‘Eyes of Wakanda' Will Rekindle Your Love for the Black Panther Universe

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The late Chadiwck Boseman's final credited work as an actor came in four episodes of What If?, the Disney+ animated series exploring various ways that events in the Marvel Cinematic Universe could have unfolded differently.
As we look back on the messy past five years of Marvel Studios, we can ask many different what-if questions. What if Disney executives hadn't demanded that Marvel begin churning out TV series for their new streaming service, overextending the team that had maintained such consistent quality control over the previous decade's movies? What if Covid hadn't made audiences more accustomed to watching movies at home, and less conditioned to simply go to a theater whenever a new Marvel release was out? What if the pandemic and the WGA and SAG strikes hadn't disrupted production repeatedly during this period? What if Marvel boss Kevin Feige hadn't so stubbornly insisted on sticking with the 'Marvel method' — putting projects into production without a script that everyone was happy with, then trying to fix things in postproduction — after it became clear that this approach was becoming less effective with each passing year? What if Feige had recognized sooner that TV shows should be made with empowered showrunners, rather than trying to outsmart a business that had been doing just fine the old-fashioned way? What if the movies and shows hadn't become so inextricably tied to one another that viewers began to feel like staying up to speed on them was all homework?
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One of the biggest of these is a sadly inescapable one: What if Chadwick Boseman hadn't died?
Becasue Boseman kept his colon cancer diagnosis a secret, his death at the much-too-young age of 43 shocked everyone, and left Marvel with a gaping hole in the company's plans post-Avengers: Endgame. That movie ended with Tony Stark and Black Widow dead, and with Steve Rogers old and retired. Between the loss of these tentpole characters and some of the other early actors starting to lose interest, the MCU needed a new face, and it was clearly going to be Boseman. The success of the first Black Panther movie was staggering, as much for its cultural impact as for its box office, as audiences instantly fell in love with both T'Challa as a character and with the idea of Wakanda as a technologically-advanced paradise hidden within the heart of Africa. When I saw Endgame on its opening weekend, by far the loudest audience response — more than Captain America wielding Thor's hammer, or Tony Stark saying 'I am Iron Man' and snapping his fingers — was when Black Panther walked through a portal, alive and well and back in the fight.
The other mistakes and problems wouldn't have gone away entirely. But having a character, and performance, fans cared about as much as Tony/RDJ in the early Marvel years, would have covered over a lot of those problems. If nothing else, it would have made the movies feel less scattered, as Marvel certainly would have come up with excuses for Boseman to cameo here and there in the same way Downey had in prior phases. While Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was a financial success, it was a movie few left the theater feeling thrilled about, even if we all understood that writer-director Ryan Coogler had an impossible task in making a sequel without Boseman. The first film offered only a taste of the vibrant culture and history of Wakanda, and audiences seemed ravenous for more. After Wakanda Forever, that hunger faded.
Prior to last week's release of Fantastic Four: First Steps, Feige said that the company would be returning to its old quality-over-quantity philosophy, and that there would be years where only one new series would premiere on Disney+. So this year, which has already featured Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Daredevil: Born Again, and Ironheart, and will later give us Marvel Zombies and Wonder Man, is a last gasp of the company's old way of doing business.
Ironheart was technically a spinoff of Wakanda Forever, though it downplayed its links to the film. But in the four-episode animated series Eyes of Wakanda, this year does offer a project set firmly in Black Panther's world, albeit centuries — and, at times, millennia — prior to the character's first film appearance in Captain America: Civil War.
Ryan Coogler is one of many executive producers on the series, though the most hands-on one is director Todd Harris, while the four scripts are split between Geoffrey Thorne and Marc Bernardin. It's an anthology of sorts, with each episode taking place in a different time period, and with a different central character, even as the finale reveals that, to borrow a tagline from a much earlier period of Marvel TV, it's all connected.
Though a Black Panther appears at one point, the focus this time is on the Wakandan secret police, the Hatut Zeraze, also known as the War Dogs(*). The opening episode takes place in Crete in 1260 BC, where we find that a former War Dog stole a lot of vibranium — the indestructible supermetal with a variety of nearly magical properties (Captain America's shield was made out of some) — and fled the isolated nation. Though the thief is confronted in the premiere, much of the vibranium winds up scattered around the world. In each episode, we see a different agent traveling to a far-flung locale to retrieve an artifact. One episode is set during the Trojan War, where a Wakandan soldier is fighting alongside Achilles and Odysseus because there's some vibranium behind the walls of Troy; another begins in China in 1400 AD, and involves another Marvel character who's part of a tradition that stretches back many centuries.
(*) Like a lot of the Wakandan history and culture presented in the films, the Hatut Zeraze were introduced in a Nineties comics run by writer Christopher Priest.
All but one episode takes place largely away from Wakanda itself, but we nonetheless learn a lot about what Wakanda means to each of the show's heroes. And we get lots of glimpses of Wakanda's ahead-of-its-time tech — though it seems to be too far ahead of its time, at least relative to what we've seen in the films. The agent in the Trojan War episode has what's basically a primitive BlackBerry, able to text messages back to his superiors on another continent. The 1400 AD episode shows that the Wakandans have already built powered aircraft and monorail trains, long before those appeared in the outside world. It's a fun way to illustrate how superior Wakanda was to the rest of the world for so long — and also how different the planet might have become if T'Challa's predecessors hadn't insisted on keeping Wakanda hidden all that time. But Wakanda in the movies isn't substantially further along than it seems to be in 1400. If you follow the technological curve presented by the show, the country circa Avengers: Infinity War should have been powerful enough on its own to defeat Thanos without breaking a sweat, and prevent half of life in the universe from being temporarily turned to dust.
Where Eyes of Wakanda shines brightest is in its animation, and how that animation is used to portray action. The character designs are all visually striking, with exaggerated facial features presented at extreme angles, and every person clearly delineated from one another, no matter their background or how prominent they are in the story. And the fight scenes — of which there are thankfully many — are fluid, clear, and thrilling. Whenever Boseman or, in Wakanda Forever, Laetitia Wright, has the mask on and is in action, the Black Panther of the films is a largely CGI-generated character, able to move with speed, grace, and power that even the most athletic actor or stunt performer wouldn't be able to match. This goes to even further extremes in cartoon form, with the agents and some of their opponents defying multiple laws of physics with the way they strike, dodge, leap, and run. The stories themselves are fairly thin, and hit similar thematic beats a lot from one episode to the next, but the action elevates the whole thing.
Disney+ is releasing all four episodes at once. The streamer has done Marvel binge releases, or quasi-binges, in the past, though usually with projects the company isn't very enthusiastic about. Ironheart was released in two chunks a week apart, while all the Echo episodes came out on the same day. Wright will be back as T'Challa's sister and successor Shuri in Avengers: Doomsday, so Marvel clearly isn't done with Wakanda yet. But with the new less-is-more strategy, this might be our last project primarily set in this world for a while.
The reality where Chadwick Boseman is still with us would be more appealing for so many reasons. Spending more time in Wakanda isn't terribly high on that list, but Eyes of Wakanda suggests there's a lot more there than we've been able to see without him.
All four episodes of Eyes of Wakanda begin streaming Aug. 1 on Disney+.
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