Disney released a new clip from the upcoming Marvel Studios series Secret Invasion, and one of the characters doesn’t seem to know how to correctly pronounce the name “Talos.” For a studio that prides itself on accuracy from the source material, this is a pretty big oversight.
In the clip, Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) talks to Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) about how he’s been missing and how he’s never been the same since “the blip” — aka that time Thanos snapped his fingers and exterminated half of the living universe.
Hill mentions that she’s only reaching out to Fury “at Talos’ request.” Talos is a Skrull General who helped save his people after the Supreme Intelligence tricked Captain Marvel into hunting them down. He is an important ally in the MCU, but Hill pronounces the name as “Tay-los” instead of what it’s supposed to be, with a short T, like the first syllable of “ta-da.”
Was this a simple oversight? Or have we been saying the name wrong all this time? I did a little digging, and it turns out the pronunciation is indeed the short T, not the long one. My most stirring evidence comes from the horse’s mouth itself. Marvel runs a series called Marvel Becoming where it talks about how the character is portrayed on screen.
Notice how the artists pronounce his name: Ta-los. Not Tay-los. There’s also a non-Marvel related game called The Talos Principle, where in discussions about the game there’s talk of a short A, not a long one. There are also the times he’s referred to in the Captain Marvel movie.
Anyway, this is an easy fix, right? Just overdub some audio? Or, Marvel could just leave it in. Honestly, the quality of Marvel material lately is not great. Between the drunken VFX in Quantumania and how fast this new trailer put me to sleep, things aren’t looking good for ol’ Marvel. Maybe this little aberration is symptomatic of a bigger problem at the studio.
Secret Invasion premieres on June 21 on Disney Plus.