MCU and Me

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has pretty much been a fascination of mine ever since Iron Man came out back in 2008. Exactly 12 years ago today (at the time this gets posted).

Somehow, this whole thing started at pretty much the perfect time for me personally. I had always been a fan of superhero movies and cartoons but had only read a couple comics in my life. Iron Man came out as I was graduating high school. I had gotten an Xbox 360 for a graduation gift and one of the first games I bought was Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance. It is a game completely filled with about as many characters and references as it could fit. It was when I was about mid-way through playing this game that I went to the threatres to see Iron Man.

I didn’t make it to Iron Man opening weekend, which turned out to be a good thing. There is no chance I would have stayed through the credits if not for friends telling me that there is something there. And if not for the coincidence of timing with playing Ultimate Alliance, I don’t think I would have gotten nearly as much out of the tag. Not only was the game my perfect entry point into how big this universe could be, it was my first introduction to Nick Fury. It was like this scene was telling me something like Ultimate Alliance was what the movies were aiming for.

To make the timing even more perfect, this was all happening just a couple months before I was moving out on my own (Iron Man actually came out exactly three months before my eighteenth birthday). I would be going to a new city where I knew only a few members of my extended family. The time alone that came from having just moved away from all my friends, and my very recent boost of interest in Marvel, led to me finally buying comics for the first time. Specifically, I bought Civil War.

In hindsight, Civil War was a very weird entry point into the comics. I had never heard of half the characters in it. And even some of the things going on with characters I did know, I didn’t really get the context. But there were some ways where it was kind of perfect. Much like Ultimate Alliance, it showed an array of characters, giving me a chance to see a lot of possible options for who I could pick and choose to follow.

Keeping up with how perfect the timing was for all of this; I start working at a Blockbuster within a couple months of moving away. As I am getting into comics, I become friends with a coworker who had been into them for much longer and had a big collection. A stopping point with comics can be how expensive they can be to keep up with, but I had found a way to start borrowing them.

Time passes, and I realize my original major isn’t really what I want to do with my life. It was one of those situations of liking the romanticized concept of a thing more so than the actual work involved. The next major I choose… I’m not completely sold on either. It’s around this point I find what I really want to be doing: I want to make (and more specifically, write) for movies and television. It almost sounds like a random choice on a whim, but it was more so a situation of having tried to deny the fact until then. It was a crazy pipedream, no chance I could ever work in the film industry, so it would be insane to try! But I had to admit, I felt more at home with these kinds of fiction than I did with most other things.

My whole school situation is sort of an aside, but it again comes down to when this all happens. I made the choice to have my major be film around early 2011, a little before Captain America: The First Avenger comes out. Out of all the MCU movies to this point, this is the one that made it feel the most real that Avengers was coming. The original culmination of what all these origins were leading to. I was at the point of beginning my journey into more formally studying film as this universe is reaching one of its most hype moments. Hell, in my first term Film Studies class I managed to right two essays on Iron Man. I took some Summer classes in 2012 to make up for the time lost from swapping majors twice, and one of them happens to be about sequels. It was homework to go watch Avengers opening weekend.

As I came to learn new ways to look at movies, not just as a fan, but how plots are structured and themes are created, or what life is like on set, my mind always wanders back to how these elements play in the MCU movies, in part, because there’s bound to be one that either just came out or is soon to be released.

I could honestly go on with how these movies have intersected with major points in my life, but let’s be honest, the MCU has been going on for over a decade at this point, it’s bound to happen. The fact of the matter is its starting point just happened to come about at an incredibly specific time in my life, and since then has literally existed through the entirety of my adulthood. They are a large part about why I am into comics, and they connect to my education into film. Even on the television side of things, I was given the assignment to outline a spec episode of a TV show for one class, and chose Agents of SHIELD (the show was midway through season 2, and my episode was all about Daisy [still Skye at this point] needing to learn to be a leader. So, I was right on track with where the series was headed).

The movies of the MCU began at the perfect time in my life to really have me connect and interact with them in a way that I don’t think any other series or movie universe could ever do again. And because of that, as this universe continues to build, through Phase Four and beyond, I’m along for the ride. Probably over thinking every one of them.