Taking “If the apocalypse comes, beep me” to a whole new level, Carol Danvers is weirdly enamored with a pager in the latest Captain Marvel teaser.
There are two pop culture references to pagers that have survived the rise of mobile phones, so Captain Marvel has an uphill battle to climb to be the third. At least she can fly, and she has the power of the Marvel Cinematic Universe behind her.
Indeed, the MCU probably can’t help but weave the pager into her ’90s-set origin film. It’s almost too perfect, in a way. Comicbook.com has found what’s believed to be a Russian-language teaser by BGR.
Watch it below:
Can we all agree that watching Captain Marvel in a different language seems like a fantastic experience? Okay, back to the relevant bits here. BGR and Uproxx come to roughly the same conclusion, that the pager Carol borrows from Fury is the one he uses in Avengers: Infinity War to summon her. There, we don’t disagree.
However, neither of them seem to get at the fairly obvious theory as for how it got modified: Kree technology. The Kree are able to modify Carol to make her part-Kree as of the late ’80s, while Dolly the sheep wasn’t cloned from adult cells until the mid-’90s here on Earth. Sure, there are differences in the MCU with regards to what humans can do, but the fact that pagers are a thing should tell us quite a bit about the state of technology on Earth.
If one of Captain Marvel‘s main themes is reconnecting with Earth even as she’s partially Kree, wouldn’t a modified pager be perhaps the best symbol of that aside from the change in her uniform color from green and black to red, blue, and gold? It would also help it last 20+ years, as BGR identifies that as a major concern.
Perhaps this technological marvel might also help incorporate other MCU cameos. Even if Tony Stark himself doesn’t appear, it’s possible that a reference to Stark Industries might be dropped if the modified pager really does appear. Even though we’ve had multiple trailers and teasers at this point, we still don’t know a ton about Captain Marvel.
To be honest, we kind of like it that way.
(And if you’re wondering, the second beeper reference is Kim Possible‘s theme song.)
Captain Marvel hits theaters March 8.