I wasn’t really into the whole Marvel Universe thing. I thought Deadpool was funny, I enjoyed the origin story of Spider-Man (pretty much every time they retold it), and I found Ant-Man totally charming. Then again, anything with Paul Rudd is totally charming.
But all of the big puffy “Tony Stark saves the Universe” stuff just seemed like a lot of noise about nothing. The whole super-powered vigilantes saving the world thing simply didn’t seem intelligent enough to be interesting.
I get that it’s meant to be a modern myth, and a lot of my students really got into it, but it didn’t quite work for me. Sooner or later you are just watching CGI characters in weird outfits flying around on the screen.
Then there is WandaVision. I LOVE that show. It is everything the rest of the Marvel Universe is not. It’s thoughtful, creative, layered, mysterious, subtle, historically literate, self-referential in a truly clever way, and fundamentally about the human condition — in a way the big splashy movies are not.
And Episode V contains one of my favorite moments in the entire history of television. It’s a moment I could watch endlessly. Should we just take it from the top?