‘Black Widow’ Easter Eggs: 7 Things You May Have Missed

First: Ohio is the home state of the Russo brothers, the directors of Captain America: Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. The Russos love Ohio and bringing their productions to the state; in fact, a lot of Winter Soldier’s outdoor scenes were filmed in Ohio. So of all the states to choose from when picking Natasha’s childhood home, Ohio feels like a nod to the directors who did a lot to make Natasha Natasha.

Second: 1995 was a very, very bad year for daughters—and Marvel keeps making it worse! Here’s all the continuity from this one year in Marvel time:

• Nick Fury saved S.H.I.E.L.D. Director (and Hydra agent) Alexander Pierce’s daughter during hostage crisis in Bogotá. (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)
• Almost all of Captain Marvel takes place, which introduced Monica Rambeau as a kid. She had to reckon with the sudden return and sudden departure of Carol Danvers, one of her heroes and practically a family member. And seeing how adult Monica bristles at the mention of Captain Marvel, she doesn’t have fond memories of this year. (Captain Marvel, WandaVision)
• In his quest to preserve the finite resources of the galaxy, Thanos and his army slaughters half of the population of the Zen-Whoberi people. One survivor, a young girl named Gamora, is taken in by Thanos and raised as his daughter/personal assassin. (Avengers: Infinity War)
• Young Ava Starr is orphaned when her father Elihas, recently fired by Hank Pym, dies in an explosion during his experiments on a quantum tunnel. The deadly accident leaves Ava out of sync with reality, rendering her a living ghost. (Ant-Man and the Wasp)
• And now 1995 is also the year that Natasha’s briefly idyllic childhood was cut short and she was pulled back into the Red Room. (Black Widow)

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O. T. Fagbenle plays Rick Mason, Natasha’s gofer when she needs everything from forged identification to stolen vehicles. In the comics, Rick Mason is a mercenary, freelance spy, and an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. While he’s only appeared in a handful of comics, he made his debut in his own Marvel graphic novel called Rick Mason, The Agent in 1989.

The comic version of Rick is also the son of the minor Spider-Man villain the Tinkerer. The Tinkerer has an MCU counterpart, played by Michael Chernus in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Considering that Chernus is only four years older than Fagbenle and most likely zero Marvel fans are heavily invested in these two obscure characters’ father/son dynamic, it’s safe to say they probably aren’t related in the MCU.

Thanks to this film, we get to see what Black Widow does in her downtime: she drinks beer and watches James Bond movies. In this case, she’s watching the 1979 Roger Moore outing Moonraker for the millionth time. This is one of the campiest Bond films, for sure, but it also has plot similarities with Black Widow: both films feature bad guys operating from massive headquarters stationed far off of Earth.

Where to watch Moonraker

The film’s emotional arc is built around a moment that still haunts Natasha to this day. Way back when, Natasha had to do one thing in order to escape the Red Room and defect to S.H.I.E.L.D. for good: she had to kill General Dreykov. In order to do so, she planted a bomb on Dreykov’s daughter and, well… This led to Black Widow and Hawkeye trying to shoot their way out of Budapest and holing up in a subway station for 10 days. That’s where that now infamous exchange between Black Widow and Hawkeye in Avengers comes from.

It turns out that Budapest wasn’t the only bit of Black Widow continuity introduced in 2012’s Avengers. Before the battle of NYC, Loki mentions Dreykov’s daughter while rattling off all of Black Widow’s heinous acts during the interrogation scene. Now that reference cuts even deeper.

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When we catch up with Alexei in the Russian prison, he’s doing what he probably does every day: arm wrestle inmates while getting another tattoo. One of those inmates is named Ursa, played by the 7’2″ Dutch actor Olivier Richters. In the comics, Ursa Major is the superhero alter-ego of Mikhail Uriokovitch Ursus, a mutant and super-soldier member of the Winter Guard (essentially Russia’s Avengers). His power? He turns into a bear. That’s pretty much it. He’s a big bear. There’s a joke about this in Black Widow when Alexei calls Ursa a “baby bear” after snapping his wrist.

But Red Guardian and Ursa are not the only Russian heroes mentioned in Black Widow. We also get a reference to Crimson Dynamo.

That’s what Yelena calls Alexei during their “father”/”daughter” talk. In context, it seems like Crimson Dynamo is either a nickname for Red Guardian or Yelena intentionally misremembering her egotistical “dad’s” superhero identity. But in the comics, Crimson Dynamo is a character in his own right.

Introduced as an Iron Man villain in 1963, the original Crimson Dynamo was Anton Vanko and he wore a red suit of armor. The Crimson Dynamo seen above, the one active in the ’80s as part of the Winter Guard, was Dimitri Bukharin.

For the MCU, part of Crimson Dynamo’s origin and alter-ego was merged with the Iron Man villain Whiplash to create Ivan Vanko, Mickey Rourke’s villain in Iron Man 2. So now Crimson Dynamo’s been referenced twice in the MCU, and he still isn’t really part of the MCU.

They’re two long-running evil organizations in the MCU—they have to have some crossover. We know that the Red Room stole from Hydra; that’s established in the opening scene, when an undercover Red Guardian steals information from S.H.I.E.L.D. (but really Hydra) and hands it over to Dreykov. The information they stole, as Melina later explains, was from Hydra’s Winter Soldier program—the same program that brainwashed Bucky Barnes into becoming a mindless killing machine. So, Melina and other Red Room scientists used Winter Soldier methods to turn Red Room assassins into mindless killing machines.

But even though Melina says that they did not steal weapons or technology on their mission in Ohio in the mid-’90s, it looks like the Red Room also stole some ideas from Hydra when it came to designing the body armor for their soldiers. The Red Room soldiers are wearing gear that looks a lot like what Hydra soldiers wore during World War II, as seen in Captain America: The First Avenger.

When Rick connects with Natasha and provides her with a stack of new identities, Nat has a good LOL at one of those aliases: Fanny Longbottom. Seriously, Rick, what are you doing?

But then in the end credits scene, the movie turns this joke into a tearjerker of an Easter egg.

Yelena’s dog is named Fanny.

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