The Dark Part About WandaVision's Toast Mate 2000 Commercial
Contains spoilers for WandaVision
Easter egg hunters are having a field day picking up on the many references to other Marvel Cinematic Universe properties hidden throughout WandaVision. Disney+'s new series is styled as an homage to classic television sitcoms, with Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) dealing with settings and scenarios that are very distinct from anything we've seen of the MCU so far. Even though the landscapes are much different than Avengers HQ, and the two comically attempt to conceal their superpowers from their new neighbors, in WandaVision, there are still plenty of winks to the superhero saga that brought Wanda and Vision onto our screens in the first place.
In the first two episodes of WandaVision, which premiered on Disney+ on Friday, January 15, the action is broken up with some vintage-style commercials for fictional products that both honor the era and contain some important tributes to the MCU. The premiere episode features the promotion of a product called the Toast Mate 2000. As wholesome and ordinary as the ad might be, if you look — and listen — closely enough, you'll see that it's actually very, very dark.
A stark consequence
The Toast Mate 2000 is a product of Stark Industries, and even though the tagline for the device is, "Forget the past, this is your future," the commercial certainly reminds us of Wanda's tragic personal history. As the flashing light of the product turns red and begins to beep more and more quickly, it resembles the sound of a ticking time bomb, which is something Wanda knows all too much about.
In Avengers: Age of Ultron, we learn that Wanda and her brother Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) lost their parents to an explosion, during which they almost lost their lives too. The twins explain that when they were ten years old, they hid under a bed after a shell claimed the lives of their folks during dinner. They then spent two days looking at a second shell that landed right next to them but didn't detonate; that explosive was labeled with the word "Stark." As a result, Wanda and Pietro grew up vowing revenge against Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) for his company's apparent involvement in their parents' deaths.
Although it's clear that Wanda has forgotten some of her own past — as she and Vision both struggle to answer where they had come from when moving to their quaint new home — perhaps the ad is a hint that her memories are about to make a fiery comeback.
Tick tock
It isn't just the Toast Mate 2000 commercial that's deceptively wholesome but actually incredibly dark. In WandaVision episode 2, there's an ad break for the oh-so-elegant Strücker Watches, a fictional company that also nods to a difficult part of Wanda's past. The watches contain the HYDRA logo — a skull with octopus arms — which is the organization Wanda and Pietro joined after their homeland of Sokovia became wrecked by war. There, the two were experimented on by a man named Wolfgang von Strucker, who used Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) scepter to endow them with their superpowers. As a result of von Strucker's tests, Wanda developed her talents for telekinesis and energy-manipulation skills and became known as the Scarlet Witch, while Pietro gained super-speed and the nickname Quicksilver.
The ad for Strücker Watches teases, "Strücker — He'll make time for you," which may be a reference to all of the attention the Maximoff twins received from von Strucker at HYDRA, since they were the only two who survived his experiments and successfully gained powers as a result of his work. The ticking of the timepiece also rapidly accelerates like the beeping sound from the toaster commercial does, which is not only eerie but also seemingly signifies a countdown to something major ahead. Perhaps the ad is a warning to Wanda and the couch crowd that it won't be long before her unpleasant past comes back to haunt her.