If television, the “boob tube,” has been seen as dumbing down young minds, seducing the innocent, for nearly three score and 10 years, maybe it’s a welcome change that lately it’s become a family unifier.
As iPhones are the great atomizer of domestic life, and kids halfway live in them, it’s been appointment television to the rescue, particularly since Disney+ made the wise decision not to “drop” the mini-series “WandaVision” all at once, but rather one episode at a time, on Friday nights. A time to gather round the glowing living room flat-screen . . .
The show may have gradually devolved into standard superhero fare (powerful beings duking it out in the sky), but it began well, with — speaking of the “golden age” of television — Wanda (the Scarlet Witch) Maximoff and Vision, the “synthezoid” former Avenger, living in newlywedded suburban bliss in a lovingly recreated 1950s sitcom set. The endless Marvel franchise hasn’t been this creative since the surrealist pilot of Noah Hawley’s FX series “Legion,” starring Dan Stevens — maybe better known as the guy who got himself out of his “Downton Abbey” contract by way of a hastily scripted car crash — as a mutant with a mental illness.
And so tomorrow night is well anticipated in this household, as begins “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” starring Captain America’s two former sidekicks. I have to say here that my affinity for the Falcon goes back to the early ’70s, when I’d ride my banana-seat bicycle downtown to hit the comic-book rack at Sag Harbor’s late, lamented stationery store, the Ideal. The character dates to 1969, when Marvel Comics got hip and started introducing heroes with some street cred. The Falcon, Sam Wilson, the second Black superhero, was from Harlem, as was Marvel’s third, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, the first to star in his own title. (I collected Black Panther too, but he was an African chieftain. It’s different.)
If you saw the last Avengers movie, you know that an aged Steve Rogers handed his shield over to Sam Wilson. Will Cap now be Black?
The way Captain America shields, shirts, and iconography were paraded through the Capitol building in the January riot made me think of an obscure plotline from 1974 in which Captain America, disgusted by Nixon and Watergate and the turn the country had taken, calls it quits and becomes Nomad, a hero without a home.
Inequality. Police brutality. Voter suppression. We’ll see if Sam Wilson wants the job.