Fantastic Four Trailer Teaser Already Features One Excellent Marvel Callback

The countdown is on. Our first real look at the upcoming MCU Fantastic Four movie will come at 7 am ET on Tuesday, Feb. 4 (FF, get it?). We’re not getting just a trailer for the movie, but a whole lead-up to the release, complete with a lead spot on the chat show Good Morning America.

As is increasingly common, Marvel has announced the big trailer event with a smaller teaser. But this one’s a bit more substantial than the usual quick montage of images that constitute other trailers for trailers. The Fantastic Four: First Steps trailer teaser shows people in the early 1960s gathering with excitement at a storefront to watch the launch of the Marvel-1, the rocket that carries Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) into space, where they’ll be bombarded by cosmic rays and transformed into Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Girl, the Thing, and the Human Torch. It’s an excellent callback that sets up the tone of the movie and the importance of Marvel’s First Family nicely for the audience.

The Marvel-1 obviously plays an important role in comic book lore. After all, when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee introduced the team in 1961’s Fantastic Four #1, there wasn’t even a company called Marvel Comics yet. Marvel Comics was initially the title of an anthology series launched in 1939, but did not become the name of the superhero line until 1963’s Fantastic Four #14. The Marvel-1 pointed toward what would become perhaps the greatest name in American comics.

The Marvel-1 looks great in the teaser trailer, fully embracing the movie’s retro-futuristic aesthetic. But even better is the name of the organization responsible for the Marvel-1 and its launch: the Future Foundation.

The Future Foundation was introduced in 2010’s Fantastic Four #576, part of the defining run by writer Jonathan Hickman. Reed Richards created the Foundation as a think tank for the next generation of scientists, free thinkers who matched their technical prowess with boundless imagination, the very foundations on which the Fantastic Four were built.

Its original members consisted of young super-geniuses, including Alex Power of the Power Pack, the child clone of supervillain the Wizard, evolved Moloids (minions of the Mole Man), with Dragon Man serving as mentor. Later additions included Valeria Richards, the younger and smarter daughter of Reed and Sue), X-Men supporting characters Artie and Leech, Wakandan teen Onome, and Adolf Impossible, son of the mischievous imp the Impossible Man.

The Future Foundation embodied the central themes of the Fantastic Four, which had been lost in the decades since Lee and Kirby launched the series. The Fantastic Four captured a sense of optimism during the space race, the idea that the world’s youth would think of things and go places that previous generations didn’t dare to dream, that they would—to borrow the title of Hickman’s first FF storyline —solve everything.

By the 2010s, Fantastic Four remained one of the most important comics of all time, but the team was anything but young and forward thinking. The Future Foundation gave the series a shot in the arm by embracing the weirdest corners of the Marvel Universe and letting the kids go nuts with ideas.

If Fantastic Four: First Steps can capture just a fraction of the Future Foundation’s optimism and energy, then the movie will be the most energetic superhero film ever made.

Fantastic Four: First Steps launches into theaters on July 25.

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