinity War writhing in pain. He also has way too much personality here. The appeal of Scarlet Witch and Vision was in seeing this woman fall for an unfeeling, coldly rational machine. Bettany plays him like a slightly awkward and likeable nerd. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since Marvel Studio sanded away the edges of nearly all these characters
Communism was just a red herring.
Dollars to donuts: Norm really is a Communist. I thought that as well. Vision was clearly being very earnest at that point in the meeting, and Norm’s reaction seemed to be a tell until the other guy played it off as a joke. Unless I missed it, though, there was no indication of what caused Vision to suspect that.
Vision had a great origin and then barely appeared in any of the subsequent movies. Wanda had even less! And they’re both arguably the two most powerful Earth-bound superheroes of the Avengers current lineup.But you have to keep in mind the concept of power creep when it comes to “subsequent movies.” Ant-Man laid the grounds for this reasoning very well: “Why aren’t we calling in the Avengers?” Because that’s a bad resolution to every non-Avengers movie. The threat levels need to be calibrated for the titular heroes, not a “Call in the big guns” finish to every situation.
Wait. Someone said Vision’s nonsensical origin was “fantastic”?
I said it was “great” earlier, and without getting too far into it – I mean – I thought it was the best part of Age of Ultron. I liked the Frankenstein refs and honestly, the serendipity of Stark’s Jarvis computer voice becoming a real boy with Paul Bettany having been in both roles was either genius planned in advance, or the MCU fell over backwards into some awesome luck. I suspect they lucked out. And “Yay Bettany!” (I’m a huge Master & Commander fan – why couldn’t there be three or four of these movies?)Edit: Ooh! I wrote this before seeing Russel Crowe was bitching about it in another thread & article. He’s right!!
I like Bettany A LOT but the whole idea of how Vision came to be/what he actually is has always bewildered me. I didn’t grow up reading Marvel Comics so I guess sometimes their more far out concepts are lost on me
Near as I could tell, Mind Stone + Vibranium = android/AI
Well that may make narrative sense, but I reach for my .44 every time I see a roach scurry across my den.
I agree. I’ve never read comic books and so only knew what I was in the MCU movies and if you’d ask me which two characters I’d least like to see with their own movie or tv show I might have said Scarlet Witch and Vision. I know Bettany and Olsen are both good actors but their characters never clicked with me. Vision’s creation during one of the weaker MCU movies was baffling and weird and the fact that it’s so hard to understand exactly what he is makes the character remote and kind of at a remove from the action. Paul Bettany’s charm was never allowed to shine through. With Wanda/Scarlet Witch honestly she was maybe my least favorite character. Everything she was involved in, everything they were both involved in, was always so grim.
So it’s a huge surprise to me that Wandavision is the most enjoyable MCU thing for me in years, but I was skeptical about virtually all the big moves Marvel was making until I actually saw them in action. It’s great that Olsen and Bettany get to play something so much more fun and varied or different than what they had to work with in the movies anyway
it felt very significant to me that Wanda was looking right at the camera/”us” when she said “help him, Vision” in the first episode. maybe I’m reading into it but I had strong echoes of the character who spiked the camera in the Mr. Robot finale, which was directly bringing the viewer into the narrative
“looks like a 1950s TV sitcom” “which Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp) claims is “exotic” because this is the 1950s.”“This fits my theory that the first two episodes are set in the early to mid-1960s, which everyone confuses with the 1950s. It’s a pet peeve of mine.”Huh?(also, I assumed that each episode was moving forward a decade – hence the different title card, then colour at the end)
I still kinda wish they kept Debra Jo Rupp for the 70s episodes though…
Isn’t she still in the audience shots of the performances?
She looks like a regular? She’ll be in the 70s episode for sure.
Do you know that they didn’t?
She didn’t seem to be in the 2nd one . And I’m curious to see if they’d sneak a “That 70s show” injoke in (although with the show being so meta , I’m not sure they will, as it could mess with the whole slightly creepy vibe)
She was in the audience of the talent show. Not sure if she had any lines but she was definitely there.
She will move forward in time with them.
I thought the point was that they’re moving through the history of sitcoms, so they literally went from the 50’s to the 60’s and then into the 70’s next week.
Exactly they went from Donna reed and I love Lucy to the dick can dyke show and bewitched
The first episode was the fifties, the second episode was the sixties. Was this not obvious?
For a review that was extremely light on opinions and very heavy on beat-by-beat rehashing of the show I just watched, it’s even worse when the one strong opinion in the whole piece is wrong. Yes, episode 1 was the 50s and episode 2 was the 60s.
Sorry to disagree, but they were both the 60s and about 5 years apart. The first ep was mainly inspired by the Dick Van Dyke Show, which premiered in 1961.The 2nd ep was primarily inspired by Bewitched and featured the Beach Boys “Help Me, Ronda”, so that one is 1965.I’m guessing the next one will jump to around 1969/1970 and be Brady Bunch inspired.
I would say ep 1 was 1955-60 and the 2nd was 1960-65 ). Ep 3 clearly seems headed to the late 60s (Brady Bunch). Not like they were exact analogs; the imprecision of some of it being part of the point.
Some people confuse the 50’s with the early 60’s. Without looking it up, I wouldnt know exactly when “I Love Lucy” or “Bewitched” happened.
First episode was 1961
Not necessarily, since “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was clearly being referenced via the set design and layout in the first episode, and it ran from 1962-1965. The dress that Wanda appears in, though, was clearly from the 1950s, so it could be a little confusing. Of course it wasn’t exactly the Petrie’s house, but it was pretty close.
To say nothing of the fact that they lived in a completely different house in episode two.
Not only two completely different houses, but each clearly modeled on its sitcom referent: The Ep. 1 house looked like Rob & Laura Petrie’s (from The Dick Van Dyke Show), & the Ep. 2 house looked like Darren & Samantha Stevens’ (from Bewitched). [And since, by now, this won’t be a spoiler, the Ep. 3 house looks like Mike & Carol Brady’s.]
This also isn’t Kathryn Hahn’s first trip to the Marvel Universe, as she voiced Doc Ock in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. That may or may not be a deliberate casting gag depending on how her role here ends up.
The Scarlet Witch in the comics could manipulate reality itself. Is this what we’re seeing?To make this more complex, Wanda’s powers in the comics come from Chaos Magic. The source of which comes from the Elder God Cthon, the God of Chaos and creator of the Darkhold. Morgan le Fey would bind Cthon to Mount Wundagore. Cthon would give Wanda a fraction of his power when she was child so that he could a vessel in the future.
Not entirely familiar with S.W.O.R.D. canon, is beekeeping part of their duties?
No, the beekeepers are AIM, a mostly villainous group (though in recent years one of the heroes, Sunspot, decided to just buy the company, and use them for good):
Except he had an actual beekeeper suit on, was surrounded by bees and had the S.W.O.R.D. logo on his back.
I assume the beekeeper suit was Wanda’s bubble world translating some sort of high-tech hazmat suit into something that makes some sort of sense in the bubble.
Agreed. Likewise, the toy helicopter was probably some manner of drone.
I think the helicopter represents whatever vehicle Monica Rambeau used to gain entry into where Wanda is currently.
I’m thinking that was a version of Swarm, the Nazi scientist made of bees.
Shit, good call. I didn’t even think of equating the Beekeeper outfit to A.I.M.
And for better or worse, A.I.M. already had their MCU cameo, but they turned out to be half-burnt military commandoes and not yellow-suit-clad scientists.
SWORD , also known as The Sentient World Observation and Response Department, is basically the space counter part to SHIELD and deals with extraterrestrial threats to Earth.
Deep cuts from the comics…Behold,Glamor and Illusion…
Excellent find.
Want another deep cut (perhaps a plot point in the show). Agnes has a rabbit named “Senor Scratchie” Agatha Harkness, who maybe Agnes, has a son named Nicholas Scratch. Nick Scratch is another name for the Devil.Maybe the marriage taker is in this show. If he is, (which I doubt) a lot of OMD haters are going scream in agony.
My mistake.
Side note – Glynis Oliver was one of the main colorists for Marvel during the Bronze Age.
Nice!
Oh lord, is that Nate Gray (X-Man) with the white stripe in his hair? I haven’t read any X-Men since Hickman took over (waiting to find the first collection for cheap) and I didn’t think about the fact that bringing all mutants back to life means the return of boring losers like him.
Close, that’s Kid Cable. He’s an younger version of Cable that killed the old Cable because he wouldn’t send the temporally displaced original X-Men team back to their own time and than effectively replaced him.
Man, I wonder if its just a contest at this point to see if who can make Cable more convoluted. This reminds me that its actually been quite a while since I read an X-book, as I stopped reading when the young X-Men were still in the present and it became clear that none of the then current storylines were going anywhere.
Man I used to love Nate Grey haha. I barely read any comics with him in them though
Nate Grey’s friendship with Spider-Man was one of the best things they did with him.
I figure it’s the Nazi made of bees, though I’m not sure what their role is.
The Harts ask their hosts mundane questions about their pasts, and tension builds as it becomes clear they can’t answer. The mood shifts from Sherwood Schwartz to David Lynch when Mr. Hart starts to choke at the table while Mrs. Hart, whose smile remains eerily frozen, demands that her husband “Stop it!” Wanda calmly asks Vision to help Mr. Hart, who’s now collapsed and at the point of death. He’s happy to comply, phasing his hand into his boss’s throat and removing the offending item.As much fun as the earlier scenes were, this was the moment when I was sure that this show was going to be absolutely sublime.For one, while Mrs. Hart initially is saying “Stop it!” to her husband… when he’s choking, that’s not where she’s looking. Still got that semi-pleasant smile on her face, but she’s staring right at Wanda, and the shift to just how horrifyingly unnerving it got was just amazing.I especially love the way the cinematography is playing into things. They’re sticking with the techniques of the era being lovingly parodied, three-camera set-ups generally, because cameras back in the day were heavy. But then the weird starts to intrude, and out comes the hand-held close-ups, Debra Jo Rupp practically staring into the camera, everything shot in a modern style.It’s not exactly a subtle technique (generally, if I’m noticing a cinematography trick, it’s meant to be noticed >_> ), but it’s a damn effective one.Also, while I figure that we’re going to get more and more teases about Mephisto being behind this all (“The devil’s in the details”, says Emma Caufield. “That’s not all he’s in,” says the friendly neighbor who seems way, way too in on things), I have a feeling that’s going to end up being a red herring. It’s too……. well, weird a thing for the franchise, yes, even for a show in the franchise going with explicit sitcom pastiches.My bet’s on Dormamu. Sufficiently powerful, tied into mystical things, known villain that’s still alive, and, well, we know what movie Scarlet Witch is going to be in after this, and who its alongside…
Yeah, the way ‘Stop it!’ changed meaning from a classic sitcom rebuke to Mrs. Hart begging Wanda – definitely a series-elevating moment.
Nah, if there’s any demon tied to Wanda it’s Cthon, the Elder God of Chaos Magic and the source of Wanda’s powers.
Cthon is also part of Agents of SHIELD
The origin of the Darkhold was never confirmed on AoS (or on Runaways), so they don’t have to commit to that connection…but they could. 🙂
im reposting this to you Laserface cuz you’re even more comic savvy than i am; here’s my theory on what’s the what, i’d love to hear your thoughts (you dont have to pull me out of the greys to give it, i’ll check responses and you can just respond without pulling me, still confused as to why i got booted back but im sure i went off stupid at one point) I think AIM is clearly involved as well as SWORD and it recently occurred to me that WandaVision sounds like One Division, Divison One being the Legion name for the MRD. I think AIM is rebuilding Vision, has Agatha and Wanda trapped but Wanda has fully given into the chaos magics (repeated use of the word chaos in the house made me rock-eyebrow), and AIM is losing their hold which is why the illusion keeps faltering. I think there was an attempted helicopter rescue, which was all the banging, and then the toy represents a SWORD extraction team that tried to come and get her. Monica showing up as a Gertrude and being tied to space and SWORD makes me think she was sent into find them and got caught in Wanda’s chaotic wake.
Nah they gave the villain away in the opening credits of the second episode the grim reaper’s annoying ass is going to show up along with the Salem Seven
Judging by this screenshot alliterator found over on io9 (https://io9.gizmodo.com/1846065889) Grim Reaper is already dead. Either that or it’s a reference to Tom King’s Vision when Vision’s Daughter-Wife Virginia killed Grim Reaper and buried his body in their backyard.He got better though…
in the opening credits of the second episode the grim reaper’s annoying ass is going to show up along with the Salem Seven .Wasn’t the ultimate version of Grim Reaper connected to Mephisto, eventually? Didn’t he summon him at some point for power….?
Yup! Also I HATE KINJA!!
LOL Jesus is there a Marvel storyline that you don’t know? (And I say that with genuine admiration).
I think AIM is clearly involved as well as SWORD and it recently occurred to me that WandaVision sounds like One Division, Divison One being the Legion name for the MRD. I think AIM is rebuilding Vision, has Agatha and Wanda trapped but Wanda has fully given into the chaos magics (repeated use of the word chaos in the house made me rock-eyebrow), and AIM is losing their hold which is why the illusion keeps faltering. I think there was an attempted helicopter rescue, which was all the banging, and then the toy represents a SWORD extraction team that tried to come and get her. Monica showing up as a Gertrude and being tied to space and SWORD makes me think she was sent into find them and got caught in Wanda’s chaotic wake.
What I’m liking is that (aside from just being good) I’m baffled as to who be behind the situation they’re in. I doubt it would be anything as insane as Dormamu or Mephisto or Cthon. The tech we see at the end of the first two episodes, and in the trailers, seems decidedly human. The voice at the end of episode 2 is Woo. The bigger question is how Wanda and a dead Vision are stuck in what appears to be prison, post Endgame, with what appears to be regular humans pulling this off.
Except the implication behind what Woo is saying is that they’re as lost as we are.Really, we’re probably not going to know for certain what the hell’s going on (and I love the suspense there!) for a while, but I’m just planting my wild guess flag early, so that I can whoop in people’s faces in a month or two :D.
