Listen, I know not everyone is a motorcycle fan. I get that folks haven't heard every motorcycle's engine noise on the face of the planet, so it may be hard for them to distinguish their individual characters.
I mean, I can tell the difference between Aprilia's V4 and Ducati's, but most people without my specific form of auditory motorcycle knowledge can't.
But when we're talking about the difference between what a Harley-Davidson and a Suzuki GSX-R sound like, I think it's safe to say most people could figure out which is which. That is unless you're the audio mixers at Marvel freakin' Studios who seemingly cannot.
See, Marvel just dropped the first trailer for its upcoming Bad Guys Go Good movie, "Thunderbolts," which brings back Sebastian Stan as The Winter Soldier, Florence Pugh as Black Widow's sister Yelena Belova, as well as David Harbour, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Hannah John-Kamen, Wyatt Russell, and Olga Kurylenko. But instead of getting hyped about the movie, I couldn't shake a blink-and-you'll-miss-it portion where Stan's Winter Soldier is riding a Harley-Davidson Pan America.
Why the hell does it sound like a damn sportbike, Marvel?!
I get that it's all the rage to dunk on Marvel lately. Well, really Disney, as the whole operation went from producing some pretty slick movies and TV shows to just churning more and more "content" out for the sake of content. But this is a movie with a $150 million budget. It stars some of the most fan-favorite bad guys in the MCU. It's been on the docket for release seemingly for forever. And has had multiple reshoots, and likely multiple edit passes from the studio heads, filmmakers, and editors.
SO HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?!
How in all that time has no one spotted, or rather heard, that Stan's Harley-Davidson adventure motorcycle sounds an awful lot like a high-strung sportbike? I mean, Harley's are fairly ubiquitous within the popular zeitgeist. There's essentially a Harley on every street corner, they're that popular.
Look, it's a minor quibble within a larger movie. But I can't help but point back to all those recent Marvel/Disney/Star Wars project critiques. After the shitstorm of the last Marvel phase, and in the midst of Star War's first-ever canceled TV show, everyone has been hyping that Disney course-corrected.
Yet, based on this small detail, I'm not confident it has.
