I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, The Honeymooners (down to Kathryn Hahn’s off-screen husband being named Ralph, Jackie Gleason's leading Honeymooners character) - these are the classic shows WandaVision’s first entry wants us to think about (with the note that the show is more interested in presenting the prosperous middle-class politics of a Beaver than the working-class struggles of a Honeymooners). ![]() George Burns interrupted the plotlines of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show to speak directly to the audience about what they were watching Ernie Kovacs disrupted the early visual language of television to present a series of surreal, form-breaking vignettes and now, WandaVision is here to heighten and jam all of this into a pleasing, gripping, and very, very, very weird blender.Įpisode 1 throws us squarely into classic 1950s sitcom territory, giving us the production design, the 4:3 black-and-white photography, and the general visual “vibe” of these types of shows immediately. ![]() The MCU/Disney+ television show takes its cue from the genre and formal conventions of broadcast television, and even (especially?) in its earliest, most formative years, broadcast television has been weird - partially because of its status of intimacy within the American household, partially because the early talent pool consisted of vaudeville and theatre writers/performers who were more than willing to muck with people out of the gate, and partially because the creators of the form needed to immediately set themselves apart from the golden removedness of seeing a film at the cinema. WandaVision is weird, but not without precedent.
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