What if the dreams and design features of Disney’s Tomorrowland were realized in 1960s Manhattan?
One gets a sense of the possibilities in Marvel’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” which begins on Earth-828, a doppelgänger for our own planet and the home base of the film’s titular superheroes, before spilling out into space. This alternate universe includes mod fashions and flying cars, Flash Gordon-inspired rocket ships and robot butlers, midcentury modern chairs and space-age architecture.
In this iteration of the franchise, directed by Matt Shakman, the superhero team inhabits a planet devoid of other Marvel superheroes — no X-Men or Spideys here — and a vastly transformed Manhattan simultaneously familiar yet alien.
For the film’s fashions, the Oscar-winning costume designer Alexandra Byrne (“Elizabeth: The Golden Age”) looked at everything from Ernst Haas photos and ’60s ski wear to fashion designers like Rudi Gernreich and Bonnie Cashin. Little was overlooked. Byrne even wrestled with the challenges of how the massive Thing might dress himself. “He’s got rock hands,” she said. “He would never be able to do buttons up.”
Other artists and designers drew from concept cars, Modernist architects, period newspaper comic strips and archival NASA footage to create the film’s retrofuturist world, said the production designer Kasra Farahani.
“So much of retrofuturism is kind of jokey and naïve,” he said. “We were looking to move past that, to take the important archetypical bits, the tail fins, the turbines, the visual icons of that era, but then shed some of the silliness and move to a more sophisticated version of midcentury futurism.” Below is a closer look at how three specific design aspects were achieved.
The Baxter Building Living Room
In the Marvel universe, the Baxter Building performs double duty as the Fantastic Four’s headquarters and home, complete with research labs, hangar decks, a home gym and, in this latest film, the most stylish of living rooms. Farahani drew inspiration from the works of the architects Eero Saarinen (the TWA Flight Center at Kennedy Airport) and Oscar Niemeyer (the Cathedral of Brasília). The room’s centerpiece is a circular conversation pit done up in Fantastic Four blue; the carpeted, coved stairing and floors were inspired by Niemeyer’s work on the French Communist Party headquarters in Paris.
One of the larger design challenges was adding warmth to what is essentially an expansive New York City penthouse. “We brought in a lot of natural materials that one usually associates with West Coast midcentury modernism,” Farahani said. “There’s tons of wood, lots of ferns and plantings, flagstone flooring.”
To complete the space, designers added a rotating centerpiece with a fireplace on one side and a TV on the other; a large, multicolored mobile inspired by the American sculptor Alexander Calder; and a Saarinen-designed womb chair next to the record player listening station.
The Fantasticar
In 1962, the Fantastic Four artist Jack Kirby (who created the comic book with Stan Lee) debuted the original Fantasticar, an open-air flying vehicle whose unique shape earned it the nickname “the flying bathtub.” For “First Steps,” the filmmakers went for something a bit more aerodynamic, taking their design cues from American concept cars like the 1964 General Motors Firebird IV. The new and improved Fantasticar shares the same sleek profile and bubble canopy top, as well as a cockpit-like front seat and rear lights that double as jets.
The filmmakers built two versions for the movie. The main car’s bubble canopy and sliding doors open up to allow all four superheroes — even the lumpish Thing — to jump in and out with ease (the makers added pressure sensors with automatic safety releases to prevent the canopy from accidentally crushing one of the actors). The special effects supervisor Alistair Williams (the “Fast and the Furious” franchise) was tasked with bringing Farahani’s designs to practical life. “It was a real challenge,” he said. “I’ve got goofy footage of me and my guys in a soundstage jumping in and out of the car, just trying to get that timing really, really tight.”
The designers also added white wall tires, chrome bullet tips poking out of the turbines, and expandable front and back seats to accommodate the Thing’s larger backside. The stunt version of the car, which took 22 weeks to make, features rear-wheel drive and a 450-horsepower-equivalent electric motor. “For a concept car, it handled remarkably well,” Williams said.
New York City
For the film’s Manhattan, designers envisioned a city whose streets and skyline have been transformed by the scientific wonders enabled by the team’s egg-headed leader Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mister Fantastic. In this alternate universe, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building share real estate with domed skyscrapers straight out of 1950s sci-fi pulp novels. The concept artists and set designers drew inspiration from Arthur Radebaugh’s “Closer Than We Think!,” a newspaper comic strip that ran from 1958 to 1963 and envisioned such hopeful possibilities as rocket-powered mail carriers and mining expeditions on the moon. “The comics are very pulpy, very over the top,” Farahani said. “But they were trying to show that these things were not just fantasy, and there was always some tenuous link to current technological discoveries.”
The filmmakers also installed a monorail system that runs through midtown, and billboards and signage that reflect a world in which the Fantastic Four are not just superheroes, but celebrity shills and stars of their own Saturday morning cartoon. Period-accurate billboards for Canada Dry and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum share the borough with a faux billboard for Coppertone (“official sun lotion of the Fantastic Four!”) starring a bare-bottomed Johnny Storm, a.k.a. the Human Torch.
On the street, the prop department mixed period cars (a Ford pickup, a classic Volkswagen Beetle) and vintage New York checker cabs with one-person bubble cars created by the film’s vehicles crew. “There’s a nice contrast that comes from taking the fantasy of all these superheroes and creating a world that seems plausible and relatable to ours,” Farahani said.
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