MAYvel 2021 (Streaming Edition); Wandavision (+1): Finally, a Scarlet Witch

Wanda Maximoff. She was experimented on by Hydra; an evil robot killed her brother, her city was destroyed by said robot who wanted to use it to destroy the world. She was the cause of the Sokovia Accords, labelled as an enhanced terrorist when her side lost a civil war and was on the run for years; she had to kill her boyfriend robot to stop a giant purple guy from completing his rock collection, then watched him be brought back to life only be killed again because the purple guy really wanted to finish his rock collection dammit! She was wiped out of existence for five years, brought back to life only to find out so much has changed... yeah, you'd be needing some therapy too after all of that. But well, there are probably better ways to do it than kidnapping a town to live out sitcom fantasies. Welcome, to Wandavision.

 

Marvel Studios does a sitcom, or rather a mash-up of every sitcom while throwing in a touch of existential horror that'll leave you asking, "what's going on?" most of the time. This is because most of the characters both in the show and in the show but also watching the show (it makes more sense in context) don't know what's going on either. Inside the town, thanks to the power of The Hex, Wanda can manipulate the town, turning it into a series of Sitcom settings based on iconic decades for the genre. The 50's with shows like the Dick Van Dyke Show, the 60's with Bewitched, the 70's with the Brady Bunch, the 80's with shows like Growing Pains and, hilariously ironic, Full House. There was an episode that was a recreation of Malcolm in the Middle. The final few episodes themed around modern fourth wall breaking sitcoms like Modern Family and The Office, an ideal time for the illusion to be shattered (which all the previous episodes had been building up too). Still, it does lead to the payoff of Wanda finally becoming the Scarlet Witch, something that only after watching the series did I notice that she had never been called that in any of the MCU movies prior. 

 
While inside The Hex, it's a traditional sitcom storey week to week, with stories changing drastically save for the underlining question about how this pocket world works. Outside the Hex is far more streamlined, focused, more Marvel like in presentation and storytelling. S.W.O.R.D., a new version of S.H.I.E.L.D., is observing the Hex, trying to figure out what's going on inside of it and what's causing it, resulting in the introduction of Monica Rambeau. She's trying to ease the situation between Wanda and her superiors in S.W.O.R.D. that view Wanda as too dangerous a threat to be left alive. Throw in witches, a philosophical battle between two Visions and what you have is a confusing roller-coaster of a story that is hard to describe without spoilers. The big issue I have with the series is that the ending feels rushed, but this is primarily because of how much there was to get through by the end of the show. While Falcon and Winter Soldier was relatively consistent and streamlined, Wandavision is more scattered in its approach. It's juggling a lot of things, and not all of them land well. But I appreciate the ambition, and though the finale wasn't as good as the show itself, that's primarily due to how good the show is. 

One thing I love about Wandavision is the attention to detail when it comes to the Sitcom settings. While Falcon was very traditional in terms of the Marvel aesthetic, Wandavision mixes it with the Sitcom aesthetics. Outside of the Hex is traditional Marvel in terms of presentation, inside The Hex fluctuates depending on the period, with the first two episodes even using the same practical effects techniques and editing tricks used for those original shows. The first episode even had a live audience. If you are curious, a documentary series on Disney+ called Marvel Studios Assembled goes into the production of both Wandavision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. They're fascinating to watch, and I hope that it continues for future MCU projects.

 

Flawed but fun would be the best way to describe Wandavision as a whole. The ending was a letdown, but I was hooked all the way through, something many actual sitcoms don't manage to do for me partly due to the drawn-out endings. Like the previous review, Wandavision is a short, primarily sharp and mainly to the point series. The fun of sitcoms without all the fat, and some existential horror added in, fun for the whole family! For now, though, we need to take a step back. We need to rewind the clock, back to when Avengers was still new before Kevin Feige had complete control of the MCU machine, and the small screen outings were made for T.V., budget and all. Up next, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Seasons 1+2.

MAYvel 2021 (Streaming Edition!); The Falcon and The Winter Soldier: And you thought Black Panther was political

 With 2020 causing all the cinemas to shut, and movie schedules are still up in the air when it comes to getting a theatrical release, the world turned to streaming services, and for this MAYvel, so will I. No movies this year, instead it's all about the shows on Disney +. Two that are directly connected to the MCU, and two that are... well, they're there... maybe... kind of waiting on Ms Marvel to see what they're doing with them. Anyway, let's look at the newest of the shows, while it might still be possible to cash in on Google's Algorithm. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. 

