Either that (which was the only really big “family” sitcom on the networks) or Disney Channel style sitcoms - with the focus entirely on the children.
I posited once that humans are genetically predisposed to at least distrust mutants…it was not well received by an unnamed comicbook writer, because the implication is that people are not 100 percent responsible for their own bigotry…
then a different writer went ahead and wrote a similar story.
Similarly if Spider-Man is such a menace…just adopt a new identity Peter.
I agree that the Westview/Eastview thing was poorly explained back in episode 1. Was it implying that Westview is the town that has always been there, that’s where the witsec person was, and the hex rewrote the memories of the cops (and presumably other nearby-but-outside-the-hex) people so that they forgot about Westview entirely and instead somehow had memories of living in Eastview? So what happens when they try to go home to their houses? Or was it that Eastview was the town that has always existed, which Wanda (or whoever) has now rewritten into being Westview, and the cops are just kind of stuck in confused-land? And if memories of people outside the hex are being affected, how did that not affect any of our heroes, any of the soldiers, etc?
This is based on Wanda’s ‘sphere of influence’ (or DOME if you will) - In the beginning, she was satisfied with a single/small town of Westview, and she (apparently) wiped a few local memories of the place external to the town- since the cops were Westview cops, they were affected but were ‘outside the dome’ when it happened - making them look very very confused.
Had it not been for the witsec person - its unlikely that anyone official would have noticed it.
She’s now expanded her Sphere of Influence to not only save Vision , but to turn the SWORD threat into the clowns that they clearly are.
The "Mandalorian-Level cameo could be something as silly as having Woo in The Office and Dwight and Michael have a few lines of dialogue with him…shit…throw in John K too and have him say something about "man! This is fantastic!’
Or they can go in the completely opposite direction and do Arrested Development - technically, a family sitcom too.
Current theory: “Pietro” is the big bad, probably Mephisto or Blackheart (recall the calendar in episode 1). He’s boosting Wanda’s powers with his own and feeding off the pain and fear she’s causing. He made “Pietro” appear to defuse the confrontation between Wanda and Vision, but — as a pan-dimensional being — accidentally used the “wrong” Pietro, not realizing the one he impersonated was different from the one Wanda knew.
(Note also how “Pietro’s” hair in the latter half of the episode resembles horns, and that he tells Wanda’s children to “raise hell, demon-spawn!”)
Re the heart on the calendar, I’m speculating at the moment that it’s actually connected to Wanda’s motherhood. If she wanted Agatha’s help resurrecting Vision, and part of the deal was that Agatha wanted Wanda to have children (there is comics precedent for something like this), then the heart symbol could originally have been added to the calendar to signify “date of conception” or something, before it was forgotten and obfuscated in the false reality. Remember, in that first episode, neither Wanda nor Vision knew what it meant, which seems highly unlikely, except that it got handwaved away with the “sitcom misunderstanding” convention. I think there’s more to it.
It was just an old Quicksilver costume.
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody has twin boys - one “cool” and one not. They might be moving in that direction.
Interestingly–I don’t know if it’s significant or not, but I do find it interesting–one exception to this was Wanda herself. She and Pietro were mutants, and even debuted in the pages of X-Men, but Wanda was a mainstay of the Avengers for years. Nobody ever seemed bothered by it, at least not until some of the more modern writers started having a few characters say things like, “Hey, didn’t she used to be a mutant terrorist?” But for most of the Silver and Bronze Ages, she was just a regular Avenger, no big deal. (The Beast was another such exception).
I agree with your general point, though, about the basic incompatibility of the X-Men with rest of the Marvel Universe. As you say, and as I mentioned way back in post 347, even the comics have mostly kept the mutant characters in their own little world, largely detached from the rest of the heroes. People being terrified of someone like Cyclops or Kitty Pryde doesn’t make sense in a world where The Thing is a beloved celebrity.
When they were created, The X-Men were no different than other superheroes except for the lazy writing (understandable since Lee and Kirby were already overworked.) Mutants were simply a way to get out of thinking up new origin stories. Mutants came in two varieties; good/teenage mutants under the tutelage of Prof. X and evil/adult mutants led by Magneto. Wanda was in the latter group and when repurposed as a good mutant was lumped in with other former baddies (Hawkeye, Black Widow, Quicksilver) to form the core of the second Avengers lineup. She was never an X-Man and except for maybe Captain America she’s probably the most consistently employed member of the Avengers.
You know… so what if they change the X-Men from the way they were in the comics? IIRC, Spider-Man was never Toy Stark’s teenage protégé in the comics, and yet the movies managed to make it work. So maybe now the X-Men will just be regular superheroes instead of a persecuted minority. Who cares? The Fox films more or less run the whole persecution thing to the ground, anyway.
Then they aren’t the X-Men.
That’s like saying, “So what if they make Tony Stark a homeless grifter incapable of invention?”
“So what if they make Batman a ruthless killer?”
“So what if they make Sherlock Holmes a bumbling idiot?”
I’m not bothered by changing things around to better play to the silver screen. But there’s a certain point at which removing the essence of a character makes them become something else. The X-Men’s persecution is endemic to their identity.
X-Men fans, probably.
It seems like the MCU is already running the fear of the supes’ powers play through Civil War on. On the surface at least it is what motivates Hayward. A specific class of supes being identified as somehow “other”, with even the regular MCU supes being suspicious of them, does not seem like something too difficult for this team to pull off.
That said I still see them as mostly being in a split off time line/portion of the multiverse, allowing stories to be told without worry of crossing canonic lines other than in very defined ways. Different what-if alt-reality stories mostly.
Despite a Disney+ show with the name, I hope they don’t identify the current MCU as Earth-616. The MCU is an Earth where X-Men and the Fantastic Four don’t exist. Earth-616 should be where the FF are the first superheroes (save, perhaps, Cap, Namor, the original Torch and other WWII characters.) Hopefully, an Earth-616 franchise can do more with superheroes in the 1960s than X-Men First Class did.
It’s the sort of thing that could be retconned super easily, but officially, the MCU is Earth-199999.
Thanks. That’s reassuring.
(Ignore this, hit post by mistake)
Did it? I suppose I misremembered. Or did Wanda get to me too?
Anyone planning on “bingeing” this after the last one comes out to catch all the things that they missed the first time? Not that long a binge, about as long as one of the LOTR movies.