Someone pointed out to me that the Special Thanks section of Marvel movie credits usually call out the writer and artist teams of the comics they took the most inspiration from. In WandaVision one of them is the team that did House of M. I doubt they’re going to introduce mutants but this may end with Wanda essentially breaking reality, which would explain all the Multiverse stuff coming in the next Spider-Man and Dr. Strange movies.I just don’t know if she’s doing this herself or someone else is responsible.
Interesting, nice catch!…I mean, the “they could just be fucking with us” grain of salt’s going to still be there, but that is certainly an odd thing to add to the credits, and not exactly rubbing it in our faces…
I’m wondering if this isn’t somehow going to turn out to be somehow happening entirely inside the Soul Stone, in between Infinity War and Endgame. The series finale in this case would be Wanda rejecting this fake reality and emerging to fight Thanos.
This would be fine, if I weren’t eagerly awaiting Adam Warlock.
Possible, but I doubt it, because Fiege has said WandaVision is hugely important in setting up the coming Marvel movies. If it ends by going back to that point then nothing is really moved forward. That leads me to believe it’s going to have something to do with the multiverse as that seems front and center in the new Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. If you look at the Special Thanks at the end of the credits, one is the team that did House of M. The MCU generally only takes inspiration and bits of plot points from the comics, but that could mean that whatever Wanda is doing, or is being done to her, essentially breaks reality and could explain why the multiverses are intruding into each other in the coming films.
When Wanda said “no” at the end of the second episode and the show rewinded to their happy news, they made it clear that Wanda is actually the one in control. She has created a paradise in which Vision is alive and both of them can be a traditional family. She keeps trying different eras because things keep going wrong, when in fact reality keeps intruding no matter where she and Vision “hide.” The saddest part of the episode is when she asked Vision if this was real. Subconsciously she knows that it’s a fantasy, but she wants this to be their life so badly.
People are saying its Mojo, from the X-Men, because of the tv thing. Technically they had the rights to him by the time they started production on this, i think, but they had JUST got them, I really doubt its him so soon.
But is the tech we see doing this or are they monitoring it to figure it out? Someone us asking “Who is doing this to you?” and I took it to be SWORD that is asking that…
Not sure. It’s Johnny Woo asking at the end, last seen in the Ant-Man movies. Maybe he works for SWORD now. It’s the trailers that makes me think someone other than Wanda is fully in control, just because it eventually seems like Wanda and Vision end up fighting someone.
Here is my prediction (I’ve been wildly wrong before so I am likely wrong again) – Wanda is doing this because she went a little nuts. It’s not like her character in the comics was ever 100% stable. She’s created this bubble of reality and SWORD is monitoring it since it seems their focus is basically on people like her in the MCU (Unlike in the comics where it focuses on threats from outside the Earth). They are trying to enter the bubble of reality with super gizmos created by others to reach her before her power consumes the planet or something and in the end she and Vision will fight them to stop her bubble fro popping.It’d make a good way to get both the X-Men and FF into the MCU since we could then have Magneto pop in to try to reach her in a climactic scene and explain the SWORD tech by way of a hand wave to “Reed Richards developed it” or something.
I’m leaning that the monitors are the people trying to help Wanda and monitoring what she is going through, and we haven’t been shown signs of what is doing this to her yet. I’m also guessing that Vision is still dead and he is part of her fantasy as well.
That Stucker Watch commercial got me thinking.
My bet’s on Dormamu.I was under the impression that it’s commonly accepted this is meant to be a sort of variation on House of M (who Olsen has known suspiciously a lot about & talked a lot about in interviews since a few years). So this is all Wanda’s doing, as we’ve seen when she says “No” and the “show” rewinds. There’s someone “outside” who’s wondering if she’s being forced to do what she’s doing, but the reality is that she’s coping with all the trauma from the Infinity Wars and the loss of Vision, and somehow her powers got a boost toward the Omega Level where they belong.
Oh, it does seem to be at least partially Scarlet Witch losing it. But there’s also likely a contributing factor to it all, most likely an outside instigator who’s giving her the boost in power level as well as making this all seem like a good idea.I also could really do with fewer “you were too powerful major female character so we had to kill/forcibly depower you in order to save everyone, you’re welcome” stories.
I’m guessing the sword logo on both the helicopter and the back of the beekeeper’s uniform is a giveaway of some sort, but I never read the Marvel comics so I have no idea what it could mean…
There was also a SWORD logo on the cover of the notebook of the guy who was monitoring Wanda at the end of the first episode.SWORD is a sister organization to SHIELD, that protects the Earth from extraterrestrial threats. Their headquarters is in an orbiting space station. And most people believe we got a glimpse of that at the end of Spiderman: Far From Home when we saw Nick Fury and some Skrulls on a space station.So SWORD is definitely involved here, but the question is how? Are they involved in keeping her trapped in this alternate reality, or trying to reach her to help free her? Or are they just monitoring things because they are concerned about her power?Was this reality created to imprison Wanda? Or did Wanda have a mental break after the loss of Vision, and retreat into this place where he still exists to hide from the truth?
On one hand, I suppose they want the last episode(s) to be something more than just “Oh, I guess I went mad for a moment. I’m okay now.” Which requires the presence of some kind of enemy to fight other than herself.On the other hand, maybe she didn’t need a boost exactly. Just the occasion to reach her full potential and come into her already considerable powers while being written by someone who didn’t have to serve the patriarchy the more remunerative established characters. We saw her destroy an Infinity Stone and keep Thanos at bay with one hand. She’s herself one of two characters whose powers are derived by an Infinity Stone – the other being Captain Marvel.By the way, t made a very sound analysis of the tactical prowess, or lack thereof, of the various players in the MCU, with Wanda being a luminous exception.
I think they already used AIM as Killian’s company in IRON MAN 3, but the shot of the guy in the beekeeper outfit coming out of the sewer made me think they are part of the action. The “beekeeper” look is probably how Wanda’s mind is trying to make the outfits make sense in the altered reality. . .
It could be all her fantasy, including the disruptions to her fantasy. If this was Legion, it would play as a character creating both an escapist reality and the upsetting cracks in that reality, fueled by and representation of subconscious guilt.
The back of the beekeeper’s suit also appears to have the comics AIM logo on it, while the closing of the show has Wanda and Vision framed by the hexagon logo of the MCU AIM. And given AIM’s relationship to the Cosmic Cube – including successfully reverse engineering it a few times…
I don’t think it’s suspicious of her to do basic research on a role she’s performing.
I thought part of Strange’s bargain with Dormammu at the end of Dr. Strange is that he never messes with Earth/this plane of existence ever again.
Yup.That was indeed their deal.Of course, that deal was backed up with the threat that Dr. Strange with the Time Stone had against Dormamu. In fact, it was the entire reason why Dormamu agreed to it at all.And Dr. Strange doesn’t have the Time Stone anymore.I’m just sayin’, I wouldn’t bet too much on Dormamu keeping up his end of the bargain if the only threat to him is gone…
Does Strange no longer have the Time Stone?It was presumably given back to The Ancient One by Captain America back in 2012, which means it would have been passed to Strange, so…?
Endgame’s Time Travel (generally) operates on “Stable Time Loop” rules. It’s… a bit more complicated (read: unclear and inconsistent) than that, but the easy way to think about it is that the Time Stone that was returned to 2012 is the same one that Thanos claimed in 2018 and then destroyed a few months later. There was never a point where there duplicate Time Stones rolling around, and thus, as far as WandaVision is concerned, the Time Stone (and, for that matter, the Mind Stone that Vision was based around) is gone….can’t wait to see where they’re going with this :D.
Cool, then I’m doubling down on my “this is all happening inside the Soul Stone after Infinity War” theory.
Which means it would’ve gone to Thanos and he destroyed it with the other stones in the beginning of Endgame. It’s gone, unless Feige and other MCU writers want to pull some “the stones can never actually be destroyed” explanation out of their butts.
Not subtle at all, but probably all the more creepy for that reason. I loved that (and you described the scene perfectly).
I’m watching this with my 8 year-old, and it feels like I’m introducing her to the training wheels version of Twin Peaks. So yeah, this is freaking awesome.
I feel that Wanda is actually in control of this but only subconsciously. I think friends are trying to connect to her. It’s possible this is not really Vision but she somehow re-created him.The turning to color reminds me of the film Pleasantville where having some sort of impure thought turned things color.
[Pleasantville nitpick: it’s not about having impure thoughts – the sister even complains at one point that she’s had more sex than any of them yet is still black-and-white. It’s about… individualism? Colour arrives in the moments when characters act outside of their social expectations, in ways that are true to themselves – the sister remains greyscale presumably because her ‘impurity’ (by 50s standards) is still just conformism by her own 90s standards? I think?]
Ok. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film so was just going by memory.
I’ve only watched the first episode so far, and I know that this is a point that nobody else is likely to care about, but on the topic of “subtle/heavy techniques”, there’s one thing I caught on to that I felt somebody had to point out, but that I’ve not seen anyone else mention here – sorry if I’ve missed it – and that’s the music.Listen to the four notes that play right at the beginning of the first episode… and that then become the theme tune for ‘Wan…da…vi…sion”, and then then gently recurr throughout the episode. They sound familiar (comforting), but also disconcerting, and they do a big job of setting the viewer slightly on edge whenever they reappear.That’s because they’re classical music’s second-most-famous (after da-da-da-dum) four-note motif: the original Dies Irae. It’s the beginning of an anonymous Gregorian chant from the 1st millennium AD, which has been associated with death, destruction and hell ever since. It was resurrected in a major way by Berlioz and Liszt in the 19th century, and recurrs throughout Liszt’s music; later, Rachmaninov was absolutely obsessed with it, and it appears in almost all his famous works in some form or another. From there, it appeared as a recurring homage throughout 20th century film music, particularly horror, but really across genres whenever anything horrifying occurs.It’s best known as the opening music to The Shining; it’s also prominent in Poltergeist and the Friday 13th films, and The Exorcist, The Omen, and Alien, and Gremlins 2, and Clockwork Orange. But it’s also the music that plays when Luke discovers that his family have been murdered; and when Simba is nearly killed by hyaenas; and when Bill Murray tries to kill himself in Groundhog Day; and often when Sauron or the Nazgul appear; and at the climax of It’s a Wonderful Life, and so on. By now it’s become so hard-wired into popular consciousness that people aren’t even aware of it, yet it’s hard for anyone to hear that music – even when, as here, dressed up to sound chintzy – without feeling trepidation that something bad is going on.
A lot of things quote it for shock effect – it’s the wilhelm scream of background music – but the way they use it so prominently here is surely too much to be a coincidence!
Oh, that’s a great catch!
Just to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself (it’s not like it’s a unique set of notes, after all – indeed, in this case it’s not even a specific set of notes, just a contour/rhythm), I had a quick look: to write the theme tune, they got in the couple who wrote the songs for Frozen II. And the main composer is also the composer from Frozen II. And the plot of Frozen II is put into motion when the heroine is haunted by the mysterious and disturbing sound of… the Dies Irae. And in that case, the songwriters actually confirmed that it was intentionally the Dies Irae.So I’m pretty sure that the WandaVision version is also an intentional reference.
This is very cool and thorough and now I need to go re-listen to the episodes, but I’m glad you pointed out the Frozen II connection – I saw their names in the credits and thought I was losing it, lol.
Also, the refrain of “Making Christmas” from Nightmare Before Christmas is almost a 1-to-1 interpolation of the melody — like this show’s motif, another good use of the tension between the comfort of familiarity and the almost subconsciously dark undercurrent carried by the world’s first musical meme.
Yes, it is! It fits with Nightmare’s general Thing of taking traditionally scary things and making them seem cuddly, while still retaining an air of menace.
I feel like I’m losing my mind reading this and I love it!
beautiful the woven tapestry. thanks for sharing.
Agnes is possibly a take on the comic book character Agatha Harkness, an ally of Wanda and mother of a Fantastic Four villain Nicholas Scratch. “Old Nick”, “Old Scratch”, and “Mr. Scratch” are some of the traditional nicknames for the devil.
I took Agnes’s line to be a comment on Caulfield’s character in the scenario, but it can work on mukltiple levels.
Based on some of the clues, my idea is that Wanda is in the clutches of a certain evil science organization.
Dormamu still probably dealing with a man coming to bargain
Nope, he was let out of that time loop in exchange for recalling his minions.Because Doctor Strange had a weapon that he couldn’t step to, the Time Stone.Which Doctor Strange doesn’t have anymore…
It was a poor attempt at a joke
I’m just over here crossing my fingers that an upcoming episode features a visit from Wanda’s wacky brother Pietro.
I like the idea of Dormamu being involved because you can tie it back to the Time Stone being destroyed in this universe.Strange can no longer uphold his bargain.Also, Agnes isn’t a red herring…but she’s also not the main baddie. She’s out of character for these shows, because she’s in on it.“It’s the star of the show…” was a tell. As is her always showing up to get Wanda back on track.
The Strucker watch from the good people at Hydra made me sit up a little more than I already was.
Can I say as an aside, that in superhero comics it’s surpassingly rare for weddings to happen without at least one supervillain crashing the ceremony. Hell, when Ben Grimm got married to Alicia Masters, Reed’s wedding gift to them was device that would stop time so that they could finish the ceremony without interruption.
Gum Drunk Vision reminds me of a British Charlie Day.And having just watched all of Buffy and loving Anya, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize Emma C. as Dottie.
we thought she was Leslie Bibb and i cannot believe i didnt recognize Anya. It was the housewife stepford factor, when she had her serious wanda talk i was like “oh there she is”
“…who’s played by Emma Caulfield (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) because God loves us and wants us to be happy after a tough year.”Accurate.
She came perilously close to confronting a bunny.
OH MY GOD YOU’RE RIGHT!!!!!
Bunnies aren’t just cute like everybody supposes… they’ve got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses. And what’s with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyways?! Bunnies! Bunnies! IT MUST BE BUNNIES!!! (Or maybe midgets?)
I popped so goddamn hard when I realized who was playing the mean girl. I have been absolutely baffled as to why she never became a much more prominent actress after Buffy, she was so alternately hilarious & heartbreaking as Anya.
