The Fantastic Four: First Steps — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

The film announces its rules before a single scene: the Marvel Studios fanfare plays over a redesigned, flat, mid-century logo card, and the opening in-universe TV retrospective is introduced with an ABC 'Special Presentation' title card matching the network's real 1960s formatting. It's a double signal — this story doesn't happen in the mainline MCU, and everything on Earth-828, right down to the studio branding and broadcast graphics, has been art-directed into the period. (ABC being a Disney network makes the bumper a quiet corporate in-joke, too.)

Roger Corman's $1 million 1994 The Fantastic Four was completed but never released — reportedly made only to retain the film rights, without the cast ever being told. Thirty-one years later, all four leads cameo in First Steps: Alex Hyde-White (Reed) and Rebecca Staab (Sue) appear as TV journalists narrating the team's exploits, while Jay Underwood (Johnny) and Michael Bailey Smith (Ben) play power plant workers rescued by the Human Torch in the opening newsreel. Marvel also invited the four to the Hollywood premiere — the warmest piece of franchise archaeology in any MCU film.

The opening montage restages the team's battle with Giganto, the giant green monster from the cover of 1961's Fantastic Four #1 — the image that launched the Marvel Universe. Shakman went further and memorialized it inside the world: he confirmed to Marvel.com that a big plaque in Times Square honors the Giganto fight, added because the comic debuted on his own birthday, August 8. Marvel doubled down off-screen too, publishing an official in-universe tie-in comic weeks before release, written by Matt Fraction with art by Mark Buckingham and a Phil Noto cover homaging FF #1.

The newsreel montage is a speed-run through the Silver Age rogues gallery. Paul Walter Hauser's Harvey Elder — comic-accurate down to the full name Harvey Rupert Elder — rules the underground kingdom of Subterranea, and his forces are said to have brought down the Pan Am Building, a sly period marker (the real one opened in 1963, at the address where the mainline MCU later parks Avengers Tower). Reed grapples with one of the Red Ghost's Super-Apes, and the Mad Thinker, Puppet Master, the Wizard, and Diablo all get name-checked. The kicker: John Malkovich filmed scenes as Red Ghost that were cut, leaving only his ape behind.

The family's helper robot H.E.R.B.I.E. (voiced by Matthew Wood, longtime voice of Star Wars' battle droids) makes his live-action feature debut doing the most domestic work imaginable: covering outlets, locking cabinets, and installing baby gates once Sue's pregnancy is revealed. The deep cut is why he exists at all — H.E.R.B.I.E. was invented for the 1978 New Fantastic Four cartoon to replace the Human Torch, whose screen rights were tied up elsewhere, before entering comics canon in Fantastic Four #209 (1979). The film's final stinger returns him to that original 1978 cartoon design.

The spacecraft that carried Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben on the mission that gave them their powers — and that they re-launch against Galactus — is the Excelsior, Stan Lee's lifelong sign-off and the word most associated with the Fantastic Four's co-creator (it's also the New York state motto, fitting for Marvel's most New York team). With no street-corner Stan Lee cameo possible anymore, First Steps scatters his memory across the world instead, and putting his catchphrase on the vessel that created the team is the most prominent tribute of the lot.

Mark Gatiss plays Ted Gilbert, host of Earth-828's biggest variety show and a transparent stand-in for Ed Sullivan, whose program defined 1960s American television. The name is the joke: swap "Sullivan" for "Gilbert" and you land on Gilbert and Sullivan, the Victorian comic-opera duo. The staging seals the homage — when the team appears on the show, the stage is dressed with white arrows pointing at them, mirroring Bill Bohnert's iconic set design from the Beatles' first Ed Sullivan appearance on February 9, 1964. Marvel's first family, framed like the Fab Four.

Earth-828's streets and TV spots are stuffed with period-faithful product placement — Yoo-hoo, Pop-Tarts, 7UP, Little Caesars — but the keeper is a Coppertone ad where Johnny Storm takes the place of the brand's famous tan-line toddler. It's world-building through advertising: the Fantastic Four aren't just Earth-828's heroes, they're its celebrity endorsers, which tracks with the comics, where the team's public fame and licensing income have always separated them from secret-identity heroes.

When neighborhood kids ask Ben to show off, he hoists a green vintage car overhead — an unmistakable echo of the most famous comic cover ever printed: 1938's Action Comics #1, Superman's debut. Fans noticed the match goes beyond the pose: the car's period model and even its shade of green track the 1938 cover art, hard to write off as coincidence in a film this deliberate about comics history. Nobody involved has confirmed it on the record, so it stays a fan-spotted homage — but the tonal inversion is the fun part: Superman smashes his car in anger, Ben lifts his for an audience.

Ben's home turf of Yancy Street — the comics' stand-in for Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, home of the Thing-heckling Yancy Street Gang — hides the film's quietest creator tributes in its storefronts: Stanley's Service Center for Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber) and a shop called King's for Jack "King" Kirby. It's also here that schoolteacher Rachel Rozman (Natasha Lyonne) asks Ben whether he grew up on Yancy Street, quietly canonizing the Thing's comic-book roots on Earth-828.

