DUBAI: The second episode of Marvel’s most recent series “Moon Knight” aired this week with an Egyptian pop song “El-Melouk” (“The Kings”) playing in the credits to close off the Mohamed Diab-directed show.
The upbeat 2021 hit has over 56 million views on YouTube and is by Egyptian singer Ahmed Saad, and features rising rap stars Enaba and Double Zuksh.
The music played as one of the characters in the show opens the curtains to a view of the pyramids in Egypt.
Shortly after the episode ended, fans quickly took to Twitter to express their excitement.
“If you told me a week ago a modern Egyptian song would be in an official Marvel work I would have called you an idiot. Yet here we are,” wrote one user sharing the clip from the series.
The rap scene in Egypt has been gaining popularity over the past few years with stars like Wegz, Marwan Moussa, Afroto, Marwan Pablo and Abyusif garnering a large fan base in the Arab world.
Another user tweeted: “A lot of people, mainly … foreigners, who watched ‘Moon Knight’ yesterday and really liked the end credits song — ‘El-Melouk’ — have no idea how big of a moment this is for this type of music in Egypt. The song is a mix of Mahraganat (Egyptian electronic dance music) and Egyptian rap music.”
“Having a favorite Egyptian street song of mine in a Hollywood series, a Marvel one too is just unfathomable to me,” wrote another viewer.
The miniseries is the first Marvel project to have an Arab director.
Read Arab News’ interview with Diab here.
The “Moon Knight” series stars US actors Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy.
In a twist from the comic books, in which Moon Knight’s alter ego is the Jewish-American mercenary Marc Spector, Isaac plays gift shop worker Steven Grant, a sleep-deprived Londoner who suffers from dissociative identity disorder and is haunted by memories of Spector.
Hawke stars opposite Isaac as villain Arthur Harrow.
The series debuted internationally on Disney+ on March 30 and will premiere in the region this summer.