Like it took me a few minutes to recognize her but yeah, right on.
The way Agnes says “Oh, this is going to be a gas!” is a pretty direct timestamp. That idea existed long before then, but the expression wasn’t used in that particular way until the late 50s. It gains popularity through most of the 60s and then pretty much dies with the decade, outside of people going out of their way to sound kitschy. So I would say early 60s is a good guess for that first episode.
..oddly enough the phrase(or a variant of it saying something was “gas” meaning it was funny) stayed in Irish vernacular until the early 2000s at least, so I didnt spot that at all..
Flexi disc included with Mad Magazine:
Two things- Per IMDB this was shot in a front of a live studio audience.(In order to capture the look and feel of a classic sitcom, legendary actor and comedian Dick Van Dyke was consulted. Furthermore, this show was also filmed in front of a live audience.-IMDB) Second, the color of the helicopter was red AND gold, with a S.W.O.R.D. logo branded on it as well. My thought is perhaps Stark Industries started S.W.O.R.D as a response to the events in Infinity War/Endgame and use Ironman’s colors as a tribute to him. the guy watching the events on the television also has S.W.O.R.D branded office supplies, so my theory is she is actually in their custody and they are trying to help her as she is being controlled/manipulated by an outside force.
I just find this confusing. In the comics, SWORD primarily deals with extraterrestrial threats to Earth. And the storyline this show is based is supernatural in origin.
It’s less confusing if you keep in mind that these are adaptions of the comics.
It will never be just like the comics.SWORD could be about extraterrestrial and extradimensional threats.
Yep, this is Earth-199999, not Earth-616. You’d think that more people would be aware of this by now and quit their whinings about comic-book accuracy.
I’m really not trying to be pedantic here, but sometimes they change things quite a bit from the source material in the MCU, y’know. Maybe here S.W.O.R.D. is just a replacement for S.H.I.E.L.D. because in the MCU (and not the now non-canonical TV shows that have come previously) that name has been tarnished since Captain America: Winter Soldier.
Wait, all the previous MCU series are now non-cannon!?
I believe so, yes. Agents of SHIELD for sure is outside of the MCU at the very least. The Netflix shows are gonna be touch to incorporate, and probably not worth it.
Oh, is that because of the Snap?
It’s because Kevin Feige fucking hated those shows.
Sentient World Observation and Response Division, being that they know of the Guardians and Asgard is also extra terrestrial here, could also count for major anomolies on the earth in the MCU, being that htis is their incarnation instead of the direct-from-Astonishing X-Men version. I just want my green haired badass Abigail Brand
One could roundabout call Wanda an extraterrestrial in nature, because her powers come from an extraterrestrial object. That, or with Tony dead and SHIELD long gone, SWORD might be the only entity capable of handing someone like Wanda.
And the storyline this show is based is supernatural in origin.Clearly a job for C.A.U.L.D.R.O.N. or G.R.I.M.O.I.R.E. instead…
They changed the meaning of SWORD, from the comic. Now they deal with people who have power on a reality affecting scale, like Wanda.
It is also possible that aliens are involved, somehow.
My theory is that with Agents of Shield ending, they are going to scrap S.H.I.E.L.D. altogether and just have S.W.O.R.D. be the new name for agency that oversees threats cosmic and terrestrial.
i think its AIM that has her and Vis and SWORD is tapping into AIM’s feed
We’ve already seen S.W.O.R.D. in the MCU, assuming that’s what Nick Fury was doing behind the scenes in the last Spider-Man film.
That’s if you assume, here it is right in your face.
Bit of a correction: The first episode was actually filmed in front of a live-studio audience, and the switch from multi to single-cam really helps undercut how ominous the part where Vision’s boss starts choking is. I am pretty sure the second one’s using a laugh track, though.
Laugh track doesn’t negate the possibility of filming before a studio audience. They’ve been using them for decades to ‘sweeten’ studio audiences. I’ve been in a studio audience explicitly told by a production assistant that we needed to “get excited” with our reactions or we’d be replaced with a laugh track. Having seen the finished product, he wasn’t joking.It would even fit the shifting timeframe, as the laugh tracks became pretty much omnipresent heading through the sixties into the seventies.
You’re definitely not wrong, but I think the reviewer here genuinely just seemed to not be aware that a studio audience was used.
that’s interesting, observer effect with some artificial sweetening *clap clap*
I could barely tell there was a laugh teck/background laughter in Episode 3, so it sounded like it got toned down to me.
The first episode was more ‘50s “in front of a live studio audience” until like you say, the eerie witch during the choking scene. The second ep leapt ahead to the early ‘60s early Bewitched Era with a single cam and locations that were not a sound studio. The reviewer is lumping the episodes into one era, when there’s a progression from the “I Love Lucy” era of the first episode to the “Bewitched” era of the second. They even reference to the color switch that Bewitched went through.
Not only that, in fact, the whole house reflects the era. The living room at least is different: wood paneling in the walls, lots of space and sober couches in the first, and a flowery pattern in the wallpaper and the couches in the second, in a living room less spacious
Wanda’s styling also changes from 1950s curls and dress to 1960s flat iron and narrow pants.
Musical cues also are meant to set date as well. Yakety yak released in 1958, Help Me Ronda in 1965. Plus a reference to beatniks in the first episode.
I loved how the boss immediatally assumed Wanda was a “Bolshevik” because she’s from Europe.
I actually thought Wanda’s wardrobe and styling in the second episode were so modern and ordinary looking that they didn’t even qualify as “period” to me at least. Not sure if that was intentional or not
I think they were directly referencing Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) on the Dick Van Dyke show. I’m not going to fight kinja trying to post a picture, but here’s a link to a pic. It’s also similar to Bewitched, but that had a more heightened style that dates it a bit more. So I don’t think they intentionally were trying to make it more modern than that era, they just picked a classic style that’s aged very well.
“Bewitched” also is significant, I think, because it represented a switch from the classic 3-camera/live studio audience setup. “Bewitched” regularly shows all four walls of the house, I noticed that when I was a very young watcher, which meant there was no place for a studio audience. It shot the actors from all angles. There was a laugh track, but clearly no audience to provide it. I know now there was an enormous amount of labor which went into shooting an episode, since often personnel would be moving “walls” around between, or even during shots sometimes.
it’ll be neat if the next episode is a 70’s style cop show or something. I’m hoping to get at least one from each decade before it transitions to “regular” MCU stuff. 80’s sitcom, 90’s WB style show….etc
I think it’s Partridge/Brady Bunch next. And we’re definitely expecting Roseanne and Full House, as well as a more “modern” style that has been stated but I won’t spoil if you haven’t seen it mentioned. With 7 episodes to go, we could have at least 4 or 5 styles of “show” before we get into MCU free-for-all.
Agents of Shield already kind of did that, I think they’re going for straight sitcoms here.
It’s like you got inside my brain. Everything you said is on point.
I feel like it may actually transition from a live audience to a laugh track at some point in the first episode, or at least that’s what the viewer is meant to intuit. The laughter vanishes once the dinner begins but returns once the guests leave. At the very end, Vision pulls out a remote and seems to be adjusting the volume of the laughter itself, which was an especially eerie moment. Who’s really in control here?
I like how it subtly shifted from an early 60s to late 60s vibe in the second episode. You could tell that the black & white was a little richer, and that the neighborhood was expanded past the house. Kind of like an earlier season episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show vs. a later season.
There’s no such thing as a multi camera show that did/does not use a laugh track. When you are doing the sixth take, the jokes just don’t generate the same enthusiasm.
Wait they really did film in front of studio audience? MIND BLOWN and with this so that’s saying something.
Theory not based on any spoilers – Disney cut Mr. Sinister out of New Mutants after seemingly having both Antonio Banderas and Jon Hamm film the role. The Fake Ads seem to have the same guy in it who at one point is shilling a hydra watch- Could we be seeing an introduction of Mr. Sinister/Nathaniel Essex?
My theory based on shaky evidence. Vision’s job being vague is definitely a reference to the undefined jobs of characters in that era of TV, but I think it’s not *just* a reference. I think he’s unwittingly working for AIM and maybe Mr. Hart or the salesman in the ads is George Tarleton?The one big thing that keeps throwing a wrench in this for me is the SWORD logo on the back of the beekeeper. Beekeeper = AIM. That shouldn’t be much of a mystery for fans of the comics, except for that dang SWORD logo really fucks with things.
The movies also used AIM a little differently so that’s why I’m like maybe we’re going to get some Essex corporation involvement along with whatever SWORD is up to. I am assuming that Wanda’s next steps (not just the show but the next phase or two) will contribute to how the X-Men eventually get rolled into the show. I’ve seen some theories that instead of “no more mutants” the outcome will be the creation of mutants (or the reveal).I am assuming Vision isn’t actually working at all – I’m assuming Vision is not real and he’s ultimately going to be the one to force Wanda back to reality. I don’t think the “real” world has any power over Vision.The only thing that perked me up to Mr. Sinister was making such a decision to remove him from New Mutants after he was filmed twice and a rumor (and just a rumor) that Marvel has gone back to Jon Hamm about it.
I’ve seen some theories that instead of “no more mutants” the outcome will be the creation of mutants (or the reveal).Seems pretty plausible considering how much Wanda and Vision talk in both episodes about “fitting in”. Her essentially inserting (or being manipulated to do so) people like her into the world – randomly “awarded” with potentially dangerous, freaky power.
It also allows them to brush past some of the backstories for X-Men that don’t really fit and give a pretty hard reboot on their origin – like they did with Wanda and Pietro. There has also been some rumblings that they are deciding what to do about Magneto – He arguably can’t be Erik Lehnsherr as we know him because the MCU is set pretty much in the present day and he’d be too old to plausibly fit in without another backstory. I know they’ve also said they aren’t rushing the X-Men which is totally fine with me, but I also imagine it makes sense to get them in and potentially get Rogue in while Carol Danvers is around.
I think the solution is to say that Mutants just age slower than normal humans. It already has some precedent in the comics since Wolverine and Mystique are around 150. So you can have it that Magneto grew up in Poland in the 1930’s but he just looks like he’s in his late 40’s or early 50’s.
I’m not opposed to that, though it arguably makes Wolverine less special? I’ve also been theorizing that with multiverse being a very specific part of the next phase from what we’ve been told, I wonder if some of the characters we encounter won’t be a multiverse situation – Need to explain how a swinging 60’s Fantastic Four exists? Well, they’re from an alternate Earth. Why are there no mutants? Mutants are from an alternate Earth. They seem to be going there with Spider-Man in addition to Doctor Strange so I think this can definitely work and if you do that, you also open up the possibility that Professor X and Magneto are from an alternate timeline and for them it was just the 80’s.
There are actually quite a few Mutants who have lived for long periods of time. There’s Mr. Sinister, Dr.Nemesis, Azazel, and Apocalypse to name a couple of them.
I hear ya and I was being reductive, but assuming that the goal will be to reintroduce Weapon X, if mutants living long life spans is known and notable, it just convolutes that story to me. Again – personal preference, not something that can’t be done. If you get in a situation where all mutants have extended life spans and healing, you create a narrative loop where the stakes have to go higher and higher to deal with it.
My problem with the multiverse theory of MCU mutants is that unless ALL of the worlds are eventually merged somehow in a “Time Runs Out/Battleworld”-style Avengers-level movie then they’re too separate from the main Earth-199999 to really matter all that much. Take “Into The Spider-Verse” as an example: Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Ham, and Peni Parker are great characters, in Miles Morales’ world, but I’m not itching to go exploring their own individual worlds too deeply because it has no bearing on the primary universe. Plus clumsily slamming alternate universes together haphazardly seems more like a DC thing than Marvel…
I’m assuming that they would merge. Given the Dr. Strange movie being multi-verse oriented, the rumors about the next Spider-Man movie and the fact that Wanda is going to be in the multi-verse movie, I’m assuming the idea of a “merge” or the remaining cast of our movie hopping universes seems possible. My assumption would be Wanda causing it the way she eliminated mutants prior to House of M. Multiverse definitely seems to be coming, though the X-Men, Fantastic 4 stuff is purely my conjecture.
Basically what I heard Dottie: “you’re one of them (mutants) aren’t you?” Wanda: “Dont tell anyone. We arent dangerous” Dottie: “yes you are.” Eexcept you know, well written.
Yea my number one theory since this was announced is that they’re doing a reverse House of M
Having control of Vision’s processing power, if he is indeed alive here, could be sufficient inducement for someone to set up this fake world…
My thoughts exactly. Apparently just recently Paul Bettany said that he filmed a stinger for Endgame that got scrapped where Wanda essentially pulled his body out of a morgue-like drawer and looked longingly at it. Could be they cut it for any number of reasons, but there’s always the chance they cut it because Feige/his team decided the Avengers lost Vision’s body along the way. If that’s the case an ambitious George Tarleton using the technology/power still in Vision’s body to rebuild AIM makes sense… Wanda goes on a rescue mission, they capture her and somehow use their combined powers to trap them in this Matrix/Truman Show like world.That’s my shot in the dark guess as things aren’t any clearer yet than when I first made this comment. Although I am holding out hope that there is a sinister evildoer pulling strings here and it’s not *just* Wanda having a breakdown/dealing with grief and denial. The latter makes sense from where her character has gone in the comics, but one of the reasons I enjoy the MCU so much is ultimately the stories are about hope and optimism. The end of Infinity War aside (which is really the mid-point of the story it’s telling) I can’t think of any movies that end with the heroes in a dark place – even the end of Ragnarok there was a tinge of optimism with the “Asgard is not a place, it’s a people” mantra. It would be a mild bummer to me if the MCU starts going to a place where “the world is dark, everything sucks, and everyone’s broken” – let’s leave that to DC and real life. I want to keep watching candy colored superheroes save the day and make a positive impact on the universe.This turned into a way longer diatribe than I had intended when I started replying to you. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk lol
Am I alone in seeing Dottie and immediately thinking it’s Emma Frost?
Yeah I actually thought it was January Jones at first.
