Wings is a poem recited by Wanda in “Taking Flight,“ during the beginning and end of the episode, when she recaps how wings are important to species and vehicles (mainly planes) that fly. It can be seen as the main theme of the episode. It mostly follows an anapestic tetrameter (changing to iambic tetrameter in the last three lines in of the first stanza) and a rhyme scheme of AABBCC. This is the only song in the series to be strictly a poem that is not set to music.
Text[]
Stanza 1 (Wanda’s fantasy)[]
Wanda: Wings are the difference between flying and not.
If you have them, you can; if you don’t, you cannot.
With wings, you can soar and glide in the breeze
and dip and turn with incredible ease.
Do loop-de-loops and shoot through hoops,
fly upside down and roll around,
and never ever leave the sky.
Stanza 2 (Reprise)[]
Wanda: To both birds and planes, wings are a gift.
Air rushing across them gives them a lift.
But, even with wings, you need power for speed,
while a propeller must pull for a flight to succeed.
And I must say that steering—I almost forgot—
is what makes you go where you want to or not.
Trivia[]
- After stanza 1, when the scene shifts from Wanda’s fantasy back to the 3D reality, Wildcat Wanda’s plane is Technicolored green for a few frames before it “transforms” into her pink model plane that she and the class end up taking a ride in.
- In Stanza 1, the anapestic changes to iambic tetrameter starting in the “loop-de-loops” bit. For the reprise, the poem goes back to anapestic tetrameter and stays like this mostly throughout.
- Wanda’s fantasy in which she reads stanza 1 is sepia-toned and has a vignette over it, much like Ralphie’s fantasy in an episode from the same season, “Flexes Its Muscles.”