Credit: Marvel StudiosWandaVision broke the Marvel mold when it first hit Disney+ in 2021. Formatted like sitcoms from across the decades, it wasn’t just the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first official TV show – it was also the first real catharsis post-Avengers: Endgame (2019) and the grand debut of Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) Scarlet Witch alias.
With each episode adopting a different sitcom as inspiration, WandaVision jumped around a lot in terms of tone and aesthetic. The first episode took its cues from iconic shows from the 1950s, such as The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy. The second borrowed heavily from Bewitched, while other episodes drew on the likes of The Brady Bunch, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Full House, and Modern Family.
To mark Wanda’s (or at least her fictional show’s) journey through the decades, each episode of WandaVision received its own unique theme tune and soundtrack. Every week provided earworms catchier than the last (the standout being episode seven’s “Agatha All Along”), courtesy of songwriting duo Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez.
If their names sound familiar, that’s because the couple is responsible for some of Disney’s best-selling soundtracks, including hits like “Let It Go” and “Show Yourself.” Disney also tapped the pair to write the soundtrack for Gigantic – an animated adaptation of Jack and the Giant Beanstalk – before the studio canceled the film in 2017.
While Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez later temporarily jumped ship to Marvel Studios, a recent interview revealed that their Disney history wasn’t totally out of mind while writing for WandaVision.
Appearing on the D23 Inside Disney podcast, the duo was asked whether they’re allowed to reuse unused songs from old projects. Robert Lopez revealed that this actually happened with Gigantic and WandaVision.
Luckily enough, the songs went back to us after ‘Gigantic.’ We cleared it with all the legal-ness of it and we realized we were allowed to use them. We haven’t used many of them, but we did use two of them. One, we used in this show called ‘WandaVision.’
Lopez later clarified that the song in question was “We Got Something Cooking.” This served as the intro to episode three, “Now in Color,” which was set in the 1970s and largely inspired by The Brady Bunch.
While “We Got Something Cooking” only borrowed the melody from Gigantic‘s unnamed track, it does give us an idea of the upbeat direction the film’s soundtrack would have taken had it not been canceled.
Thankfully, fans can look forward to future Disney ditties from Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. With the announcement of Frozen 3 – and the pair’s recent quotes to Collider confirming that they are “very excited” about the project – we’re sure another “Let It Go” moment is just around the corner.