She is going to play one of the Salem seven
So ..how close is this to a Marvel ‘Life on Mars ‘ show? (with the period stuff , and reality trying to bleed in.)Also a 30 minute show with a 6 minute credits running time?? Why!!
I feel like the Disney+ credits are longer than on other streamers because they credit all the dub actors on cards at the end as well. (I’ve never really paid attention to how other companies handle it but it seems like Disney’s interface makes me more likely to see it for whatever reason?
It’s movie-length credits even before the dub actors. Which wouldn’t be a problem if skipping ahead during the credits didn’t leave the episode counted as unfinished.
I don’t use the autoplay feature very often so I know that Netflix credits are just as long as they also show all the workers from other countries.
Netflix does it as well, but I don’t think Disney+ automatically skips credits, unlike Netflix.
The total run time of the season is supposed to be ~6 hours; the episodes will get longer as things get less sitcomy.
American sitcom should be 22-24 minutes, right? Commercials and all
American network sitcoms generally riun 30 minutes with commercials. At this point they are usually about 21 minutes without with some, like some of gthe popular CBS shows running as short as 19 minutes. For a long time, before some date in the 90’s they ran 22 minutes without commercials and at some pint before that more like 24-25 minutes.
22 minutes of show per 30 minutes used to be the broadcast network standard yes
American TV is meant to start/end on the hour or half hour; so most show will be half hour or hour run times with commercials.
NO, usually it’s about 22 minutes for actual content, with the rest of the half-hour block for commercials.
No network to insist that the credits be as short as possible to make room for more ads, or squashed into the corner of the screen while a trailer plays. They can take as long as they like, do flashy movie-style “pre-credits”, slow it down so that you can actually read all of the names…A fair chunk of the credits on every Disney+ show are the alternate-language dub credits, too.
The end credits including all the dubs/foreign credits does make the episode run times/remaining time look weird, but what I was noticing more by the second episode is how long the Marvel “flipping pages” logo feels when its in front of every 20-30 minute episode instead of just at the beginning of a 2 hour movie.
I never knew I wanted to see a biopic about Richard Deacon (who was a very interesting fellow, despite always playing oafs) starring Fred Melamed until now. Fred would have to shave his beard, though, so I don’t know if he’d be up for that.
The ‘60s sitcom simulacra is pretty tired. It’s really a simulation of a ‘90s parody of a ‘50s sitcom that’s been done ad nauseam. That said, it looks like they go a bit deeper a few episodes in. I’m on the fence at this point but I’ll give it a few more episodes.
That helicopter was totally a S.W.O.R.D. quadcopter they sent into her little world.
“They sent”, or Wanda’s mind is translating something anachronistic into her bubble world?
Bleurgh. Maybe it’s just me, but this kind of “review” should have vanished a long time ago. Reviews > recaps every time – even if we don’t share all the same views on the quality of the episode it would be good to know what the reviewer thinks!
I like recaps
Why? I’m actually curious.
I really don’t understand the point of recaps, especially for what is being promoted as a prestige show (at least in terms of production if not theme) that is part of basically the largest property in pop culture at the moment. Even if the reviewer doesn’t feel there is much in way of thematic content to engage with, at the very least there is opportunity to discuss references to the comics as well as how the show fits into the larger whole of the MCU and speculation on the mystery surrounding the situation the characters are in, as well as opportunity to delve more into the quality of acting and production design. But instead we’re given around 1000 words describing the two episodes that the large majority of the readers will have just watched, with an arbitrary grade attached without any insight or explanation as to how that A- grade was assigned, at that point we all may as well have read the wikipedia plot synopsis.This is labelled as a review, how hard is it to actually review the damn show?
“…this kind of “review” should have vanished a long time ago”-I guess you could call it antiquated, just like the 60s, so it fits 😋
I goddamn love how subtly they blend in shooting techniques whenever shit starts going wrong.It’s interesting that Wanda, who seems to be actually controlling this whole thing, defaults to violence whenever its “NPCs” threaten the fantasy, what with the boss choking and Dottie drawing blood on the glass. I wonder if we’ll get a big “destroy the set (and people)” moment eventually.
yeah the switch to hitchcock during dinner was wonderful, it even felt like the calrity changed to reflect a moment of semi clarity on wanda’s part.
Strucker… he’ll make time for you!
Eh. The classic sitcom gimmick was cute for about 5 minutes. Wasn’t expecting this to go on as long as it’s going. I get it already. Rather than being intrigued by the hints and clues, I’m checking my watch, wishing they’d get to the point. I can’t watch a whole season of this sillinness.I agree that Katherine Hahn is great (“How can anyone do this sober?”) and the Talent Show was pretty amusing. But I need more than to laugh at an ironic premise. I’m far from an A because I’ve seen other shows start stronger… And I doubt this is the “best” WandaVision can do.
We have gone a full year without any additions to the MCU. I will take all the WandaVision I can get.
Was agents of shield garbage to you?
I am a cord-cutter, so I generally look for the new seasons on streaming services a few months after they finish airing on TV 🙂
It didn’t start that way, but it definitely got there.
I gotta agree. The ratio of sitcom spoof to interesting MCU stuff is way out of whack. That was an hour of viewing. For a few minutes of weirdness. I got no joy out of boss coming to dinner or misunderstanding tropes from tv shows made 65 years ago. I’ll keep watching. I bet this holds up to second viewing where something unimportant in episode 3 is very rewarding after watching episode11. But right now it’s a tough watch.
This is the problem with cultural fragmentation, people can’t appreciate a good genre pastiche anymore. They just want The Metaplot to Advance.
Same thing happened with The Mandalorian, which was a genuine attempt to do a Western (different shades of Western, in fact) in every episode – every single comments thread began with a massive argument between people who thought it was “boring” and “lacked character development” because they were impatiently waiting for The Metaplot to advance, and people who were enjoying each episode and the self-contained story it was telling while treating the whole Baby Yoda business as a bonus.
That’s fair for the first season. The second season was “Go find the next spinoff character, then you can advance”.
Really. i HATED it. They shouldve had em flip through the 50s to rhe 80s or 0s in like, one episode, wrapped up the whole thing. Over 2 episodes it was excrutiatingly boring.
Cranky contrarian is cranky.
That’s kinda how I felt. I think this show would play better for me if I wait and binge it all at once.
I like the idea behind the show, and I would be fine with them spending as much time as they like with the sitcom stuff without rushing through the “metaplot,” but to me it just wasn’t all that interesting.The sitcom bits aren’t all that funny as sitcoms bits, the idea that they’re riffing on old sitcoms has been done many times before and is amusing for about five minutes, and the sinister moments don’t hold much weight or intrigue because we pretty much knew going in that this is all happening in some constructed reality—most probably a subconscious creation of Wanda’s to avoid facing her emotional trauma. It’s a mystery we already know the answer to, at least in broad strokes.
Maybe you didn’t watch old sitcoms as a kid, like Bewitched and I Love Lucy? I’m enjoying Wandavision as much as I am because I get the references. Just brilliant.
Those the are exact words I used when arguing about the show with my boss this morning.
Oh, I get the references. I watched those old shows. Like I said, it’s cute. But in an SNL sketch kind of way. (No joke in WandaVision is as funny as the actual jokes in those classics) That’s why immediately christening the show as ‘Brilliant’ is pushing it- and does a disservice to even talking about the series critically, as the comments have shown right off the bat). Any show could do this, and many have. A perfect example is Mr. Robot, which literally did the exact same idea in season 2’s “eps2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes” (right down to the false reality being a construct to escape pain) but it had more meaning because we had more context. Perhaps an unfair comparison since that show is just thematically richer than something Disney+ is going to offer, but they did only need one episode to get to the point, because it is fundamentally a one-joke premise that doesn’t need to be drawn out.
i was mildly surprised that I COULD enjoy it for its hokey 50/60’s sitcom style, which I thought would get difficult after 5 minutes. Watching w/ my 15 and 7 yr old daughters it actually managed to be an enjoyable fun wholesome 1/2 hour! And I wasn’t exhausted by the shtick like I thought I would be.
Agree that the gimmick got old quick. I want them to get to the point already, don’t need a season’s worth of buildup, only to have the secret revealed in the last episode. I also am not a Marvel universe expert, so I have no idea what could be going on so speculating isn’t something I can do while waiting for the reveal to happen.
Yeah, I was hoping the second episode would be a new sitcom premise or least turn a lot darker. The best parts were the weird and unsettling moments that broke the sitcom format, and I was hoping for a lot more of that.
The pre-air review indicated they would arrive at the fireworks factory in episode 3.
Yeah, we watched the first one and were mostly bored. Figured things would pick up in the second and it didn’t. I’m out.
They all do a fantastic job. Paul Bettany is kind of expected, as he’s playing similar roles and beats in the past, but let’s hear it for Elizabeth Olsen absolutely nailing the cadence and slightly hammy “60s sit-com actress” style. It’s less showy than Hahn’s “wacky neighbor”, but Olsen kills it.
She absolutely nailed it. The second episode convinced me she must have studied hours of bewitched tapes to get Elizabeth Montgomery’s mannerisms down.
Yeah! Bettany’s no slouch, but we’ve seen him do this before. Olsen is straight-up phenomenal. Even little stuff like how she carries herself or holds her hands. It’s that perfect slightly fake phoniness without being phony. It’s REALLY impressive, all the more so since it effortlessly blends in. It’s so perfect you don’t notice it, but SHE HASN’T DONE THIS BEFORE. All the more.impressive.
I would actually enjoy more love for the both of them. I love Paul in this because I’m enjoying how he’s playing an alien in foreign land in a way. I love that they are both out of place here instead of like how in Bewitched, Samantha and her family are the oddballs while Darren has to juggle it all. They both have their own tricky waters to navigate. He’s so been allowed to show more range. He was damn near the straight man (Darren like) in part one but the roles were almost flipped in part. Paul just got a chance to go way more wacky with it. I love both of them so much in this
Yeah, she’s somehow perfect at it. Even just the way she speaks.
I wish she was headline billed before Paul Bettany. A petty complaint, but it niggles me.
They were both fantastic. Completely met my expectations. As an homage to the 50s and 60s tv shows, and as setting up the rest of this show, it did its job. I can’t wait to see where it goes–even though, as a comics enthusiast, I have my guesses.
The choking zoom really felt like she asked Wanda to stop what was going on instead of the choking.
It felt like she was at minimum trying to force them to out themselves.
The Beach Boys released “Help Me, Rhonda” in 1965. This fits my theory that the first two episodes are set in the early to mid-1960s, which everyone confuses with the 1950s. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Wanda, Agnes, and Dottie’s hair and wardrobe are clearly post-Jackie Kennedy.This is something I always find amusing, confusing the early 60s for the 50s. MadMen played this off pretty well. I tihnk most fans thought MAdMen was the 50s but it was very much early 60s leading into the last season or two. First the younger guys started wearing their hair longer, kinda early Beatles like. It was a good remiinder that the show did take place in the 60s. And then of course the very end was full on hippy dippy.
Did old shows make this mistake too? If so, it could be the show being authentic to sitcoms of yesteryear which tried to portray the 50s but didn’t capture the styles and essence of that decade that well.
This is in wanda’s head so she made the mistake
Yea I get that could be the show explanation but that wasn’t really my point. The showrunners have talked about how they tried to make these episodes as authentic as possible to how shows were produced in different eras. So was just interested if showing people with different hairstyles and whatnot was an intentional homage or not.
Yeah, but outside of Wanda’s head in the reality we inhabit people mistake the early 60s for the 50s all the time.
Great question. Was Happy Days that accurate? This would be the show to go to ask that question. I don’t think Fonzie was what a greaser really looked like back in the day, but that’s more of a bad take on an anchronistic stereotype. Mork from Ork was on Happy Days only to later take up residence in Boulder, CO in the early 80s.I kind of think this is not just a TV thing though. I think it’s a media thing and not just fictionalized TV. People think of the 60s and free love and Woodstock, all the music which was all in the back half of that decade, so I think “the 60s” is more of a social construct at this point.
Well of course – all “eras” are social constructs. In reality, each era blends into the next imperceptibly, usually. And decade names are only vague approximations. The fifties definitely lasted well into the sixties, but the sixties were a really short decade – while they probably didn’t really die at Altamont in ‘69, they were certainly dying [a UK touchstone: Get Carter in ‘71 really feels like the hangover to the 60s!], and they were killed off for good in the oil crisis of ‘73. The ‘20s, as well, notoriously didn’t get started until the middle of the decade (and ended extremely abruptly – the 30s were basically the dystopian version of the 20s).
They also don’t really match up entirely between countries. Here in the UK, other than the Sixties (which I think happened here some time before they reached the States), most decades started later than in the US. Most egregiously, I don’t think the Nineties really got going here until 1997*. And then ended very abruptly in 2001…*I think in the US they started in 1992, when Clinton arrived. But in the UK, Labour unexpectedly lost that election, and instead we got the Major Government – the grey, increasingly desparate, increasingly apathetical, tail-end of the 1980s. It wasn’t until Blair’s landslide in 1997 – “things can only get better”, “Cool Britannia”, etc – that the 90s really got here… though in some areas (pop music) the foundation had been laid a couple of years earlier.Hmm. I’m rambling now. Sorry!
As soon as you wrote Get Carter I knew you were a boody limey. ;)The UK contributed to the music of the 60s pretty early on The Stones and Beatles got their start in ‘64. Oops, actually ‘62. Even ‘the 50s’ as remembered mainly happened in the back half of the decade. Elvis didn’t hit big until ‘56. and Little Richard recorded Tutti Frutti in ‘55.