 
While Wandavision (next week) was focused more on the after-effects of Endgame on a smaller scale, Wanda's reaction to what happened, Falcon and Winter Soldier focuses on the significant scale effects of Endgame. The world is a mess; refugees worldwide are without a home, thanks to all the people who disappeared after Infinity War returning and continuing as nothing had happened. Borders are returning, and because of this, a political extremist group known as the Flag Smashers is out to try and return the world to the way it was in the five years between Infinity War and Endgame. "One World, One People." What makes this group more intimidating when compared to similar organizations in the real world is that many of its members have been given a working version of the Super Soldier Serum, and have the powers of Captain America. There is one main difference, though, their physical bodies don't change in size, compared to Steve Rogers transformation in the first Captain America movie. What happens, though, in the chase to try and stop the Flag Smashers is a mix of parties with conflicting agendas. Sam and Bucky work alongside Barron Zemo (the main villain from Captain America: Civil War), which results in Wakanda sending in the Dora Milaje to recapture Zemo he killed King T'Chaka. The American Government promotes John Walker and turns him into the new Captain America, who, alongside his friend Battlestar, is trying to capture the Flag Smashers and the Serum. Zemo wants to destroy the serum. Another villain, MCU "newcomer" the Power Broker, who initially funded the creation of the new serum, wants to regain their lost property from the Flag Smashers, and that's all for the A Plot of the series. There's a lot of stuff in these six episodes. They're dense with story, and yet this mess of plot threads are held together, thanks to the B Plot. 

 

The B plot of the show focuses on Sam and his journey into becoming the new Captain America, as was Steve's intention in Endgame when Sam was given the shield. However, it isn't without its hurdles, thanks to John Walker having the shield and sinking further into madness resulting in him killing a Flag-Smasher, instead of the original intent of arresting them, in broad daylight, on international soil, with the shield. Encase that wasn't enough of a political message forced down your throat, we also learn of the darker history of the shield after Steve was frozen in the ice. These story threads are where the comparison to Black Panther is inevitably created. While that depicted a fantastic version of Africa, a city free of colonization in the form of Wakanda, this show tackles racism in America head-on to Isaiah Bradley. While his story is slightly toned down for the series, the only thing different between his comic book history and his MCU history was that he was a trial run in the comics before they gave it to Steve.

 

In contrast, here, he was already frozen, and they were trying to recreate it. While the exact specifics aren't something I can personally attest to, due to what minor differences there are between the racism of America and the racism here in Australia, this still hits hard because of the situation. The show is very respectful to the character and doesn't hold back in showing how badly black people were treated then, and even how bad black people are treated now as Sam himself interacts with racist people on screen. This series was initially meant to air in August last year, and I can't help but wonder how the previous year's events would have impacted how people view this character as the racial tension due to George Floyd's death would have only been two months old by then. 

 

The production values are surprisingly consistent, considering this was in post-production during COVID Lockdowns. It's what you'd expect from a Marvel movie. However, I will give an honourable mention to Madripoor. It's probably one of the most exciting places they've made for a Marvel production so far that doesn't lean heavily on the sci-fi aesthetic (compared to somewhere like Wakanda or Sakkar). The translation of Sam's Captain America costume from the comics to real life is also very impressive. It's a great looking costume, and I appreciate the white accents to break up the blue, compared to something like Steve's costumes from the movies, which look very monotone in retrospect. But, with how similar MCU projects are in terms of presentation (there have been 25MCU movies and two canonical shows. I think you can get a good idea as to how these things look and sound), I'll be ending the review of it here. This show was a great watch, thanks to the character interactions and how the world around the characters interacts with them. Would I recommend binging them now that all six episodes are out? No, these do feel catered to the release schedule Disney + has, that being one a week (most of the time). The show is worth a watch, though, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens next for these characters in the MCU.
 
The Mediaholics Toybox is joining in on the MAYvel fun this year with Marvel Legends reviews. For those interested in that, you can check them out at any time, with new ones going live on Sundays. In the meantime, I'll see you next week for Wandavision.

Binge (Streaming Service): "Ever heard of the phrase "don't compete with yourself"?

Before I get to my review of the release of Justice League, entirely directed by Zack Snyder, I have to cover something first as it will impact my view on the movie. The streaming service I watched it on. See, here in Australia, we don't have HBO Max. Our equivalent of Cable TV, Foxtel, has the distribution rights to HBO Max content for the next few years, including putting the content on it's streaming services. Binge was the version I chose to view it on. If people outside of Australia are looking to pay for Binge, I can tell you right now, don't waste your time. Even assuming they enable VPN's to work, the service is less to be desired.

