The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Featurette: Tying Blackness In America Through Sam Wilson’s Journey
A large part of Marvel Studios’ success came from populating its films with great characters and weaving in great individual stories within a shared universe. But that makes the Disney+ shows distinctly different from the films while also being compelling in how it brings humanity to its supporting characters. After spending the better part of 12 years as a supportive cast, Sam (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky (Sebastian Stan) can now step out of Cap’s shadow and live up to the heroes they were destined to be. And to give the miniseries some added depth, “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier” takes a look at real social issues such as race and PTSD in America, while still being very much a product of Marvel Studios with its cinematic action sequences and stunt choreography.
Disney+ has released a brand-new featurette that addresses the continuation of Sam and Bucky’s stories. In it, showrunner Kari Skogland, writer Malcolm Spellman, and executive producer Nate Moore talk about interweaving the real-life stories about being Black in America and those struggling with PTSD within the larger arc of the MCU. As such, it explores more of the human side of the two titular characters. “I felt like we would be dishonest just on a human level if we had this Black man just accept the symbol without having real ambivalence about it,” Spellman said about Sam’s hesitancy about accepting Captain America’s legacy.
“With this series, we’ve been able to give a level of sincerity and humanity to him,” Mackie said about Sam. “You get a real sense of what this character, Sam Wilson, really is.
“The notion of what Blackness means in America ties very much into Sam’s journey through the events of the show,” Moore adds. And that came through just within the first episode where we see how Sam and his sister Sarah (Adepero Oduye) struggle to get a loan to help keep their family’s business afloat. The banks are far more interested in the fact that Sam, an Avenger, is sitting right across from them and seem to have no problem making it harder for BIPOCs to get financial help.
Even Sarah hints at the balance of those real-life fights at home for herself and Sam, and the war aboard where Sam and Bucky have to take on the Flag Smashers, a new terror network who believes life was much better during the Blip.
It’s going to be really exciting to see where the story goes from here. As we said in our review of the first episode, because the titular characters never really got the chance to fully develop in the films, the miniseries is a chance to find out who they really are. What’s more, we will get to see how much the world has and has not changed through their eyes.
New episodes of “The Falcon and Winter Soldier” drop every Friday exclusively on Disney+.