This is particularly true of the UK, actually, which I meant to add in my original post: in the UK, the 50s started really, really late. Wartime rationing continued until 1954, with petrol rationing returning from 56-57. The cost of the war, and the whole ‘stabbed in the back by the US’ thing, meant that economic hardship for many was worse after the war than during it. A radical Labour goverment came in after the war, but not for long, with Churchill returning as PM until 1955. It was very much an era of old age and sickness and the decay of the old world: Churchill was so ill that the King almost immediately decided to try to force him to step down, but then died himself; Churchill was even incapacitated by illness, but couldn’t be replaced because his intended successor, Eden, was himself also incapacitated by illness. Likewise the Empire, with the Suez Crisis in ‘56 being a complete national humiliation and the full stop to British delusions of continued importance in the world.So our Fifties – as an era that contrasted with the wartime 40s – didn’t really begin until 1957, and were only a brief pause for breath before the Sixties kicked in: we never had those ebullient, optimistic, can-do, highway-building, rock-and-roll Eisenhower Fifties.
On the Sixties – I think Britain had more than just the music. The same year as the Beatles’ first single was also the year that That Was the Week That Was came out – a brutally satirical, controversial taking-apart of “The Establishment” and the older generation, which really kicked off a big cultural shift. And I’m told Britain was also leading the way into the Sixties in fashion and design, although I don’t know about that myself. I know America was going though its own things – Kennedy, the assassination, the beginning of Vietnam – but I think that if you’d compared the two countries probably any time up to, say, ‘66, you’d probably have felt that Britain was ‘ahead’, or ‘more Sixties’, than the US (whereas the reverse is true most of the rest of the time).
[I normally scoff at pretentious people saying things like “this moment in this film is symbolic of the entire era”. But honestly, when the theme tune kicks in as the police arrive the morning after the drug party at the end of Get Carter – the theme tune that feels so much like hearing sirens through the haze of a hangover – it absolutely feels like the most comprehensive “right, the Sixties are over now” moment…]
I was thinking of fashion being a British thing in 60s London as well. I hate to say that I have an Austin Powers stereotype in mind on that topic.I never thought about it being American, but yeah you would have had a Hell of a hangover after WWII. We had a post-war boom.I’ve been thinking of watching Get Carter recently. It’s a Michael Caine thing. Maybe I’ll do that.
Do!
It’s not an absolute masterpiece – it’s slow by modern standards, and it’s so, so grim and nihilistic. You could never make it today. But it’s a really striking, memorable film that’s a great showpiece for its era (both of reality, and of filmmaking).
Happy Days wasn’t accurate but it wasn’t in any way trying to be historically accurate. It was basically a cartoon version of “the 50s”
Like Sha-Na-Na? Did anybody ever look like Sha-Na-Na?WHy did they play Woodstock? I beleive they went on just before Hendrix. In the Woodstock movie they only give you like a minute of Sha Na Na and they look really out of place.
Yeah Sha Na Na was crazy. They were a retro 50s group but it was only the 60s/70s. They were surprisingly big, has a TV show in the late 70s
The two episodes are in different eras with different cultural signifiers. The first is clearly late 50s Dick Van Dyke show – they even do the ottoman gag in the credits where Vision phases through what Dick tripped over. The second is set about a half dozen years later – Wanda explicitly mentions her capri pants (very mid-60s suburbs) after she and Agnes were wearing the classic dress/apron combo of the late 50s in the first ep.
There are Dick van Dyke references but the template for both episodes in both styles is obviously bewitched. Wanda is literally a witch, but has to hide her abilities but still uses them to help her husband etc.
Well, it also is because a lot of the cultural and stylistic shifts we think of that differentiate the 50s and 60s really came about in the mid-60s. The real hippy/ psychedelic stuff wasn’t until the very end of the decade.
I’m not so sure about all this. It was clear from the beginning that Mad Men started in 1960. Nixon was running for president, and everyone was wearing clothes from 1957, which tracks for “real” people in 1960. If anything, shows meant to be emblematic of an era will be hyper moden cartoons.
Mad Men is a bad example. They referenced explicit dates during each season. If anyone thought it was always the 50s they were really confused. The first season has a New Year’s party for the 59/60 New Year’s Eve. Later season’s reference 11/22/1963. The final season was explicitly 1970
One thing I find interesting about this show so far is how so very American it is. It makes me wonder if the target audience is more homogenous than the movie releases. Obviously, yes, there is nothing ion this show of interest to Chinese audiences, at least as far as I can tell. I was thinking about this because I have a friend in Argentina way into Marvel movies and comics. I don’t think any of the retro-TV jokes are going to connect with him or others not from the USA. Only Americans lived in those kinds of homes and neighborhoods. I’m not sure that the kitchens were anything like the ones in the American TV shows. Even within the USA how many younger, key demographic fans are really going to get this concept? Nick at Nite has been showing tv shows I grew up with in the 80s these days. When I was a kid Nick at Nite was exactly the types of shows that WandaVision is riffing on. I wonder if Marvel really knows who it’s audiuence is on this one?
Speaking from LatinAmerica here (from an Argentine perspective, specifically- please give your friend a high-five for me lol), I don’t think it’s that exotic or too over my head?
The architecture and some cultural values are definitely different, but besides those sitcoms airing here and on nick at nite, a lot of things are pretty universal of that generation, and we either saw it in media or just heard about it (the big suburb house, the housewife and worker father, the red scare -my mom still tells stories of teachers telling her the ‘commies’ would literally eat her-, the “traditional 50s values”). Add to inspirations from that era being in fashion in some places, it’s definitely not too crazy. I can’t speak for the rest of the world though, especially less westernized countries!
He’s fairly young so he might miss out in that sense.When I moved to Buenos Aires (Where I got my screen name. I was trying to choose a name for an account and everynight my neighbor was screaming on the phone, “Che, Boludo! blah, blah, blah, No seas Pelotudo!” It went on for nights.) Anyway I was shocked to go into the music/movie stores, Musimundo or whatever, but how many old American and English TV show DVDs were on the shelves. Benny Hill seemed super popular. They had his dvd’s spread all over the store. I remember a lot of 70s tv shows. Mork and Mindy stood out probably because I lived in Boulder, CO where the show took place. I used to go out at night and when I would get asked, “De donde sos vos?”, I would answer, “Soy de Colorado”, them, “Sos de Boulder?”, me, “no, pero yo vivi mucho tiempo en Boulder .” I got this response more than once, “MORK Y MEEENDY, MORK Y MEENDY!” I swear this is true.But yeah, Argentina shares a lot with the United States, especially compared to other South American countries where they seemed to be less inundated with American media until more recently. Extra especially is the extent of American ‘classic rock’. I don’t know if you’ve seen El Angel. I love this movie it’s about a teenage sociopath. Dark comedy.It took place in the 70s I’m assuming under the military junta, but the houses he breaks into are all decorated with shag carpeting in odd colors and look like my parents house where I was born. One of the characters also goes on a very 70s variety show like we had in the USA. Also, when I was there, there was a comercial for Fravega I think it was celebrating their anniversary and Ricardo Darin played a very cheesy game show host with a nice 70s white dud jheri curl.
Oh, I just remembered. Somebody in Buenos Aires drives around in a customized ‘General Lee’ from The Dukes of Hazard.
I don’t think any of the retro-TV jokes are going to connect with him or others not from the USA.Friend, those classic old sitcoms like Bewitched or The Munsters were syndicated worldwide and a big success everywhere, in constant rerun for decades. Here in Italy every post-WWII generation grew up with American TV shows in their house.
American media flooding out local media. The American media conglomerates priced the film *more cheaply* than that of other countries, and there were some shady deals to get TV and movie properties into those countries.
which feeds my pet theory that “they” are drawing from the kind of shows Wanda would have seen as a child in Sokovia as their templates for “normality”
Makes a lot of sense.
Yea I’m assuming that these are shows Wanda would have seen growing up in Sokovia (decades after their initial airing) and which were a source of comfort for her
I agree, many of these sitcoms were seen and translated worldwide in the 80s and 90s. I watched Bewitched, Gilligan’s island etc. in French as a kid.The references are most likely to be missed due to age rather than country of origin, imo.
This is true, but younger viewers who have never seen a sitcom but are big MCU fans are gonna be bored and frustrated. My son was.
So maybe it’s not a show for younger viewers? Why should a black & white experimental homage to boomer television with David Lynch undertones appeal to kids? Not all Marvel products are created for the same target. I imagine Legion didn’t go over well with the youngsters, too.
True, but Legion was never sold as “Marvel’s Legion” with an unlimited budget for marketing across all media.
I grew up in the US watching the old Nick at Nite & TV Land shows, but now live in London with my British husband. I asked him about it and he said they had them here, but he didn’t catch some of the littler nods (like tge Dick Van Dyke chair thing with Vision), but he got the pastiche overall.
I mean, I feel like they didn’t really bank on people who were actually born in the 1930s to make up much of the audience of their 2021 show.
The luxury Marvel has is they don’t have to worry about confusing audiences because audiences are so into their content, they’ll do research and figure out what references mean and what Easter Eggs they missed.So in terms of who this is for, it’s for the massive audience that follows the MCU and will gobble up whatever new content there is in the universe (myself included).
True, but regardless it’s also true that shows like the Brady Bunch were watched worldwide. I think, if anything, they have informed the world view of what “America” is more than any hit movies (which might help this show).
I love that we’ve arrived at this point and can dive beyond the surface level stuff.
so it’s almost like building a little world in their minds they enter whenever you say ‘Captain Marvel’ or show the MCU colours, which they then reproduce and share with one another. That’s interesting.
*Ahem* Americans and most Canadians, who grew up watching similar (if not the same) shows. But I know Canada is—when it comes to movie and even now TV audiences, often seen as one with the US.
Still, I wouldn’t think this would be too obscure. I dated a guy who was living here for a while from Australia and was obsessed with I Love Lucy, which he grew up with and (God help me) the Brady Bunch. I can’t speak for most foreign language countries, though I know there was an episode of the anime Marmalade Boy set in a sitcom world which basically was the same sitcom as, well, presented here.
I think for good and bad a lot of American TV tropes basically took over TV culture in general (especially the 1980s primetime soap opera tropes of shows like Dynasty, but also things like Gilligan’s Island and when I worked in the early 90s for a year in Dublin, everyone seemed to know everything about Happy Days, a show I hadn’t even seen…)
One with us? I’m sorry but South Park may have instilled in me a competetive, nationalistic anti-Canada attitude. We are both in North America, we speak English, you’re just like us in The United States, but not really. I’m on to ‘you people’. Just kidding.I was in another discussion this week, it was about how all the conspiracies catching on around the world are pretty American, mainly that Donald Trump is here to save the world from the pedophiles. An article I read about that said that this was because the lingua franca of the internet is English, particularly American English. Our pop culture and it’s uglier byproducts truly have gotten everywhere. SOmebody commented that this is why countries like Australia and others actually have government programs to promote national popular culture, so the Americans don’t take over everything.
Same here in Canada. “CanCon” as it’s called–a certain percentage of programming that has to be Canadian–, although honestly almost every tv show I grew up with was American. Or sometimes British…
I prefer American culture to be honest, Australians don’t give me that nervous system thwack I look for in a show. they are often simple but happy, simple romance, simple crime, simple family. but I am increasingly frustrated by pop culture in general. I watched the first Wonder Woman a night or so ago (emergency time out from the inauguration), and spent a good chunk of it trying to figure out why Steve Trevor seemed so disoriented with his surroundings and uninterested in his onscreen love interest. I zoned out from the story itself.
Maybe that’s maturity. y’know like, an actual grown man who built a functioning mind and sense of himself, and then forged cognitive tools to make sense of the world around him. beautiful things, baby. possibly flawed, but worthwhile anyway.
Not from Latin America, but I think you might be underestimating just how ubiquitous American pop culture has been around the rest of the world just a little bit. We might not have lived in the same kind of houses as you guys, but we sure as heck ended up watching a lot of the same television programs featuring people living in those houses.
I am underestimating. I always thought that other than Rock and Roll that things like television shows didn’t get pumped out freely until at least the 80s and all the shows featured what seem to be very American family tropes.
So I think the cultural imperialism of Western media in the mid 20th century makes these throw backs more relatable world-wide than you might think. I have parents from central Africa and they’re very well acquainted with The Flintstones, I Love Lucy, Bewitched etc. Even though not everything made the transition, I don’t think it had to for this to work. Most people who watched any 1950s or 60s tv globally watched an American show even it was dubbed.
Ironically, here in Britain, we may have been the most insulated from American sitcoms – I’ve heard of these, but never seen any of them. Oh, except the Munsters. [we also had Sergeant Bilko]. We had a huge backlog of our own nostalgic sitcoms to pump out![although we didn’t really have an I Love Lucy equivalent. Hancock’s Half Hour arrived in the late 50s, but that was more a series of observational plays that happened to have the same actor. Our sitcom boom began in the 60s (Steptoe & Son, Till Death Do Us Part, The Likely Lads, The Liver Birds), and they were once extremely popular, but they had gone wildly out of fashion by the time I was young. Instead, the ‘classic’ era for us is the 70s – Dad’s Army, Porridge, Reggie Perin, Rising Damp, The Good Life, etc. These shows are a bit dated in style, but still pretty funny, and still shown on TV, though less continuously than when I was young.][the big differences between our sitcoms and the US versions: ours are much more misanthropic and barbed, even the ‘gentle’ ones. This is helped by the general rule that US comedies had comic actors in them, whereas UK comedies had ‘straight’, serious actors. (in the 60s and 70s there was also a lot of broad sex-farce comedy, which I get the impression wasn’t in style much in the US. It went out of style quickly here, too – it’s very camp and silly; in a way, I suppose you could say we had quite a division between classes: the more intellectually-minded could watch Porridge, etc (even though the protagonist is lower-class), while the easily-pleased watched On the Buses…. (*shudders*)).). Anyway, I guess that what I’m saying is that the UK I don’t think ever had the sort of “perfect life” happy comedy that the US was famous for, and that WandaVision is parodying. So for me it is a bit alien, yes, although I recognise the idea of it second-hand, as it were, from references in other US culture.]