 
Like my review of Disney+ back in December 2019, this review primarily focuses on the service itself, not the content on it. However, I will be referring to content on the service in examples of positives and negatives. A lot of the review focuses on the web browser version Binge. However, I've also looked at the Android app version for minor differences. I'll start with the main home screen. While it's not bad, clearly drawing inspiration from other Streaming platforms by grouping similar shows and movies together, the content presented is a bit skewed in terms of preference. Binge primarily markets itself as a home for more mature content, so while there is Kids Content on the service, it takes more digging to get to it than something like Disney+, where the Home Page has a mix of content at different age groups. Because of this, and the fact that Binge hasn't got any clearly defined way to set up content restrictions, I wouldn't recommend it for parents straight away if they want to turn it on, give their kids the remote and tell them "watch what you want while I work."

Finding content on the service is also more frustrating, then it needs to be. The Search Bar doesn't work logically. To give an example, in an attempt to find content supposedly on the service, Batman The Animated Series. I could search for "Batman" and get 36 results. But suppose I searched "Batman The Animated Series". In that case, I get 250 results, with content that supposedly fit the criteria, including Mr Bean, Green Lantern, Sex and the City, Animals, Joe Exotic: Tigers, Lies and Cover-ups, and To Catch a Serial Killer. If nothing matches the criteria, most search results would say "nothing matches the criteria", why would your search bar bring up random bits of content instead? With the lack of parental locks, this is a pretty serious issue.

 
"Timmy! Why are you watching Sex and the City?!"
"Binge told me it had Batman in it!"

Even the limited search of just "Batman" has oddities in it. Not to the same extent as the full title search, but I'm pretty sure if I'm searching Batman, I don't want to watch Scooby-Doo, Pawn Stars, or Shipping Wars. 

Parental controls aren't the only thing missing from settings. The only thing there is if you want Closed Captions for content, which I do at least appreciate for accessibility. However, some settings are desperately needed, such as a more refined picture quality setting (Youtube's picture quality settings, for example). The main reason for this is that from personal experience, when using the service on my computer, when Binge bounces the picture quality from HD to SD, it locks it as SD for the rest of the video. This issue was highly frustrating during the Snyder Cut, as the lower quality meant that a lot of scenes became hard to watch. What made it even more frustrating was that at around the two and a half hour mark of watching the movie, I saw that Binge was using up a lot of my computer's memory trying to view the film. No other streaming service has this issue on my laptop, no other video platform has this issue on my laptop, and every other video platform knows that if I want to watch something in HD, I want to watch it in HD. The picture quality drop wasn't as big of an issue on my phone, as the video quality didn't noticeably drop when watching The Loony Toons Show. It looks to be an issue with the way the web browser version is designed and optimized.

Technical issues aside, how is the overall content? It's alright for the most part. The content is more in favour of lifestyle and drama entertainment. For someone like myself, it is nice to see a good chunk of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon content on there. Still, there are some cases, such as Codename Kids Next Door, where only a few seasons are up, even though Foxtel has the distribution rights in Australia. One of the biggest reasons for this comes back to what I said in the opening paragraph. "Our equivalent of Cable TV, Foxtel, has the distribution rights to HBO Max content for the next few years, including putting the content on it's streaming services." The keyword there being services. Foxtel has four streaming services going here in Australia. Foxtel Go, Foxtel Now, Binge and Kayo Sports. Binge and Kayo Sports are the more traditional Streaming Services, with prices roughly in the range of other platforms like Netflix, Stan and Disney+ to match this. Foxtel Go is a service you can only get if you have a Foxtel subscription, which usually costs $139 a month for the whole package. Foxtel Now looks to be a "we want to have our cake and eat it too" with a subscription model that acts like their regular Subscription (where you pay for a base pack and then opt into extras). Still, it's a mainly digital service with an optional box to plug into your TV if it's not internet compatible. Without the box, it's $104 a month for everything. I wouldn't be surprised if Binge was a hodgepodge of all of Foxtel Now's bundles cut down to the bare minimum to try and get people to purchase Foxtel proper. 

