WandaVision just changed the entire game. Besides the Malcolm in the Middle opening and huge cliffhanger ending, the usual mid-episode commercial was completely different.
It was the first commercial to veer from a housewife demographic, instead shifting towards the Rocket-Power-tinged aesthetic of Millennial youth with an animated ad for a Go-Gurt-inspired product called Yo-Magic. But while the tone was shifted more juvenile, the meaning is all the more sophisticated.
The commercial in WandaVision Episode 6 begins with a simple premise told in stop-motion animation. A boy is sitting on a deserted island. A shark offers him a Yo-Magic strawberry yogurt, but he can't get it open. He picks and pulls at the lid while days pass and he grows frailer and frailer until he withers away into a skeleton. Smash cut to a close-up of the box and the slogan: "Yo-Magic, the snack for survivors!"
Unlike the other commercials we've seen so far, there is no blatant reference to an existing moment in Marvel history. There's no Hydra logo, no Stark-branded toasters, just a tragic fable and a radical shark. So in order to dissect the meaning, it's best to stop looking at this like a WandaVision commercial and instead examine it as a 30-second short film Wanda created.
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Yo-Magic, explained
To draw the obvious conclusions first, Yo-Magic represents the concept of magic. It also represents the concept of survival, as it's sustenance on a desert island and "the snack for survivors." The variables are who the boy on the desert island represents.
If the boy represents Wanda, then the commercial directly addresses her survivor's guilt, which to her is like death — unless she uses magic as a way to escape it. Her guilt has been the focus of previous commercials, so it makes sense a sitcom Wanda controls would put her psyche front and center.
However, there's another way to look at the commercial. If the boy represents Pietro or Vision, then the commercial foreshadows the episode's ending. In a world where they can't access Wanda's magic, they are quite literally dead. Just as people rely on food, the men in Wanda's life rely on Wanda and her magic. However, they don't know this.
In a way, this commercial is like a propaganda film for Wanda. It reminds herself and anyone else who may be watching that her magic means life, and the real world means death. But much to Wanda's dismay, that's just expert-level denial. In her own words, "We can't reverse death, no matter how sad it makes us."
WandaVision is now streaming on Disney+.
