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Reed says he reached back even further into the history of science fiction, from old serials to the now legendary pulp magazines of the 1950s, to latter-day illustrated stories, all to draw inspiration for the imagery of Quantumania.
“It keys off everything from Flash Gordon to Barbarella, or any of those sorts of ‘70s or ‘80s things like Heavy Metal magazine,” Reed explains. “We really wanted it to be kind of a grab bag of all these science fiction movie and literary touchstones that I grew up with. So to me, it’s just like, we have worlds within worlds to create in the Quantum Realm. So they can be all these different things.”
Reed notes one influence in particular that might be especially obscure to a lot of viewers, but at the same time could trigger a memory in a certain generation that grew up with one specific Saturday morning animated show from the 1960s (which was briefly revived in 1981).
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“David Dastmalchian plays this character Veb, who is sort of this red globby character,” the director says. “To me, it was like, ‘Do you remember the Hanna-Barbera Herculoids animated series? One of those guys was named Gleep or whatever it was called. What if we had a photo-real version of something like that?’ I love the idea of just having a lot of different aesthetic qualities to represent all these different life-forms down there.”
In designing and visualizing the full breadth of the Quantum Realm, which had only been hinted at in the previous two Ant-Man movies, Reed says he wanted the artists working on the project to introduce the wildest ideas they had.
“To create this entire corner of the MCU that hadn’t been explored yet and did not belong to any of the other heroes in the MCU … [we assembled] a team of artists under our production designer Will Htay,” the director elaborates. “We had so many different worlds within the subatomic world to create, [so we said], ‘Bring your best ideas to the table and open your portfolios. Let’s see some of the strange stuff you created.’”
