That was my big concern with it.
Giving her her own show, I worry that we're going to get Han Solo Syndrome, and she's
neat when you don't know stuff about her-
Hahn Solo?
Oh Brian, why don't you just go straight to hell, man?
Why don't you just go straight to hell and die?
What is wrong with you?
Tom.
Brian.
What are some things that we want to see in the Agatha Harkness spinoff?
Brian, I think I've said before, magic in comics and superheroes, not 100% my thing.
It always felt like a weird cheat to me, which doesn't make any sense.
But for whatever reason, I could never get fully on board with magic characters unless,
for some reason, they got put into a pulp setting, like Mandrake the Magician sort of
stuff.
Fedoras, and cigarettes, and back alleys, and rain.
That kind of thing, yeah.
Double-breasted jackets.
Hellboy, for example, one of my all time favorite comics, one of my favorite stories, I know
that this is a wild stretch, but there is an Agatha Harkness story that comes from Uncanny
Avengers from about five, six years ago, where we find out that, just post World War II,
she was of this clandestine postwar allied magicians' army thing.
Oh my God.
Yeah, it was kind of neat.
It was called the Department of the Uncanny, and she and a three other magicians, there
was a guy named Dakor, there was Ghost Dancer, and the Emerald Warlock, and they formed this
very old-timey crew of Nazi wizard hunters-
Love it.
I'm there.
... that rocked.
I'm sold.
Sign me up.
This reminds me, I'm going to slightly tangent here, the Ed Brubaker run of Immortal Iron
Fist.
Did you read that back in the day?
Early 2000s.
I did not.
Basically, Danny Rand is the Iron Fist dude, but then you find out that there was an Iron
Fist before him who was adventuring around the world with a team of weirdos in the '40s.
His name was Orson or whatever, and he was the Iron Fist at that point.
And it was very like this retro pulp thing, exactly like what you're describing.
And so everything you just mentioned, I love that storyline.
This sounds amazing.
I have a huge crush on that particular period of history as a setting for adventure stories,
and I think that adding paranormal stuff to it, for some reason, it's just very charming
to me.
Another good one, Atomic Robo, if you've never read it.
I don't know that.
Okay, we'll talk after this.
Atomic Robo is a robot invented by Nikola Tesla and he's lived for over a hundred years.
It's basically Hellboy but a little bit more straightforward, and instead of the son of
Satan, he is a robot, and it's great.
Well, I think it's important to point out that Hellboy isn't actually the son of Satan,
Brian.
He's actually the child-
You know what I mean.
Okay.
You know what I mean.
Sorry.
We have this discussion every week.
We don't have to fight.
It's exhausting.
I'm so tired of it.
Anung Un Rama.
So anyway, it's this terrific pulpy throwback story that I think is delightful.
I don't imagine that it will probably make it onto the screen.
I think it would be really fun if it did.
They're trying to find a Nazi witch named Hilda von Hate, I think is her name.
I hope I'm right.
Nailed it, Hilda von Hate.
Wow.
Yeah, the sorceress of the SS.
What a subtle name.
That's perfect.
No idea what she's about.
How much does that rock, though?
I know.
It's perfect.
That's like the Wonder Woman villain.
What is it, Professor Poison or whatever her name was.
Right.
Doctor Poison.
Doctor, yeah.
No, got it.
How much would it suck if it turned out she was building robots.
She's like, "No, I didn't want to get pigeonholed."
It's a family name.
It's Poisson.
Poisson.
My last name is fish.
I'm making fish men.
Yeah, this is great.
So that would be my number one pick.
I don't necessarily think that it's going to happen.
I think with the direction that they've taken the character, and especially with what Kathryn
Hahn did with her, there was a whole portion of Marvel comics history where Agatha Harkness
was working as a nanny, as this all powerful nanny, to the Fantastic Four.
The Fantastic Four left their kid, Franklin, to hang out with her while they were working.
So what if this spinoff was a reboot of The Nanny, but with superheroes?
That's more or less what I could see happening, yeah.
Yeah, everyone loves The Nanny.
I think that could be neat.
Yeah.
No-one ever stopped loving The Nanny.
True, but it just started streaming and now everybody's extra psyched.
Ooh.
Yeah.
We'll never get tired of Fran Drescher's voice.
I think that could be neat if we did a this is her penance for the stuff that she was
doing.
If Wanda was in charge of keeping an eye on her and then she gets put in charge of keeping
the children of the Avengers safe or whatever.
So one of the things that I think worked so well about WandaVision was that obviously,
this is nothing revelatory I'm about to say, but each episode is a different era of sitcom,
and what's so great about the Agatha character is that she fits right in.
Kathryn Hahn is so good at playing a broad sitcom type character, but the whole time
we know that she knows that we know that she's being a broad sitcom type character.
Right.
You always feel like you're in on the joke with Kathryn Hahn, like she's winking at you
the whole time.
She's so good.
She does such a great job with it.
Yeah.
But one of the things I'm worried about is will we still like Agatha when she's not being
a nosy sitcom neighbor witch?
Are they going to do more sitcom stuff with her?
I would probably like to see that but I can't imagine a way to justify it.
So that's-
So that's my-
Yeah, go ahead, Tom.
That was my big concern with it.
Giving her her own show, I worry that we're going to get Han Solo Syndrome, and she's
neat when you don't know stuff about her-
Hahn Solo?
