WandaVision: Marvel consulted 94-year-old Dick Van Dyke on new comedy

Marvel’s WandaVision has been described by one of its stars Teyona Parris as “ six Marvel movies wrapped in what they present as a sitcom. ”

And to fully understand the second half of the equation, Marvel sought advice from one of the icons of television comedy: Dick Van Dyke, 94.

The Dick Van Dyke Show star has been consulted by Marvel Chief Honcho Kevin Feige and Series Director Matt Shakman on how to keep broad comedy grounded in reality.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Game of Thrones director Shakman explained: [The Dick Van Dyke Show] can be very wide with silly physical comedy gags, and yet it never seems wrong, and I wondered how they did that.

Asking the Mary Poppins actor for his opinion, “his answer was really simple,” Shakman continued. “ He basically said if it couldn’t happen in real life, it couldn’t happen on the show. ”

The Dick Van Dyke show aired on CBS from 1961 to 1966 and won 15 Emmy Awards.

The bizarre sitcom-superhero hybrid WandaVision represents Marvel’s first solo foray into television.

And star Elizabeth Olsen, 31, compared the experience of directing the show to that of her older sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who rose to fame on the classic ’90s sitcom Full House, when she and her co-star Paul Bettany, 49, spoke to EW.

“ There was something very meta about my own life because I was visiting these recordings as a kid, where my sisters worked [on Full House]Martha star Marcy May Marlene said.

“ It was crazy, ” Olsen said of her first time creating her own sitcom, which was filmed in front of a studio audience to add authenticity.

Her 34-year-old twin sisters shared the role of Michelle Tanner in Full House between 1987 and 1995.

“ It’s the biggest gift Marvel has given me to be able to do this show, ” Elizabeth told the magazine.

‘You get to focus on [her Marvel Cinematic Universe character Wanda Maximoff] and not what she felt through everyone’s stories.

Olsen first played the superhero, whose alter-ego Scarlet Witch controls both hypnotic and telekinetic powers, in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron.

And Bettany, who has been with the MCU since Iron Man in 2008, also enjoyed the change of pace from action to genre laughs.

“I thought, my God, I’ve ruined my whole life,” laughs Bettany – who plays Android Vision. “I should have been doing sitcoms all this time.

The first official trailer for the highly anticipated Disney + miniseries WandaVision debuted at the 2020 Virtual Emmy Awards.

The show will have a six-episode debut series that Marvel has described as a “ mega-series of events. ”

Created by Captain Marvel writer Jac Schaeffer, the show centers around the two super powerful beings who live idyllic suburban lives in a world straight out of a 1950s sitcom.

The series has been described as a “ mix of classic television and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which Wanda Maximoff and Vision begin to suspect that all is not what it seems. ”

WandaVision will take place following the events of last year’s Avengers: Endgame, but so far it’s unclear how Vision, which was slain in Infinity War, was revived.

It has also been revealed that the show will feature characters from Captain Marvel, Thor, and Ant-Man, and that it will tie into the upcoming 2022 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness movie.

Along with Olsen and Bettany, WandaVision also stars Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau, Kat Dennings as Darcy Lewis, Randall Park as Jimmy Woo and Kathryn Hahn as “Curious Neighbor”.

The long-awaited series by Marvel fans was also one of many productions stopped following the COVID-19 pandemic earlier in the year.

The first look at the upcoming series took place earlier this year, during the Super Bowl in February.

So far, there is no official word on an exact release date yet, but it is expected to air on Disney + sometime in December 2020.