WANDAVISION on Disney +

*SPOILERS*

Well, this is interesting. WANDAVISION... going all out to try something different... and mostly succeeding.

The Scarlet Witch and Vision always were Marvel's most interesting couple and over the years were put through their paces in the comics, most notably through Brian Michael Bendis' HOUSE OF M run in 2005, where Wanda suffers a mental breakdown and alters the fabric of the world to protect herself from the truth.

I suspect WANDAVISION is taking the Bendis storyline and marrying it to the setting of Tom King's excellent suburban VISION graphic novels of 2018.

I watched the first two eps of WANDAVISION on Disney+ and I say bravo to this attempt to do something different with the superhero genre, placing the story of the married heroes within an imagined world of 1950s US sitcoms.

One or two more eruptions of the real world might have made the first two eps more compelling, esp for those who do not know of I LOVE LUCY, THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW and BEWITCHED, but the show's commitment to its format is to be applauded. 

I thought Elizabeth Olsen was excellent as Wanda of the 50s, but Paul Bettany let it down a bit for me as Vision of the 50s. He doesn’t have the comedy chops and I wanted to rewrite and redirect ep2 to have him play the consequences of the chewing gum not as a drunken sailor but as a malfunctioning robot, which would have better suited his acting style.

The likes of Jack Lemmon, Dick VD, Dick York and Dick Sargent made that role of anonymous suburban husband look like an easy thing to play, but it is not. 

I loved that switch in ep 1 from the studio cameras to the wider-lensed mobile cameras and the shift in lighting when Mr Hart started to choke on his food, signalled by the question to Wanda about her children… it became rather Twilight Zone-ish and unsettling. All through lenses and lighting. That's how you do it.

There are easter eggs a-plenty and a delightful animated titles sequence that starts ep2 which is a perfect homage to the period. I noticed the Wanda & Vision suburban home changing (without the series drawing attention to the change) from the single story set of I Love Lucy in the first ep to the two-storey house of Bewitched in the second. 

A nice touch at the end of two promises bigger changes in the upcoming episode three...

The series is a treat for comics and MCU fans. And the episodes, appropriately, are only thirty minutes long.