The reason why Wanda Maximoff knows his old American TV shows on WandaVision

WandaVision it is full of homage to classic sitcoms, with most episodes so far (except the interlude from episode 4) paying homage to an era different from American television. It’s a fun setting that offers some interesting downtime for characters that are usually caught in the middle of other people’s stories.

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

What some Marvel fans identify as a hole in the plot, I see as a remarkable case of glare in the fridge, the trope named for the perception that something initially questionable in movies or TV actually clicks in place when examining all the details. Hovering between Millennials and Generation Z, I can’t speak for all Kids These Days, but I’m familiar with older sitcoms. And my experiences in Eastern Europe are the reason – which is why Wanda’s perspective makes perfect sense to me.

I spent many childhood summers visiting my grandparents in Croatia, before the south-eastern European country was an important holiday destination (and before The Game of Thrones was filmed there). And like any other bored child, I killed my time watching a lot of television.

Here is the detail of American television abroad: the more popular a program is in its original broadcast, the more expensive it becomes to distribute in another country. But at the same time, there is no point in paying for a program that no one has watched. A series still needs to have a decent success to be worth it.

And so, international distribution agreements are often closed for programs outside the network, which are significantly cheaper to license than programs currently on the air and, for the most part, have a proven popularity factor. Many of the programs that I watched during the summers of my childhood ended up being those that were off the air for years, as Alf, Married with children, and Just shoot me.

Photo: Disney Plus

I recognize that I only started paying attention to programs that were not cartoons when I was a little older, around the end of the 2000s. (Yes, I am young). In that specific period, this meant that I watched many programs from the 80s and 90s. Of course, nowadays, with Netflix, streaming and internet (not to mention piracy), there is no delay in the consumption of new media. Globalization is expanding rapidly around the world in 2020, but Wanda Maximoff did not grow at the time of Disney Plus and easy access to the internet. We now formally know that she was born in 1989, which means that it is very likely that she spent her childhood and adolescence watching the ages of the American sitcoms we have seen so far. WandaVision.

This may not be intentional on behalf of the writers – after all, it is just as likely that Wanda camped at the Avengers Tower and watched Full house on Hulu. But, as someone who specifically learned most of his cultural canon from American television by being abroad, in Eastern Europe, this has a particular impact on my own experiences. WandaVision it is full of homage to older comedies, references and Easter Eggs to Marvel comics and films, and perhaps, in this case, a small glowing nod to a specific real-world occurrence.