Oh Brian, why don't you just go straight to hell, man?
Why don't you just go straight to hell and die?
What is wrong with you?
I thought that was great.
Hahn Solo?
Come on.
Which one of us is?
It was very good.
You said it.
You did a great job.
I'm sorry, I overreacted.
Let's never fight again.
I've been stressed at work lately.
You see, I've been having to do this podcast with this idiot.
No, I don't want them to do the same thing over, and over, and over again, but I want
to see Agatha fit into the wider MCU and interact with more people, but I don't know how you
get there without repeating WandaVision over and over.
But I do hope she becomes a wider part of the MCU, mostly because I am obsessed with
Kathryn Hahn, and I probably should have worn my Super Yaki Welcome to the Hahnaissance
T-shirt for this episode, but it's in the laundry.
But no, Kathryn Hahn makes everything she's in better and she has been doing that forever.
How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days is a bad standard rom-com and she makes that movie-
Don't you dare.
... worth it's existence.
I mean she's hilarious in it.
Bad Moms.
Bad Moms, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
She has done a lot of supporting heavy lifting, and so I'm happy that she's getting a spinoff,
but I want to see her really, Hahn, not even the character, just flex her muscles in the
MCU, and hopefully meet more characters.
I just don't know how that works.
The biggest thing I want from an Agatha spinoff though is an Emmy for Kathryn Hahn because,
no offense to Julianne Nicholson, who was very good in Mare of Easttown, but come on,
the work Kathryn Hahn did is ridiculous.
She's so good in WandaVision.
Every frame, she's doing something fascinating and different.
So just an Emmy for Kathryn, please.
Someone make that happen.
She's a huge highlight.
Yeah, I think the first pitch obviously is the one I like the most, which is-
Nazi wizard.
Nazi wizard hunter is hard to beat.
Can't top it.
But I think that as a potential for a TV show in the same spiritual vein of WandaVision,
this idea of her trapped as a superpowered nanny, and the hijinks that can ensue.
So would she have to discover her own powers again, like Wanda did in WandaVision?
I guess I'm curious about how that would work.
Does she have any memory at all, or is she like I know I'm a superpowered nanny, or is
she ignorant to it?
I think you raised a good question because the series ends with her mind being wiped.
I don't have any desire to see her discover that again, because that's a journey that
I don't either, that's why I asked.
Exactly, right.
So Bourne Identity is an awesome movie because he doesn't have his memory and then eventually
you figure it out, but you don't want to see him remember who he is every time when you
know who he is.
So same thing with Agatha Harkness.
I want episode one, minute one she's like, "Oh yeah, I have powers," but somehow I like
the idea of her getting stuck and punished as a nanny, or as some kind of this is what
you have to do.
I think it could be really fun, right?
Yeah.
I think it would be a lot of fun.
My interpretation of the end, and I maybe I'm remembering this wrong, but I thought
that she got trapped inside of her own mind.
Agatha's still in there, her body's running on autopilot as this wacky neighbor character,
which is very end of Being John Malkovich, a particular hell that she's being put through.
But no, I love the idea of her being pulled out of that we need somebody who's powerful
enough to protect these kids, but also somehow being collared by Wanda, or by Dr. Strange,
or whoever so that she can't do damage, and you get to watch her either doing a Loki semi
redemption arc or constantly trying to get out of the restraints that she's been put
in while, at the same time, being forced to change diapers and make snacks with people.
No, and the good news is I just double checked, by the way and head writer from WandaVision,
Jac Schaeffer, is running this series.
So I think we can be optimistic that the sense of humor that WandaVision presented and its
sensibility will be a part of this spinoff as well because it's the same creative team.
How about as a counterpoint, brand new idea, first episode, she gets her memory back and
immediately launches into super villain mode, and she spends the rest of the series trying
to gain strength, gain allies, formulate a plan to take revenge on Wanda and kill her.
And that's it, it's just straight up this is a villain's arc, she's a villain.
We don't need to redeem her because she rules when she's evil.
Yeah, so fun.
We don't care.
And again, we've talked briefly in the past about Marvel's villain problem where they
have bad guys and Marvel comics, the villain's defeated, they get away, they fake their death,
they go to jail, they come back.
In Marvel movies, most of them die.
And so it was fun to have Baron Zemo come back in Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
He was a great addition to that show.
I think it would be great if we have just Agatha Harkness, constant thorn in the side
of the MCU.
She's just a villain, she's a bad guy.
Just there starting trouble all the time, yeah.
Yeah, why not?
And you're talking to somebody who would watch a spinoff series where Kathryn Hahn eats cereal
for nine episodes and that's the show.
We all would.
So any idea sounds good, but I do love don't redeem her, let her be deliciously fun and
evil because she's so fun when she's bad, and every time you think everything's fine,
Agatha's back to stir things up again in some different fun way.
Every episode is another plot against a different hero in the MCU.
So it's Pinky and the Brain, but one person and they're good at it.
Exactly.
I was just about to say it's Pinky and the Brain but it's Agatha Harkness.
Yeah, she screws up-
She's good at it, yeah.
... every time because she gets beaten.
No, she's not good at it.
I'm saying she gets foiled every time, and she goes back to her lair like Rita Repulsa
on the moon, and she's like ah.
Yeah, back to the drawing board.
I have to get these Avengers somehow.
Right, perfect.
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