When WandaVision Moved Into the Griswold House

ALERT! Spoilers for WandaVision and (sort of) Agatha All Along follow.

First, let’s get this out of the way: I hate Marvel movies. I hate them! Too long, too bloatedly expository, too filled with digital fight scenes that put me to sleep because I have no emotional connection to any of this pixel-created rock-em sock-em stuff on the screen.

(As opposed to Frozen, where I feel very deeply about the pixel-created magic on the screen.)

But Dan wanted to watch every piece of Marvel output in release order, so we’ve been slogging our way through each movie one by one for years. Like, we started before the pandemic.

Last week we finally got to WandaVision. And I loved it. LOVED IT. Was obsessed.

The conceit was so perfect because it spoke my language — TV sitcom tropes — and was executed perfectly to boot. Every single production detail (including opening title sequences and musical cues) was spot-on and told the story as Wanda channel-flipped us through the decades.

Part of the reason everything felt so picture-perfect down to my bones was that I could immediately tell the series was filmed on the Blondie Street set at the Warner Bros. Ranch.

This piece of backlot property featured a street chockablock with iconic building exteriors featured in Christmas Vacation, Bewitched, The Partridge Family, Lethal Weapon, Hocus Pocus, Friends, Pushing Daisies, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, The Middle — and so many more movies and TV series.

This made for some incredible in-jokes if you noticed the sets. The Maximoff/Vision house was the Christmas Vacation Griswold house, because of course that’s where you’d situate the ideal hap-hap-happy family. Agnes Agatha lived in the Bewitched house, creating a warped lineage from one witch to another.

Also, don’t think I didn’t notice former demon Anya (Emma Caulfield) as Wanda’s Regina George-esque neighbor Dottie, who lived in the Todd and Margo/Lethal Weapon house next door.

Yes, WandaVision’s interiors were custom soundstages crafted to give them the essential visual elements of the eras and shows to which they were paying homage. But the exteriors were real, and their physical presence underscored the heightened reality of the series.

In the making-of feature Assembled, Elizabeth Olsen said as much, noting that in the town square finale sequence with a full cast and wide, panning shots — including Kathryn Hahn as Agatha standing and projecting lines from the roof of a real two-story building — “it feels like a piece of theater. It felt really satisfying to do emotionally […] and it just felt epic.”

Of course it would be more fun for any actor in the series to have actual sets to play off for once instead of green screens and fill-in-your-imagination here sets. No wonder the whole experience was so satisfying for both participants and viewers!

Then I learned that the entire Warner Bros. Ranch set had been sold and demolished in 2023-2024. Agatha All Along was the final show filmed there.

It’s all gone. The Griswold house and adjacent swimming pool. The Bewitched house. The original park where the Friends opening was filmed (Warner Bros. moved the fountain to the main lot for the studio tour in 2019).

All to build more soundstages and parking lots.

I get that in California we lose iconic structures to fires all the time (including the original Back to the Future Courthouse Square set at Universal, which was rebuilt after a fire in the 1990s). The Griswold family home itself was built for Christmas Vacation, according to columbiaranch.net. It replaced the Mr. Deeds mansion, which had been leveled after a series of fires earlier in the century.

But what is lost when someone intentionally destroys a piece of pop culture history is so much more painful than when something goes down because of the wrath of nature. There’s forethought in the erasure. There’s a patriarchal dismissal that says, “What you care about deeply does not matter.”

And yes, this is also me reacting to the cultural destruction writ large over the past decade, the erosion of and lack of regard for art and nature and the hand-drawn and human-written. . . . And yes, this might seem frivolous in a world where so much else feels more urgently in need of saving and fixing.

But I’ll say over and over that a) frivolity and joy fuel us in bad times as well as good and b) real-life touchstones keep us engaged and emotionally committed to what we experience. No matter how much we move forward, there’s immense value in keeping one foot in the real world, not bulldozing prior innovation in the name of efficiency and progress.

So we can have vinyl and mp3s. Field Notes and Notion. Library books and emailed newsletters. Practical, tangible creativity that reminds us of the power of art and craft along with digital systems that continue to connect us.

WandaVision was created with love and respect for an art form that the rest of the Marvel universe seemed to ignore entirely until this point. And it’s ironic that it now serves as one of the final homages to a place that was an icon of the silver and small screens.

I’m still excited to watch Agatha All Along and soak up the glorious talent of Kathryn Hahn. But it will be bittersweet.

Go further down the Blondie Street / WandaVision rabbit hole:

Here’s a look at the history of the Warner Bros. Ranch and the many productions filmed there:

Assembled is also a fun watch if you want to get a better look at the practical effects they used throughout the series:

And for one more trip down memory lane, here’s the original Friends opening sequence that’s all fountain footage: