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An edit I’ve put some time into on and off for quite a while this year, and late Spring ‘22, because I’ve always had a very specific vision and idea of what I want to do, but my ability to pull it off is very limited because of certain things not being available properly from Marvel themselves.
Specifically: I remember all the individual episode promos on social media for the first season that were very clearly TVA-themed. I always really liked this idea because those teasers, with The Watcher’s voice and a clear diagram of a branching timeline, made it look like a very clear “successor-series” of sorts to ‘Loki’ Season 1 and very neatly bound them together (especially with how much the Sacred Timeline splits and branches off as soon as He Who Remains is killed).
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The problem is: most of the promos DO exist and are easy to find, but only in that social media viewing format where the scale and resolution is clearly designed to be viewed in portrait mode on a phone screen, rather than widescreen on a TV.
I’ve managed to do all the episodes of Season 1, but less than half of them have the widescreen promo, unfortunately – and the rest have the 4:3ish ratio instead – so that kind of sucks. However, I can always come back and update this later if I do find more of the widescreen versions, and maybe even a viewer of this post knows where I can find the rest properly and help point me in the right direction – so who knows?
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Episodes 1x01-03
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For these episodes, I put the 4:3 ratio TVA promo at the start of the episode, an edit notice at the end and no story changes. The promos themselves have audio from the episode coming in before the visuals change, so I cut the sound off at that point and faded it out gradually to ease the transition before the visuals changed – hopefully it still works.
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1x04 – What If… Iron Man Crashed Into the Grandmaster?
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This episode was originally going to be a part of Season 1 before it was delayed and pushed back by the studio, as I’m sure most people know by now – so I worked on putting it back where it belonged.
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To this end, I got rid of the Watcher’s exposition about Multiverse Guardian Gamora’s story and put one of Season 1’s episodes’ opening credits in place at the start, so it matches the rest of that season. The opening credits from Monster Strange’s episode were the least contradictory based on the appearing names, so that’s the one I went with – Gamora’s voice actress, Cynthia McWilliams, is unfortunately cut off, but let’s credit her here instead.
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I put this episode in this slot because of the order The Watcher assembles The Guardians out of their respective universes in the original finale. He assembles them after retreating to Monster Strange’s universe from Ultron first, and from there they all appear in episode order – with Sakaarian Iron Man and Gamora appearing between T’Char-Lord in the original Episode 2 and Infini-Monger in the original Episode 6 – and 4 is in the middle of that, so why not?
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Episodes 1x05-7
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Now with the Gamora episode re-inserted, the following episodes are pushed back one in the sequence, with Monster Strange appearing in episode 1x05 to the Guardians of the Multiverse in 1x10.
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The TVA promos here are still in the only available, 4:3, ratio.
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1x08 – What If… Thor Were an Only Child?
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The only change I made was the TVA-themed teaser for this episode – thankfully the widescreen version this time, and an edit notice at the end of the credits, hopefully they both work well.
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1x09 – What If… Ultron Won?
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As with above, those were the only changes I felt necessary, so those were the only ones I made - and another widescreen promo thankfully.
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1x10 – What If… The Watcher Broke His Oath?
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As above in widescreen at the beginning of the episode, but also a small change at the end. When The Watcher put Nuclear Natasha in another world that lost its Widow, I put in a small flashback to episode 1x03, in my usual visual style. This ties them together strongly, and also that episode feels like it ends with a clear set-up for a sequel – but The Watcher says he doesn’t normally DO sequels (and the ‘Winter Widow’ episode was probably a one-off because of that), so maybe this kind of follow-up to that story is all we’re going to get, unfortunately.
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Ideally I would love to continue with the first season and finish the rest of the episodes in the proper widescreen format, ‘completing the set’ as it were, but that really depends on what I can find online as far as the TVA promos are concerned. Hopefully I can find more another time and pick this back up again later, but we’ll see of course.
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Footnote: I am merely a self-taught editor and VFX artist here, as such, some areas might be visibly mostly good – as I have to be realistic with the footage in front of me and what I can do with it, of course. If you do have any particular notes and feedback, feel free to give me your thoughts, but please be constructive and don’t be an ass about it.