Right I think the UK is one of the few places that has its own robust tradition of TV sitcoms so doesn’t just import the American stuff. There’s some cross pollination but it’s usually that a UK show was remade for US TV a la “Man of the House/Three’s Company” and whatever the source was for “All in the Family”
I’m told “All in the Family” was a loose remake of “Till Death Do Us Part”. Similarly, “Steptoe & Son” apparently had a US version called “Sanford and Son”. In fact, both shows were adapted by the same guy – Norman Lear – who then made a series of other shows (“Maude”, “The Jeffersons”, “Good Times”) as spinoffs from these, essentially making an entire career out of copying UK sitcoms – which shows, I guess, how isolated from each other the two ecosystems otherwise were![in later decades, the dreaded “US remake” became a running joke for UK comedies. The US remake inevitably made everyone more attractive, took out the bitterness and aggression, removed the distinctive features of the show, and almost always lasted only a single pilot episode…]
I watched loads of American shows growing up in the UK; Bewitched, Car 54, The Munsters, Partridge Family (although weirdly not the Brady Bunch from memory); they used to be summer holidays filler TV and then later on Channel 4 went through a nostalgia trip when these were always on on Friday evenings after The Tube, even stuff like Mr Ed.
Ah, going by the ‘The Tube’ reference, you’re an older generation than me! I’ve heard of some of those things, but by my era I was only actually aware of The Munsters being on TV.
[animation, however, was much more American – we had The Flintstones, the Jetsons, etc. – they weren’t that popular with my generation, but they were background filler everyone was familiar with.]
That’s weird to hear because I live in Britiain too and my British husband said that he definitely watched some of these shows growing up.
I don’t know about Argentina but in Norway they were showing reruns of sitcoms from the 60s onwards all through the 80s and 90s. I assume they were cheap afternoon fillers. So I know exactly what these episodes are referencing, despite growing up in an apartment in Oslo.
That only holds for people who had cable or satellite, though—right? Norway didn’t get any free-to-air commercial TV stations until TV 2 in the early 90s, and I don’t think NRK (the public broadcaster) showed all that many American sitcoms.
We had Swedish channels alongside NRK as well I believe. But yes I lived in a housing co-op in the east of Oslo that had cable TV paid for through our maintenance fees. We probably had more channels than a lot of people with more money.
Classic 50s and 60s American sitcoms were shown and repeated many times on UK TV channels from around the 1980s onwards. You don’t see much of them any more on TV in the UK outside of speciality satellite/cable channels, though, and thanks to the multi-channel digital TV era, you can’t guarantee that a large chunk of the country watched something just because it was on BBC1 or ITV on a Saturday evening. I’d be a little worried that younger viewers might not get the references, especially outside of the US, but older viewers should have that kind of memory.Besides, the “50s/60s American suburbia” sitcom genre has been riffed on endlessly in media in the years since it fell out of fashion. There have been plenty of movies, from genre pastiches like Pleasantville to out and out reboots like the Brady Bunch films.
I did find myself wondering what age/generation this was aimed at (though as a 48 year old I loved it). MCU movies are truly for all ages. I don’t have kids but my friends who do watch virtually all of them with kids as young as like 6. To enjoy this you’d have to have a pretty good knowledge of the early 60s sitcoms it was an homage to. I saw “Bewitched” (the main source material for the 2nd episode of WandaVision) in reruns in the late 70s and into the 80s, but I’m pretty sure it had fallen out of syndication packages by the 90s. Have people under say 40 ever even seen these kinds of multi-camera sitcoms? Or do they only know them by the many parodies and homages?
Yeah, I don’t know if I mentioned this elsewhere, but I think things are different for the most recent generation, especially for the kids growing up now watching whatever they want on YouTube and not what was broadcast on the networks or even expanded cable.As time has gone on options have expanded every year. I remember only having network tv and watching late morning and early afternoon, Bewitched, Gilligan, My Three Dad’s, Lucy for years. Then we got cable and Nic at Nite which just blew up the amount of old TV we could watch. I think you are right that a lot of these have fallen out of syndacation.But more to my point, we would have Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies on in the afternoon and on USA or TNT they would play old school Bugs Bunny from the 40s. A lot of the jokes in those shows seemed to be for adults as well as children. How many times did a character do a James Cagney impression? There was a schtick where bugs would slick his hair back and croon into a large microphone like very young Sinatra. Hitler showed up from time to time. I know pop culture from decades before my time due to these cartoons. I don’t think kids media for the last few decades references much from the past or at least kids aren’t exposed to content 40 years old like we still saw in the 80s. Those were the best but totally racist and probably too violent for kids these days.
My family is likely atypical, but we occasionally watch The Dick Van Dyke Show on Hulu, so my kids were all in. A lot of the living room/kitchen set from the first episode was clearly inspired by DvD.
I’m 39 and I grew up watching all these shows on Nick at Nite and TV Land in the 80s & 90s. Hell, TV Land wasn’t even launched until 1996, showing things like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Petticoat Junction, etc.
US shows like Bewitched were syndicated widely; I remember watching an episode dubbed into Russian about 15 years ago, and I’ve definitely watched a lot of old US TV in Latin America. Sure, the Chinese market would be an issue, but is D+ even in China yet?
I totally forgot a relevant story to this conversation. Several years ago I was in Paris in a restaurant by myself enjoying the band. The band was excellent, two acoustic guitars, upright bass, and they were doing a mix of Django Reinhardt gypsy jazz, pretty deep stuff, Parisian cafe music then a set of more popular tunes. I was amused when the guitar player sang Take me Home, Country Roads. He starts the next tune and it’s a little funky compared to the rest of the music. It was odd, amd then strangely familiar and I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was. The main singer was taking a break and sitting across from me smoking a cigarette and we were not paying mush attention to each other and then the guitar player begins to sing, “Love,…….exicting and neeewwwwww. Come aboard, we’re inviting yoooouuuuuuu. The LOVE BOAT, dah, dah, dah,dah,da,da” I did one of those totally uncontrollable laughs that bursts from the the area in between the nasal cavity and throat. Kind of the opposite of a snort laugh. If I had been drinking my beer at that moment I would have covered the singer. So I reverse snort laugh and face palm myself and the singer hhears and sees me andd then she breaks out into the biggest laugh in the whole joint and it was great. She and I ended up buddies and drank together for the rest of the night. It was soo much fun and good music. It was all about a lonely evening in Paris and The LOOOOOVEEEE BOOOOOAAAAT!
Yeah, FWIW, my husband is British and I felt like a lot of the homage-y stuff went over his head a bit. (Granted he also didn’t grow up watching reruns of American sitcoms -anyone who did would probably get it)
How would a Sokovian child who spent most of her life in captivity (mid-1990s) know about American black-and-white sitcoms of the 1960s? She wouldn’t. Does someone yet unseen have her in captivity, and her consciousness has been filled with a custom TV channel to keep her under control, a channel the showrunners are calling WandaVision?
possibly one of the greatest flaws of American programming, they don’t actually know how foreign audiences think and process stuff, and even if they did, any attempts to work around and through that would result in broad nothingness. I’m watching their ABC news right now, second half of the inauguration coverage *snooze* wakes up *snooze*
but this show does look cool and once I finish the Mandalorian, I’ll watch this too. because cool.
Who woulda thunk we’d see Debra Jo Rupp in the MCU? That was pretty cool.
At this point, any actor is a good bet to be in the MCU at some point.
Am I the only one absolutely bored of this show so far? Like, we all know the twist that this is all a reality of Wanda’s design, so these glitches don’t carry much weight or mystery to me. The sitcom plotlines are tired. I feel the Truman Show captured these themes brilliantly already.However, I’m not an MCU stan so alot of these references are lost on me, and I don’t have any particular connectionto this couple. So I guess that might be playing with it?
That explains it. I’d argue WandaVision’s intrigue is entirely based on the viewers foreknowledge rather than anything the show is actually doing.
And yet, I know nothing of the comics and I loved this. I’m so confused but the eye candy is more than enough for me.
But I already know that the Vision is dead and this is all a construct of her imagination/powers (marvel’s old “woman too emotional to be this powerful” arc. See: Phoenix) so, I don’t understand what other parts I’m missing. I know the Archetype of Scarlet Witch and her loose ties to X-Men (which is a woefully underrealized franchise)I see all of the dumb nods to Marvel. (The Stark radio made me ROLL my eyes.) I wish the show subverted the sitcoms more than COMPLETELY recreating them. The only thing that really stuck out to me was the boss choking, but by the second episode I really wanted the plot to move along instead of a “Ooh why is her nose bleeding!? OOHoooOohhhOohhh!” moment wedged between dryass sitcom.
Yes
I’m enjoying the show so far, but I feel like ironically the pacing of the show with a “tv show” meta so far doesn’t work so well as a week-to-week show. Unlike The Mandalorian, where each episode feels complete, this show feels more like it should just be binge-watched. The episode ends have too much build up and not enough resolution.
Maybe this will change in later episodes, but so far it looks like the plot is set up to snowball, so I’m wondering if the release schedule is wrong for the type of show it is…
Legit disappointed that the helicopter didn’t say “THANOS” on the side.
“This is a funny jibe at the vagueness of the jobs of most sitcom dads,..”Good point. I would add a jab at a lot of white collar work these days.
Honestly I don’t think it was either. I think it was just meant to show absurd the situation is and how it’s not “real”
Yeah I thought it was meant to show how the world is lacking in detail, thus causing the characters to question it further and possibly be close to breaking out that way…Spoiler? Possibly episode 3…like that one early conversation of Vision’s that Wanda undoes.
“Witch in the comics could manipulate reality itself. Is this what we’re seeing?”Yes.
Which, on top of this being delightful, makes me now want a solo Scarlet Witch movie EVEN MORE.
They keep promising….
When did they promise a solo movie for her in the first place?I don’t need it either. These show we will get allows much more experimenting , character study and it’s being produced just like the movies. There is some call for every single avenger to get a solo movie from someone and it’s just something I don’t need for many of them.
Series is the way to go. Fury, Rhodey, Hawkeye, they’ll get hours more than some movie for these series, with the potential for consecutive seasons. The amount of time for development in these streaming shows compared to the films is just amazing.
I’m all Marveled-out too. No Disney+ for me, I guess.
Agreed, although she apparently plays a huge part in Dr. Strange 2
The over/under is this show doesn’t go well for Wanda and she is the big bad of the next Doctor Strange movie. She may also be the reason for all the dimension hoping characters in the next Spider-man
Aw, I hope not, I genuinely love Wanda & don’t want to see someone who has been brutalized by so many different people (mostly men) turn into a villain.
Yeah it’s a tired trope and I hope it doesn’t happen. The MCU has done a lot to make the movies about the spirit of the comics and not the exact plots. Hoping they take the Wanda/Vision epic into a different direction that doesn’t end with a scorned and abused crazy woman rewriting the universe. Note: Without spoiling to much, Vision isn’t the one who fucks up Wanda in the comics. At least not directly. Visions always been a pretty stand up dude, the problem is robot men tend to have memories wiped when they are rebuilt after death and poor Vision has been killed several times at this point in the comics and his love for Wanda always seems to get reset after.
Episode 1 is heavily Dick Van Dyke Show, which was early 60s, but early 60s TV was still very culturally 50s, and it was also decent bit of I Love Lucy.
Now, episode 2 was pretty much entirely Bewitched, so there’s your post-Jackie late 60s.
Wrong 1: Donna reed, Ozzie and Harriet, I love Lucy, twilight zone for both 1 &2 2: dick van dyke, bewitched, I dream of genie
The set in episode one was practically a duplicate of the Dick Van Dyke Show set.
Episode one was the Danny Thomas show episode two was the dick van dyke show set
The layout of the house in ep 1 is a 100% match to the layout of the house in The Dick Van Dyke Show.The layout of the house in ep 2 is a 100% match to the layout of the house in Bewitched.
In fact, Dick Van Dyke consulted on the set.
The pants on Wanda were a bit give away. Samantha wearing pants regularly on the Bewitched was scene as “controversial” at the time.
Like I said before BOTH episodes were heavily indebted to Bewtiched. Wanda is the Scarlet Witch. She has to hide her powers but also sometimes uses them to help her husband and get out of wacky jams. The whole thing is more Bewtiched than any other classic sitcom
I kind of feel like I want to say, Wanda, you can trust the voice. I mean especially if I suspect who is charge of the voice (I keep thinking there had to be a reason Chloe Bennett had not altered her Daisy hair at all, yes quarantine and all, but not dying it a color beyond blonde or purple) but also did her former team create this issue..
There were a number of small references to the comics, many of which were from the circa 1985 Vision and the Scarlet Witch limited series. My favorite were Glamour and Illusion who in the comics were neighbors who were both magicians and thieves.
I don’t know. I kind of didn’t like it. I get it, they are doing a 50s sitcom. Get on with it. Maybe I’m too impatient but as much as I enjoy old black and white sitcoms (I was just watching Beverly Hillbillies on Pluto yesterday), this was just not charming enough for two episodes.
The red of the toaster didn’t remind me of Scarlet Witch but of the red soul stone on Vision’s forehead.
It appeals to a specific taste. For those of us who grew up on Bewitched and I Love Lucy reruns, we loved it. It was a different kind of comedy.
Yes you are too impatient. But, a lot of people seem to not be able to just let the story play out. It is what it is.
The same kind of guys that I suspect would complain “is that it already?!” were they to blow their load early on.
Or just enjoy the pure silly of it.
That would be cool. But, its also becoming less and less of a thing. Just having fun with it doesn’t justify time spent as much anymore.
Depends on who you are and where you are at in life. In my 40s with two kids and an obsessive job. I don’t have a lot of free time and when I get it I gravitate way to to lighter and sillier and fun stuff then I do “serious entertainment”. I actively groan these days when I find out movies are over two hours long. Especially things like WW84 which could have told a better story in 90 minutes
It’s a 9-episode series, not a 3-act movie. Expectations need to be moderated appropriately.
Actually the stone on Vision’s head is the mind stone and it’s yellow (in the MCU)
The Beach Boys released “Help Me, Rhonda” in 1965. This fits my theory that the first two episodes are set in the early to mid-1960s, which everyone confuses with the 1950s. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Wanda, Agnes, and Dottie’s hair and wardrobe are clearly post-Jackie Kennedy.There was a big clothing/ set change between the first and second episodes. Which suggests the first was 1950s and the second was 1960s. With the transition being the cold open when they go from two single beds (I Love Lucy) to a double bed.
