The reason Wanda Maximoff knows about her old American TV shows on WandaVision

WandaVision is chock-full of tributes to classic sitcoms, with most episodes so far (except the interlude to Episode 4) paying homage to another era of American television. It’s a fun setup that provides some interesting downtime for characters who are normally caught in the middle of other people’s stories.

The show also raised two burning questions, if my Twitter feed is any indication: How does Kids These Days in the audience understand references? And why does Wanda Maximoff, who grew up in the fictional Southeastern European country of Sokovia, have such intimate knowledge of American television?

What some Marvel fans see as a plot hole I see as a remarkable case of refrigerator brilliance, the named trope for the achievement that something initially questionable in movies or TV sets up clicks when reviewing all the details. Between millennials and millennials, I can’t speak for all kids these days, but I know the older sitcoms. And my experiences in Eastern Europe are the reason why – this is why Wanda’s perspective means so much to me.

I spent many childhood summers visiting my grandparents in Croatia, before the country of southeastern Europe became a prime vacation destination (and before The iron Throne was filmed there). And like any other bored kid, I killed time by watching TV a lot.

Here’s what it’s about American TV overseas: The more popular a show is originally broadcast, the more expensive syndication becomes in another country. But at the same time, there’s no point in paying for a show that no one has watched. A series has yet to have decent success to be considered worth the expense.

For example, international syndication agreements are often concluded for off-network shows, the license of which is significantly cheaper than the shows currently broadcast and which, for the most part, have a proven popularity factor. A lot of the shows I watched during the summers of my childhood ended up being the ones that hadn’t been aired in years, like Alf, Married with children, and Shoot me.

Photo: Disney Plus

Granted, I only really started to get interested in shows that weren’t cartoons when I was a little older, in the late 2000s (yes, I’m young). During that time, that meant I watched a lot of ’80s and’ 90s shows. Of course, these days with Netflix, streaming, and the Internet (not to mention pirating), there’s no lag. also spread in the consumption of new media. Globalization is growing rapidly across the world in 2020, but Wanda Maximoff didn’t grow up in the days of Disney Plus and easy access to the internet. We now officially know that she was born in 1989, which means it’s very likely that she spent her childhood and teenage years watching the eras of American sitcoms we’ve seen so far. WandaVision.

This may not be intentional on the part of the writers – after all, it’s just as likely that Wanda will camp out at Avengers Tower and watch Full house on Hulu. But as someone who has specifically learned most of his American television cultural canons while overseas in Eastern Europe, it specifically resonates with my own experiences. WandaVision is full of tributes to old sitcoms, references and Easter eggs to the Marvel comics and movies, and perhaps, in this case, a brilliant nod to a specific real-world event.