Of all the ways that WandaVision is poised to surprise us over the course of this season, one major way is what the Oscar-winning songwriting team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez have in store. Because each episode of WandaVision invokes a different era of television history, each episode gets a new credits sequence and theme song appropriate to the genre in question.

While Anderson-Lopez and Lopez have done iconic work for Disney in recent years, including original songs for Frozen, Winnie the Pooh, Frozen II, and Coco, this is their first Marvel project — and it was a great deal of fun for them.

Below, Anderson-Lopez and Lopez explain how they got involved with the series, how they worked with production to write the theme songs, what their favorite part of the process was, and which period of time required the most research for them to emulate. Important note: They mention "the only ones" when it comes to which upcoming decade required the most research. So begin guessing now just how many episodes are "set" in that time period.

COLLIDER: I'm just curious right now about how you got involved. Does Disney just basically have you guys on speed dial? Like, "We need some songs, are you guys busy?"

KRISTEN ANDERSON-LOPEZ: I wish.

ROBERT LOPEZ: Yeah, that would be cool.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: That would be cool. I think the real key is Matt Shakman, who's the director of this piece, was really thinking about Bobby in particular, because they had worked together. They went to Yale together and he directed a production of The Tempest for which Bobby wrote original songs.

LOPEZ: Yeah, in the pool.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: In the pool at Yale. But I think he called Bobby in particular and said, "I really want you guys to work on this cool thing I'm working on."

LOPEZ: We had wanted to do something with Marvel, but could never imagine what possibly they would ask us to do. And this is such a special project, and so weird, and different for them and different for us. It was just a great opportunity and it was a lot of fun.

When you came in to do this, especially going through all the different eras, were you thinking about particular all-time great theme songs that you were hoping to emulate?

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: Yeah, absolutely. And the fun thing is that I had spent the better part of my childhood in front of the television, being told, "These hours are going to amount to nothing." But I had been downloading every song, every jingle, from every decade.

LOPEZ: So the tables have turned.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: It was really exciting. I didn't need to do a lot of research. In fact, the only ones we really needed to research were the years that we were in college, where you didn't really have access to a TV, but that particular decade was maybe the hardest for us.

Do you mind specifying what decade that was?

LOPEZ: It's just the '90s.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: Should be the '90s.

Okay, great. So I was doing some online shopping, as you do, and I saw that there are WandaVision t-shirts out there that say, "A love like you've never seen," on them. Is that the merchandising department taking that line from the song?

LOPEZ: The t-shirt very rarely comes first. [laughs] You have to make the song... We never look to T-shirts for inspiration.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: Yeah, I think they took it from the theme song that we did, but we don't get paid for that. So the best part... this is a deep dive, but the best part is when we write a song for Disney, it gets cut, but they've already given it to somebody like Target. And then you see cut lyrics on a mug then you're like, "Whoa, we never wrote a song called 'Hot Ice.'"

In terms of the process, so, you were writing the theme songs first, and then were they making the credit sequences or did you have some idea... Was there more of a back and forth about what to expect?

LOPEZ: It was kind of a back-and-forth because they presented us the scripts right before they went into production. And then we started working almost the same week that they went into filming it. So we were having a little back and forth with Matt as he was shooting, he was trying to make sure he got enough footage and the right kind of footage. But it's different than doing a musical, where they have to be lip-syncing to the song. They didn't have to have the songs when they were shooting it. So I think there was a little chicken-and-egg-ing.

Excellent. So I love the lyrics for the first episode, but for the second episode the only lyric is of course the word "WandaVision." Was there a version of it with word lyrics or was there a reason why you went that direction with it?

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: Well, we were really emulating the cool jazz Bebop-inspired theme songs from that decade. There was a lot of that minimalism, both visually and musically. So we kind of wanted to keep that evocative of those specific things, but-

LOPEZ: There is a whole family of songs like that, there's like "Manamanah," and, you know, silly songs that repeat and don't have many words.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: And all that Dave Brubeck stuff that was happening at the time.

So, last question — what's been your favorite part of this whole process?

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: You know, what's really fun has been that we did the voices, the singing voices and singing in styles through the different decades. And then, probably mostly because of the pandemic, our voices are on it all over the place. So that's been kind of fun to be the people singing the theme songs. Usually we replaced ourselves, and in some cases we did, but in a lot of cases are through a lot of decisions that weren't ours, our voices remained in.

LOPEZ: It's good for the income.

New episodes of WandaVision stream Fridays on Disney+.