Just checking: Did anyone else notice that the light on the Stark toaster was red? I think they aimed for subtle and got it.Also the sound the toaster made was the repulsor gun, right?
Yeah when it’s first pressed down (activated? I’m not sure the correct way to describe using a toaster) that was definitely the repulsor sound effect used, after that it seemed to be a pretty generic detonating bomb sound as the light flashed red.
Oh that’s interesting! The blood from the cut was red too.
I’m going with the working theory that the toaster represented the bomb that blew up her parents (represented by the actors in the commercial).
My 10 year old godson wanted to chat about the show today and I explained to him that both commercials represented something significant, if not borderline traumatic, that occured in Wanda’s life. The next commercials in the series should help clarify this trend, if it’s real.
It did seem Cornballer-esque
The helicopter toy was also Iron Man colors
i pirated both episodes and they were terrible.
Sy Ableman?!?
The helicopter wasn’t just red. It was red and gold, like the Iron Man suit.
Referencing another dead MCU character.
I thought it was… kind of terrible. The mystery stuff around the edges is neat, but so far it’s 90% intentionally bad sitcom with a grating laugh track.
I don’t see what else anyone was supposed to expect given the widely circulated synopsis. It played out exactly as I thought it would.
I think it’s a matter of mileage but I don’t think they are going for intentionally bad and more of a sincere homage. Me and my wife, who is a huge old show watcher, were laughing at the silliness.
The only thing that kinda ruins this show for me, is the Cloverfield feeling. It was obviously intended to be some kind’ve standalone genre exploration, but it was shoehorned into the MCU with Wanda and Vision added to it, for the name recognition.
The WandaVision theme song from episode 2 is quite catchy. I hate it and love it.
I think they were going for an “I Dream Of Jeannie” vibe despite the “Bewitched”-style visuals.
The helicopter was red and yellow, no? Iron Man colours.
By the end of the second episode I was beggining to feel concerned that we still haven’t seen Agnes’ husband “Ralph”.um….um… “FLOURISH!!!”
The often-named-but-never-seen character is a staple of many sitcoms, especially ones that are cited by on-screen characters as sources of stress and/or trouble. Notable examples:-Maris Crane, Fraser-Bob Sacamano, Seinfeld-Dr Richard Nygard, Parks and Recreation
Vera, Norm’s wife on Cheers, is the first one I thought of.
A little bit Howard’s mom on Big Bang Theory, though she is heard if not seen.
I liked the first two episodes but there’s little doubt this whole
season would be a better watch if you could binge it in one go.
I want that toaster! 😀
Sounded like Cap on the radio, asking Wanda, “who did this you, Wanda?”
The second time sounded like a different man.
It’s Jimmy Wu, the FBI Agent from Ant-Man and the Wasp, who’s been seen in some of the trailers.
It’s spelled “Jimmy Woo” actually.
So you’re saying that voice was Randall Park?? I need to go turn it back on for a sec and listen again.
I’d love to see some reviews of this series from people who haven’t been watching the Marvel movies. I found one, from Time magazine, where the critic seemed to find the third episode baffling. I say this because I haven’t seen a Marvel movie since… ummm, Iron Man 3 I guess (I was a heavy X-Men reader as a kid and teen and have—more or less—liked the movies, but various things have gotten in the way of watching more from family illnesses and unemployment, to lack of interest). I’m in a better place now and can watch and enjoy this show, and love the cast and enjoyed the first two episodes (though minor details bugged me—like that they would never serve red wine on the Dick van Dyke show—drinks, sure, but… Wine at dinner was actually not that common, even at dinner parties, but yes I’m being anal). But I guess I’m worried that I’ll have no idea what’s going on in an episode or two.
I do find it funny reading comments from people wondering if they’ll like the show if they haven’t read the comics. The Marvel comics are so incredibly complex at this point–while I think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is starting to feel that way to me too, they’re still completely separate. If there were a true TV series to reflect Marvel comics, it would have to have as many episodes as a daytime soap opera (and actually, wouldn’t be oh so different).
In fairness, Marvel did go to the trouble of creating Marvel Legends, which are basically little 7-8 minute recaps of characters from the movies without having to watch all of the movies. If you haven’t seen the two episodes for Wanda and Vision, I strongly recommend them.
Thanks!!
Plus the show starts in media res and doesn’t explain anything. So it’s a mystery to everyone
First thing I thought of when that beekeeper showed up was A.I.M., but maybe I’m looking too hard for tie-ins.
I think it’s pretty clearly a AIM nod.
I never knew AOL Instant Messenger could be so nefarious
Why does this “review” consist almost entirely of a beat-by-beat breakdown of the episodes’ plots?Awful.
Because they have to reach a word count even though there’s not much to actually review. That’s the problem.
Seriously fucking lame. Review the damn show or don’t. Don’t give me a beat by beat summary. Ugh.
Because they’re hedging around the “common (comic book) knowledge” that Scarlet Witch has the power of warping reality. It wasn’t shown to this degree in the films, but the show is playing it as if we don’t know that Wanda is capable of doing this, which is a strange choice even if there are going to be more layers and motivations.
That’s not at all a good reason why the “reviewer” just wrote a boring and way-too-detailed summary of the episodes instead of an actual review.
I mean, this is already the best thing the MCU has ever done. Full stop.The Fincher reference in the second episode with the audience shouting that one particular line over and over, and with “box” having a double meaning for TV, was just chef’s kiss. I had at least 3 moments of sheer panic watching these eps. The fact that the credits give you clues to the overall narrative, too, is positively Lynch-ian.This feels like “a moment” for the MCU. 100% serious.
I agree. I think this is the best thing the MCU has ever done. I love it. I’m really surprised that more people aren’t saying this
Not going to lie: the second episode’s foreign language credits are a bit spoiler-y, since some of the character’s names change. (No one we didn’t already know was going to be in the series….but it does put some pieces together.)
I guess there had to be some sort of reward for making it through all of those… thanks for the forewarning.
I get that they going for the whole 50’s/60’s TV sitcom aesthetic but did they really have to take it so far as to broadcast it in 4.3 aspect ratio? That was just painful to watch. Now that they’re in color, I hope this changes in the coming episodes. I don’t think I can go a whole season like this.On a side note, Paul Bettany channeling Rik Mayall in the second episode during the talent show was fantastic! I doubt that was the intent but it was great, nonetheless. I got Young Ones/Drop Dead Fred vibes.RIP Rik Mayall
How is it painful to watch something in an aspect ratio used by literally any film* made before the early 50s?*Okay not Napoleon It’s because of folks like you we have to see old shows on streaming with a bunch of extraneous garbage on the sides. All aspect ratios are fine, respect the black bars.
Uh, I guess it would be fine if I still had a 4:3 TV but watching it with giant black bars on either side is painful and there’s no reason for it. You can still make a homage to the golden age of TV with black and white, wardrobe and plot tropes of the era and broadcast it in 16:9.Watching old programs is something different because it’s impossible to upgrade them to widescreen without stretching them but to be honest, I don’t really watch too many old shows on streaming partially because of that.
“Painful”? Uggh, folks like you are why we had to put up with pan-and-scan for so long. Philistines. The reason is that different aspect ratios give you a different shape of a frame to compose in. That’s good, variety is good! And since you know the whole idea here is to recreate the feel of an old sitcom, using the wrong aspect ratio would take away from that effect! It’d be like if The Lighthouse were made in 2.35:1, or The Artist were in color because a lot of people don’t like black and white (and don’t get me started on them.) We should not be confined to one aspect ratio simply because that’s how TVs are shaped now.
Yeah, I’m spoiled.I’m sorry if I expect the best possible quality from a trillion dollar company who’s streaming service I pay for to watch one of two programs that passes for content and whatever PIXAR movie that’s currently not running in theaters.
A 4:3 aspect ratio with pillarboxing is not lower quality, you idiot. It’s simply a different shape. Black and white is not lower quality than color, Academy ratio is not lower quality than 16:9, that’s not how “quality” works.
I’m not saying that picture quality itself is bad but having giant black bars on both sides isn’t necessary. You maybe praising their commitment to the aesthetic now but will say the same 10 episodes in or more?But thanks for calling me out as an idiot for having an opinion. You might as well call everyone with internet an idiot, so yeah, GFY, from one idiot to another.
Me? I watch old movies and TV shows all the time! Pillarboxing literally does not bother me at all, nor should it bother anyone who understands how cinematography works. I used to prefer letterboxed movies on my 13″ SD TV. I sought out letterboxed VHS releases (which were a thing for like a couple of years.)The best aspect ratio is whatever the director chooses for the job.
why, cable only costs $500 dollars a month, you expect “quality” too?
Does this really look so bad?
or this?
It seems even the editors at The A.V. Club would agree.
If the show were in 16:9 it’d feel like a compromise, like “we’re doing this because it’s what people expect not because it’s how a show from then would actually look.”
As long as they don’t do vertical video
Who cares about the aspect ratio when the content itself is nonsense filler? The creators knew they had nothing, so they waste our time with warmed over sitcom tropes. After watching an hour of this I remember why I no longer watch network television. If you cut out the irrelevant bits you might get an 10 minutes of a decently unsettling show. As it is I have no problem skipping entire scenes of Wandavision
What makes it “painful”? This is just a bizarre take. Maybe a new variant of the people who lost their minds over letterboxin in the 90s
Gonna strongly disagree. I think the 4:3 aspect ratio was just one of the clever touches. I thought only boomers complained about black bars on their fancy TVs
You gonna feel the same way after a whole season? Maybe 2?If I were a boomer, I’d live for this shit, gobbling up everything from Nick’ At Night.
You seem to be convinced that everyone is going to be somehow optically fatigued by having black bars on their TV screen.Some of us really really don’t mind at all and don’t see why it’s such a burden for you.
It’s a limited series. Every episode advances the sitcom time line so I’m sure the last few episodes will be in 16:9But yeah. I would be fine with a 1960s sitcom starring Wanda and Vision going on for 5 season at 4:3. Just like I’m okay watching old shows in the proper aspect ratio and I was okay watching films in letterbox on a 4:3 screen. Until you mentioned it on this thread I hadn’t even realized it. My mind just processed it with the black and white as “old sitcom”.
I also got big Rik Mayall vibes from Bettany in the second episode!Although I cannot get behind your aspect ratio complaints. People not being able to deal with different aspect ratios resulted in the abominations of pan-and-scan movies during the square TV era because people didn’t like the black bars on the top and bottom and now the zoomed in or stretched out images that used to be 4:3 because people don’t like the black bars on the sides on their widescreen TV. I prefer whatever aspect ratio the creators intended.
didn’t even notice, can’t imagine noticing so much it bothers me.
Watch it on an iPad. Problem solved. And when you feel yourself get the urge to complain about the top-and-bottom letterboxing when later episodes shift to modern broadcast aspect ratios, switch back to your TV.
If you don’t have the curtains to adjust the aspect ratio of the screen to the material being shown like a movie theater, that’s on you.
Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen ARE: The Dangerous Brother And Sister!
Fully with you on the Rik Mayall tribute delivered by Paul Bettany.
Can’t wait for “I Love Loki” and “Thor’s Company”.
The only MCU show I’m interested in is She-Hulk, so WandaVision wasn’t exactly something I was clamoring for. But what the heck, I like old school sitcoms (in fact, I spent the summer of 2019 watching I Love Lucy, Bewitched, and Gomer Pyle.) so I’ll check this out. It’s good they released 2 episodes because, not knowing what to expect, it gave me time to adjust, and re-calibrate my expectations for what this show would be.
First episode was whatever, but I liked the second one quite a bit. The animated inner workings of Vision was hilariously simplistic, and I love that dumbing down such a complex being in a way we can understand, is itself an era-appropriate way to convey an idea. The overall scenario in ep 2 was just more interesting. There’s a delicious glee to watching how Wanda is going to cover up up all of Vision’s magic faux pas (the piano gag in particular was quite clever). Olsen in general is pitch perfect playing this part.
But I think both episodes tread the same ground without much in the way of new information. Or exposition. Or even something resembling a plot. It’s all a big meta joke for right now, so it feels kind of skippable to me (?) until something important happens. Sure, I might miss some clues, but this is mystery box television- clues is all they are, and the design here is to string viewers along, and I’m very much feeling that. Only without the engagement of a clear narrative.
“That was my grandmother’s piano…”
I’d say give the next episode a try, as it apparently picks up. Then if your still not into it go ahead and drop it
I love Fred Melamed as the boss. His amalgam of every early sitcom boss from Mel Cooley to Larry Tate is annoying, arrogant and menacing all in one.
Old sitcoms made child me basically believe that bosses are some sort of god-like beings that rule the workplace with impunity.
It gives me so much joy to have outlasted so many of my dopey bosses and in being instrumental in getting the really evil ones fired.
Wasn’t this an episode of last season’s Legends Of Tomorrow?
What Marvel Universe organization uses this logo?
So S.W.O.R.D. is doing this? Or just observing what is going on within her head… Maybe she is catatonic and they have her hooked up to monitor her, this is the output, but they may or may not be the cause.
It could be SWORD but the beekeeper at the end of episode 2 points hard to AIM
The Beach Boys released “Help Me, Rhonda” in 1965. This fits my theory that the first two episodes are set in the early to mid-1960s, which everyone confuses with the 1950s. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Wanda, Agnes, and Dottie’s hair and wardrobe are clearly post-Jackie Kennedy.I was under the impression that each sitcom iteration is a different episode. So Episode 1 was the 1950s, Episode 2 was the 1960s and the next iterations we’ll see will be ‘80s and ‘90s. Not sure if future episodes will be fully sitcom-y based on the assumption that eventually we have to find out what is going on.
Why do you think they’re skipping the 70s?
Typo – I must have gotten distracted while typing. Should say 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Not meant as a conspiracy theory, I promise!
Haha ok no worries
I for one really enjoyed it. The goofy, tongue-in-cheek sit-com parody pared with surreal David Lynch dread is a jarring but entertaining contrast. I’m hooked.
