WandaVision’s era-specific sitcom themes became a signature part of the show, to the point where fans would speculate about which specific sitcom or decade would open the next episode. The songs charted WandaVision’s progress through six decades of television history, reflecting the increasingly surreal atmosphere of Wanda’s alternate reality along the way. It was an unusual move for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it produced a big hit, and the songs played a huge role in getting viewers into the right mindset.
There were seven songs produced in all, and ranking them is difficult. All were written by the same Oscar-winning team, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, and each of them fills a specific niche. They’re also corny at times, yet there’s an underlying creepiness to all of them, deliberately inserted by the songwriters to convey WandaVision’s Lynchian undertones. A subjective ranking of all seven songs follows, based more on their embodiment of those notions than their objective quality.
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7. W-V 2000
The 2000s was the last time opening theme songs remained prominent, before streaming, binge-watching and the “skip intro” option made many of them obsolete. “W-V 2000” reflects that with a series of simple electronic beats over an increasingly frantic montage of Wanda’s name on everyday items. It reflects work-related sitcoms like The Office and Parks and Recreation, which marked a break from the family-centric comedies evoked in the previous themes. The shift also coincides with the final dissolution of Wanda’s fantasy life, with Wanda’s lack of control linking to the themes of mismanagement that served as the font of ’00s-era humor.
6. Let’s Keep It Going
’90s theme songs were reminiscent of post-punk MTV montages, and WandaVision’s ’90s opener embraced that ethos to create the most deliberately disturbing entry in the series, as it was chaotic, unsettling and tinged with menace. Family comedies at the time embraced dysfunction, following in the footsteps of Roseanne and Married… With Children, and they were best exemplified by the likes of Malcolm in the Middle. The theme here was evocative of Malcolm specifically, as Wanda’s world started to fall apart, and she took increasingly aggressive steps to defend it.
5. A Newlywed Couple
“A Newlywed Couple” had the starting position in WandaVision’s line-up, so it had to convey the most amount of information about the show up front. Actual ’50s sitcoms rarely used lyrics in their themes; shows like I Love Lucy stuck solely to instrumentals, while Leave It to Beaver and The Dick Van Dyke Show used spoken voice-over. WandaVision responded by adopting the tactics of Sherwood Schwartz, a legendary producer who wrote for The Red Skelton Show and Gilligan’s Island. “A Newlywed Couple” adopts Gilligan’s expository tactics while letting the visuals play to the earlier aesthetics of I Love Lucy and its ilk. It also establishes the ground rules of the show while adding to the mystery of how two superheroes ended up in 1950s suburbia.
4. We Got Something Cooking
Schwartz also scored The Brady Bunch, featuring another famously expository opening theme that defines the show for the viewer. Later shows from the ’70s followed suit, adopting laid-back themes that dated themselves the moment they were uttered. WandaVision heightened its kitsch with its oppressively sunny lyrics, matched with images of Wanda’s sudden pregnancy and revamped scenes of cliched domesticity. It matches the first real cracks appearing in Wanda’s façade, stressing that maintaining her fantasy isn’t going to be as easy as she believes.
3. Making It Up as We Go Along
The Reagan Era called for a return to ’50s-era domesticity, and network sitcoms responded with the paternalistic likes of Growing Pains and Family Ties. The visuals mashed Family Ties’ conceit of a portrait being painted with Growing Pains’ trend of using child photos of the actors to depict the characters growing up, which the music matched up with minor chords and painfully earnest lyrics. WandaVision skipped the theme song in Episode 4, “We Interrupt This Program” as Monica Rambeau and company’s grappled with Wanda’s alternate reality, but “Making It Up” ties into that elegantly, suggesting that Wanda’s love for Vision is enough to sustain this fake world.
2. WandaVision!
With the basics established in the first episode, WandaVision stepped effortlessly into the second episode, which in this case meant a largely instrumental theme song. The vocals were limited to the show’s title, so it was left to the animated visuals to convey the story. The tactic matches era staples like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, which similarly used instrumentals instead of lyrics. Both shows also began airing in black and white, then switched to color during their run, which WandaVision emulates in this episode.
1. Agatha All Along
Ranking most of the songs on this list is quite subjective, but there’s little debate about the top spot, which caused a social media explosion and turned Agatha Harkness into a meme darling. The song itself is wicked, embodying WandaVision’s central, spoiler-laden reveal in both the title and chorus. It’s an infectious ear worm to boot, making it difficult to avoid singing aloud. It shares that quality with most classic sitcom themes and stepped out of the previous pattern of era-specificity, as “Agatha All Along” evokes the spooky-comic vibes of The Munsters and The Addams Family. It’s fiendish, clever and encapsulates the show’s entire ethos in one catchy package.
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