Here's one you literally cannot see: the Yancy Street set reused part of the Pinewood Studios backlot built for Deadpool & Wolverine's climactic all-the-Deadpools brawl. Shakman told Brandon Davis: "We used part of that backlot that they had built at Pinewood for that big fight with all the Deadpools... we tore down a bunch of it and rebuilt things, but a few of those storefronts and things are the same." A corner of the Void, redressed as 1960s Manhattan — the only physical MCU crossover in a film that otherwise refuses them.

When the Silver Surfer descends over Times Square, two employees watch from the window of a Timely Publications office — Timely being the 1940s company that became Marvel Comics. The pair (Martin Dickinson and Greg Haiste) are dead ringers for a young Jack Kirby and a pre-mustache Stan Lee, and Dickinson, credited as Timely Employee #1, confirmed on social media that he's playing Kirby. Pause inside the office and it gets richer: an uncolored panel from Tales of Suspense #27's "Oog Lives Again!" and a finished page from Fantastic Four #13 — the first appearance of Uatu the Watcher — sit in plain view. On Earth-828, Lee and Kirby may be drawing the marvels they're watching outside.

Tucked among the Times Square storefronts is Westview Appliance — the film's one deliberate nod to the wider MCU and a personal signature from Matt Shakman, who directed every episode of WandaVision before this. Westview, New Jersey was the sitcom-trapped town at that series' heart. Shakman confirmed it to Marvel.com: "There is one nod to WandaVision with the Westview Appliance store in Times Square, which is just because I love Vision and Wanda." Given WandaVision's pastiche also began in a black-and-white 1960s suburbia, a retro appliance shop is the perfect hiding spot.

To slingshot away from a black hole's pull, Reed calculates the Excelsior must hit 0.88 times the speed of light — a decimal-shifted wink at Back to the Future, where the DeLorean needs 88 mph to trigger the flux capacitor. The number does real physics work too: relativistic travel near a black hole causes genuine time dilation, and the team returns to an Earth where more time has passed than they experienced — an actual time-travel-adjacent consequence that makes the 88 callback smarter than a throwaway gag.

Facing the four aboard his ship, Galactus remarks that he was once as small as the beings before him — a line lifted straight from his comics origin. Before becoming the Devourer of Worlds, he was Galan of Taa, a mortal explorer and sole survivor of the universe that existed before this one, transformed as that cosmos collapsed. H.E.R.B.I.E.'s research earlier in the film backs it up, noting Galactus predates the universe itself. One quiet line smuggles in one of Marvel's biggest cosmological ideas without a single flashback — and his Star Sphere transport is pulled straight from the comics, too.

Julia Garner's Silver Surfer isn't Norrin Radd — she's Shalla-Bal, a name only comics readers would clock. In the source material (introduced in 1968's The Silver Surfer #1), Shalla-Bal is the Empress of Zenn-La and Norrin Radd's great love, the woman he leaves behind when he becomes Galactus' herald to save their world. The film inverts the classic origin: here Shalla-Bal herself makes the bargain on a Zenn-La beach. Meanwhile, Johnny's fascination with her remixes his comics romance with Frankie Raye, another of Galactus' heralds. Two threads of herald lore, braided into one character.

The team's reality carries the official multiverse designation Earth-828, chosen because Jack Kirby — co-creator of the Fantastic Four, Galactus, and the Silver Surfer — was born August 28, 1917. Matt Shakman confirmed the tribute, describing it as one of several Kirby homages threaded through the film, and the end credits close the loop with Kirby's own words: "If you look at my characters, you will find me." The MCU's architects effectively signed an entire universe with its co-creator's birth date — the single most-searched easter egg in the film.

In a sly inversion of sixty years of comics history, Ben's legendary battle cry originates on Earth-828 with the in-universe Fantastic Four cartoon — and the real Ben grumbles that it's not something he actually says, until the finale finally earns him the line. The final post-credits scene then plays the cartoon's full opening: The Fantastic Four Power Hour, animated by Titmouse, Inc. in the style of the 1967 and 1978 series, scored with an original Michael Giacchino theme song, and packed with comic-accurate versions of Red Ghost and his Super-Apes, Puppet Master, Diablo, Mad Thinker, and Dragon Man — plus H.E.R.B.I.E. in his original 1978 design.

The egg almost everyone missed isn't hidden in a frame of the movie — it's a QR code inside the Future Foundation logo shown after the credits on the digital and Disney+ release, alongside the message "The Future Foundation extends its thanks." Scanning it opens a Marvel.com page styled as Reed's Future Foundation site and unlocks a free digital bundle of nine comics, including Fantastic Four (1961) #1, the complete Galactus Trilogy (#48-50), Fantastic Four: Life Story #1, and Earth X #12 — essentially the film's required-reading list, handed out as a reward for watching every last credit.