Watched it, enjoyed it immensely. Once again amazed at what a great job Marvel Films does over all with their characters. Watched it with my 15yo son and afterwards just to give him some context, watched an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show (the one where they tell the story of Richie’s birth).It was a great evening of TV!
I never saw an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, but I’ll keep that one in mind to compare it with the first episode. Also maybe the much-lauded walnut episode.
Yes do! And for the 2nd episode watch an early episode of Bewitched! Disney+ should provide a list of companion episodes to watch because WV is serious homage/parody of those shows and if you’ve never seen em, you’re missing out.
I have seen some episodes of Bewitched with my dad so I get the homage to the second episode (the title sequence was such a delight). And I’m trying to remember if Wanda twitched her nose at all.
Red as the color that breaks through the black-and-white reality reminds me of similar moments in Schindler’s List.The color reveal really evoked Pleasantville for me.
I had trouble trying to describe this show to coworkers who don’t keep up with Marvel, but Pleasantville with a side of Inception was what I settled on; the neighbours all remind me of the hostile extras within a dreamworld in Inception.
No. No. No. Im sure it will improve, and I get it, theyre setting something up, but IT WAS BORING AS FUCK. Really, really, not good, and did not deserve an A. Everyone i know was saying “oh my god, what is this bullshit”?
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 episode 14.
Has Elizabeth Olsen done comedy before? Because she is like perfect at the “quirky sitcom housewife” thing. The whole cast is great but I’m surprised just how easily she fits in to that dynamic. And of course bringing in people like Hahn and Caulfield is gonna win me over quick.
I thought these first two episodes were incredibly boring. It didn’t have anything to offer over an old episode of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie. I know it will get better, but ugh! So Boring!
By the third and fourth episodes, the “Previously on…” clips will be enough to let us know which bits were TRULY important in those two frustratingly boring first episodes.
Patience…
It’s obvious by now that whatever’s going on, Wanda has changed the most. For instance, she has overtly magical powers. This was the case in the comics, but not the films where her abilities were variations on telekinesis and hurling some kind of projectiles.
MCU Wanda can also create mental illusions as seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
I enjoyed it and appreciated it. I also found myself growing annoyed by the magic show. A part of it may be that I generally dislike that kind of sitcom “wacky misunderstanding”. I enjoy good farce. The actors did a wonderful job. I just … I was done. Good enough. And as this epsiode ends with color, clearly the conceit will shift for episode 3 to be a little less cloying. I’m also wildly intrigued. The mystery and unfolding can’t be rushed, nor can it be held at bay too long. This is a fascinating exercise. Will they succeed?
As someone who’s always wanted more of Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, I feel like I didn’t really get that character in these first two episodes. I completely understand what they’re doing, I love the switching in filming techniques when something’s off, there’s lots of good classic sitcom spoofing, and the performances are great. It’s just that it feels like they’re serializing the premise of one Buffy episode, and the comedy isn’t strong enough for it to be the main focal point. As a spoof, it often excels, but usually just feels exactly like what it’s supposed to be spoofing. I will be patient, but so far, it feels like they were dragging out the stuck in a dream/unreality/simulation/mind palace for too long with not enough substance. It says something when the episodes together are only an hour, yet I feel impatient. There might be a good way to spoof old sitcoms and that’s your entire show, but this ain’t it.
I don’t know about anyone else, but the sitcom “gimmick” worked fantastic. It managed to actually feel like the early sitcoms without being a parody. I was actually genuinely interested in the sitcom nature even without the underlying mystery.
“This fits my theory that the first two episodes are set in the early to mid-1960s, which everyone confuses with the 1950s.”The first episode was clearly set in a 1950’s sitcom universe; the second episode was set in a 1960’s sitcom universe. I expect episode 3 will likely exist in, like, a 1970’s era, Norman Lear style sitcom universe.
I’m betting “for the children” is going to become very ominous. Notice that the talent show is apparently “for the children”, but we haven’t seen any children at all yet? And the other cast members keep making jokes or references to how Wanda and Vision don’t have children. Wanda’s sudden pregnancy is her direct response.
The watch also said HYDRA on it.
Can we hope that Vision is either properly dead, or properly alive (as in, he can appear in movies again). As opposed to Schrodinger’s Coulson, who’s alive on TV (some of the time) but dead in movies and never the twain shall meet.
I was quite excited about this show after seeing the sneak previews. Now, having watched the first two episodes, I’m very much on the fence about it. There’s just not enough interesting things going on to keep me hooked. So far it’s pretty much just wacky hijinx, but I can get (better-written) sitcom-style humor in Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched reruns, so if things don’t pick up soon, I may just give up, sadly. I feel like with the slow burn that they’re doing on this show, it would’ve worked a lot better to release all the episodes at once so people could binge through and get to the good stuff without having to wait for the next ep to drop.
Once you remove the Dick Van Dyke and the Bewitched stuff, how much is left? How much of that is important going into the following episodes? I can imagine someone at the first meeting going, “Who doesn’t love 60s sitcoms?”
I want to know what they’re using Vision to compute.
Have I misremembered, or was the helicopter very much in red/yellow Iron Man livery?
The red and Agatha Harkness tell us the villain will be Mephisto — you’re incorrect in your assessment of Agatha, as she turned on Wanda as an ally of Mephisto.
If Scarlet Witch could somehow revive Vision, do they explain why she couldn’t revive her brother Quicksilver as well?
Vision is partially technology no matter what his confusing backstory is (did Jarvis, the AI, die in the films too, and brought about Vision?) so that could play a little into why he could plausibly come back while other dead characters might not.
And Quicksilver had several 20mm holes blasted through him. Probably harder to bring a regular ole’ meatbag back from something like that.
I wish they tapped David Lynch to direct an episode of this. The first two episodes were so Lynch, I loved it. I knew nothing about the show going in, but was pleasantly surprised by how well done it was. Really looking forward to watching the rest of the series.Additionally, I like to think about the dumb kid who turns the show off after only the first 5-10 minutes confused that the super-hero show they thought they were tuning into is actually an “old fashioned, black and white, laugh track sitcom”.
If Lynch did this there would have been one quarter the dialogue and most of it would have been Wanda and Vision silently walking around the home. Also if Lynch did this it wouldn’t be comprehensible.
I’m really enjoying it so far. They’ve nailed the mid-60s sitcom pastiche while incorporating enough mystery to keep us on our toes and an obvious invitation to be in on the joke. Also Kathryn Hahn was born to play that role. Even the way she says “Wanda” just reminds me of watching reruns of Bewitched and I Love Lucy in the afternoons.I’m not a comics book reader and only a casual MCU movie fan (I’ve seen them all but I couldn’t tell you all the various interconnections) – what was the logo that showed up on the notebook at the end of the first episode? It wasn’t the Hydra logo (I know that much) but I don’t remember seeing it before.
Also, the joke of a rogue bunny in an episode featuring Emma Caulfield was not lost on me.
Apparently it’s a SWORD logo, which in effect just makes it parallel to SHIELD from the films. They apparently changed what the acronym means so who knows where they go with it— if it’s meant to be a one to one successor or if the more violent vs defensive acronym means anything since they seem to play it sinister.
I think that Wanda is kind of over-writing the reality of a real town called Westview, and all the other “characters” are real people who live there, and are aware, at least to a certain extent, but are going along with it because they are scared sh*tless. When Vision goes to the neighbourhood watch meeting, and they try telling him it’s members only, they all showed a bit more tension in the first few seconds. I think they were meeting to discuss what to do. Same with the wives, who apparently meet, but never invite Wanda. Emma Caulfield seemed actually wary, and frightened of Wanda, and all the wives seemed a bit more nervous than they should. The “For The Children” thing might be they are going along with this because all their kids have disappeared in this reality, and so that’s a phrase they say to remind themselves and each other to play along with and appease Wanda and Vision while they try to figure something out.
Yes, I got a sense it was like Disney’s Once Upon a Time, where the characters in the turn are all cursed to be part of that world… which possibly sets Wanda as the Evil Queen. Then there was episode 3…
Uh…why is this show getting coverage?It’s not a real show. The content is ironic, and the jokes are intentionally bad. The only “real” bit is the gambit to escape from this Tranquility Lane lotus eater machine, and it’s already super telegraphed. It’s just a big prologue for the next Marvel thing.
AITA for breathing a sigh of relief when it wasn’t Debra Jo Rump who died recently? I don’t mean to disrespect Tanya Roberts but I typically enjoyed Kitty whenever she was on screen and would be really sad when she died.
In “my” era of Marvel Comics, the Scarlet Witch and the Vision are married, and they have two kids. I’m still kind of mad that Marvel undid all that. More good things have been destroyed by bad writers who felt the biggest way to make a splash was to break things.
I am sure someone already said this, but wasn’t the first episode set in the 50s and the second in the 60s? From the various previews it looks like the show will move through the decades, so I don’t think it is correct to assume that the first two episodes are set in the same era.
“This fits my theory that the first two episodes are set in the early to mid-1960s, which everyone confuses with the 1950s.”Pretty sure the first episode was 50s and the second was 60s. The aspect ratio, filming style, and even colour grading (even though it’s black and white), along with wardrobe style, all change from episode 1 to 2.
The end credits are stunning btw. I’d watch just for that.
I here to represent the viewers who know nothing about Marvel stuff. I have no idea about these characters’ backstories, nor do I particularly care (nothing against those who do care, mind you). I have however watched a lot of early sixties sitcoms in my time, and so I’m very much here for this show in all its surreal glory.
Marvel put up a vignette on the costumes today, it’s only a minute long but shows off the way they used real color to help set the tone for the b&w episodes.Of note: Wanda’s magician girl attire is red. So even in b&w they threw in that reference to her comics outfit.
I’m enjoying the show, but they really could have made it clearer in the first episodes why we’re supposed to care about Wanda and Vision and their new situation at all. Superheroes trapped in a sitcom is intriguing, but we can all agree they were not the most dynamic characters of the Avengers movies. It could have really used more detail to show us why this status quo is important. It’s only by the third episode that three characters, at the same time, clumsily give away they’re working for a secret sci-fi organization, something that could have been alluded to in ways throughout. That in particular screams lazy writing. So far the different eras of sitcom feels more like a gimmick. I’ll gladly bite my tongue if the show ends up being about the shifting cultural attitudes of the American middle-class or our obsession with TV, but so far I don’t quite see it.
My theory so far is that though Wanda is in control of this pocket dimension of alternate reality she’s created around this small town, we’re going to find out there’s another higher power that has forced her or tricked her into this headspace, to create her own prison.Based on the way Kevin Fiege often synthesized, simplifies, and streamlines the original comics stories, my guess is that Grim Reaper (who’s headgear symbol appeared in the background of the credits of one of the first two eps) in the process of trying to take revenge on Wanda (for an off-camera whatever) has summoned Mephisto and used the demon’s power to warp her mind into doing this and forming this bubble of alternate reality. When she realizes none of it is real and Vision is still dead and her children never existed, there will be some kind of explosion of power in the final fight against Mephisto (or whoever the final big bad is) that cracks reality into the Marvel version of the multiverse, and allows both Vision & her children to still exist (perhaps at an older age, for the obvious comic reasons), and also mixes up Marvel continuity in other ways, which will be dealt with in Doctor Strange 2 (bringing in Mutants, the F4, etc.)
Yeah, I get the sense it’s not all her. The best prisons are the ones one doesn’t want to leave, so setting up a world where she can have her heart’s desire then leaving her to enforce it seems like a good strategy.
Exactly.
Meh, not a fan. Too much of the writers standing off screen doing the “nah-nah, we know something you don’t!” thing. Not enough plot or character development. Knowing this is all some sort of simulation or something and none of it has any consequences at all for anyone makes me not care what happens in each episode. Being constantly hit over the head with a nostalgic TV shaped baseball bat really is painful. It feels like they spent more time coming up with just the right TV tropes than they did writing anything resembling a story. All style, no substance, C-.
I hate this show with all consuming passion. Even at 20 odd minutes, episodes feels too long as you wait for characters to catch up to what’s really going on. It’s nice that Marvel Studios can waste money recreating sitcoms but it’s just empty style, the actors are playing dress up. All the hammy nonsense isn’t worth the one or two minutes of clarity that happens (always in the last 5 minutes)
Wow. an “A-”, really? This was the most boring show I have seen in a long time. I honestly don’t know what I was supposed to get out of it.
I’m glad I didn’t read this review until after seeing at least episode 4. I didn’t want to know where on the MCU timeline the show was set until it explicitly said. This review certainly made so big assumptions on that, which yes especially in hindsight these two episodes hint at.
I’ll point out something that I didn’t see anyone else, I noticed how multi-cultural for the “times” it was.
Outstanding show.
Kitty Foreman! Yes, please!
This is exhibit A in why the movies needed to share the limelight Tony
& Steve were hogging. Elizabeth Olsen & Paul Bettany have great
comedic & romantic chemistry. At least they finally got to tap into
it here.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2021/03/05/does-wandavision-deserve-derision/
I’m not a fan of romantic lead Vision looking like a normal Paul Bettany
so much. It’d be more surreal if he didn’t blend in with his vintage
sitcom surroundings. It’s not like he has a normal name to go with this
disguise. Vision turning into a normal guy wasn’t part of their comics
courtship. Wanda is attracted to him because he’s a Christmas-colored
synthezoid.
The first episode emphasizes Wanda is Sokovian when Elizabeth Olsen
isn’t bothering to do a “European” accent anymore. Vision uses Paul
Bettany’s real English accent but nobody comments on it or his national
origin.
This would be a great way to
introduce Mojo to the MCU, but they’re not touching the X-Men rights
yet. The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, Legends Of Tomorrow, & DuckTales have had examples of this meta-narrative just within last year. WandaVision
insists on making you sit through entire episodes for the fake shows
well after it stops being novel. Just because you can replicate vintage
TV doesn’t mean you have to show us everything. I’m not saying WandaVision doesn’t deserve credit for its period sitcom recreations, but I am saying that Legends Of Tomorrow hasn’t been getting enough praise for replicating four disparate TV series in one episode on a network budget.