Because of all of this, do I recommend Binge? No, I don't. If you're looking for a cheap Foxtel, then I guess this is good value for money, thanks to the fact that it comes the closest to competing with other Streaming Services. But because Foxtel wants to keep people paying for its set-top boxes, keep paying for Cable, it doesn't have a chance in the long term, especially if or when HBO does decide to bring HBO Max properly to Australia. Foxtel, you can't have it both ways if you want to compete with the other services. Stop competing with yourself and commit one way or the other with how you want to distribute the content you have the rights too.

Disney+: Not a review of Mandelorian

That will probably happen sometime in 2020.

It should come as no surprise that the Streaming wars have now well and truly started. Many large companies are either making their own services or partnering with other companies either with their own or working on their own, to try and give you everything you want at the minor cost of never actually owning any of their content again, data collection, and a small monthly fee on top of it. Though Australia has had Netflix for a while, and a collection of homegrown services like Stan to fill in the void created by other providers not bringing their content here, that does look to change thanks to the launch of platforms like Apple TV+, Disney+, and upcoming ones like Hulu and potentially HBO Max. Though reviews of these services may come in time, I can at least review this one, as it was staring me in the face every day I went to work for a few weeks around the launch. So while I'm housebound anyway, may as well take a look at something slightly different this time, with my review of Disney+... that was late compared to everyone else but let's be honest, when has that ever not been an issue with this site?

(Would love a Fox category... just saying...)

Starting with the launch lineup, and while it's a very strong selection of their content, even going so far back as to include the likes of Steamboat Willie, there are some noticeable gaps are depending on the series. I found it odd that The Proud Family show was not on the service, while the movie based on the show was. Same with the Muppets, the Muppet movies are here, but not the original show. At the same time though, there are many region-specific variations. By the looks of it, Australia was actually in a pretty good spot, as some movies being held up in licencing in the US are available here. As I couldn't find many sources very easily, I went through the CNet video on Youtube, going through the few placeholder spots they've found on the US version, and saw that all of them were available here. Something tells me that it's because of places like here in Australia that the placeholder icons are on the US platform, with messages like "Coming June 2021".At the same time, there were holes inside shows themselves, one glaring one to me being the two-part pilot of Ducktales 2017 when I went to do a quick check of it

There are however some issues on the more technical side of the platform. For the purpose of this review, I mostly focused on the web browser form of Disney+, as it allows me to get screenshots more easily. With this though, I noticed some performance issues, as the site appears to be very CPU and RAM dependent, at times burning through almost half of my computer's CPU when trying to play Avengers Endgame. Comparing this to Netflix, which has been an optimized service for me so far. Other Netflix comparisons are very easy to make, and none in favour of Disney+, with things like title sorting being a complete mess at times, thanks to being undecided about calling stuff Disney's *insert title here* or just *insert title here*. No option to marathon the Marvel Cinematic Universe in order, as going to the main Marvel subsection of the service, the first eight MCU movies displayed were Avengers Endgame, Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Thor Ragnarok, Captain America Civil War, Avengers Age of Ultron and then The Avengers. A massive example of this is The Simpsons, which many of the services from their last streaming platform are currently missing, including things like the ability to watch all the Treehouse of Horrors episodes in a row. Even small things like the ability to press the space button to pause or resume playing something feels like a missing feature due to it not working consistently, and I can't help but wonder why.

Like with a lot of streaming services, a constant and reliable internet connection is required for an ideal experience, and during testing, my router decided to have some problems, bringing to light how the video player handles less than ideal situations regarding connections. To put it bluntly, not very well. I had to restart Endgame several times because of network dropouts either skipping sections of the video and not letting me rewind to play it properly, or just outright giving up trying to buffer. Though I could bring up minor issues, like the rather bland loading screen of videos and the Android App (I said I mostly focused on the web browser, not entirely), and the locking of pre-made avatars that no one else will see anyway so what was the point? The thing I keep coming back to time and time again is the question of "Is it worth it?"

For archives of content? While there is plenty here, sorting through it is a problem (I'm honestly surprised National Geographic got a dedicated sub-menu but Fox didn't), the content is, at least for the most part, there. Original exclusive content is lacking, but that's something that can be built on in time, and if the archive content was weaker, this would be more of a problem for me then it is now. In terms of the overall all experience though? There is still a lot of work to do, and I'm hoping that these issues get fixed sooner rather than later. Keyboard shortcuts, consistent sorting of titles, the content holes, even minor presentation touches that I'm surprised are missing from something made by a company that is normally proud of their attention to detail. It's why I can at least recommend it on a content level, if not a service level.