Von Doom Fest - Spider-Man

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His amazing friends, Ice Man and the Fire Stars, Peter. Set Rise, Jesse Spider Man, Spider Man friendly neighborhood, shire Man. Welcome, He's ignored. Action is his reward. J Hi is a great big guy.

Wherever that is, you'll find a sire. Welcome back to von doom Fast. Oh my god, it's gonna be our biggest episode. It's gonna be our craziest episode. It's about Peter Parker.

Everyone loves Peter Parker. It's b Do you love Peter Parker. We're just going to talk about some mild mannered milk toast kid from Brooklyn. Yeah's let's talk about him. That's all.

Could you imagine what did the entire show just about Peter Parker, Peter Mooring Spider Man entirely that. I don't think our listener would appreciate that. Our listener burn on us burn as as always, we're here to counting down the days until doomsday, which are getting closer, and the time you hear this, it'll be just a few days away from the official unveiling of that trailer that's going to happen at Comic Con June twenty fifth and Hall H and then it'll be on the internet moments later, and then HP and I will be recording moments after that. We won't see the reaction. Oh yeah, listen, I've been to Hall Age.

I once stood outside starting at five am to get into Hall H for a panel, and then when I and the panel was at two pm, so then I had to sit through all the bullshit to get to the panel that I wanted to And then that night, when I was laying in bed, I watched the panel on YouTube, and I thought I wasted an entire fucking day. That's not so like I was in the front row and hanging out with the actors. I was there to see it was I was in the back of the fucking auditorium watching on a viewscreen when I could just watch it later on basically the same experience. Could you hear from the back what was being said? Yeah, they had a microphone system and a PA.

But you wasted what twelve hours of your time you could have. That's a young person's game. That strikes me that was twelve comic con hours. I could have been perusing old issues of Spider Man. For instance.

You know what, I could have picked up an Amazing Fantasy number fifteen from August of nineteen sixty two HP and that would be the first appearance of Spider Man. There you go. Remember the good old days and these conventions where you'd get like a bootleg copy of Rocky Horror on VHS because it was not available anywhere else. I remember specifically us doing that. Sure, yeah, absolutely, get fake like name badges for Meskatonic University.

Can you still get those? Do you think? Do they still? Are you crazy? Yes?

And of course you can get diplomas, You can get faculty stickers for your car. You can get the jerseys with the Miskatonic Cthulhus their team. Yeah. Can I just say Father Malone was always ahead of the curve in terms of pop culture T shirts and ephemera T shirts that would have Whylan Utani T shirts before that kind of thing became like Etsy dominant, always ahead of the head of the curve on that. My rule for those shirts were if it wasn't obvious, like if it wasn't the movie poster emblazoned on your shirt.

Then there should be no mention of the movie at all. Then it should be it should just say whilan Utani, and then the right person will get that. Yeah, that's why, in my opinion. I totally agree that's I am a proud owner. I'm not wearing it now, but I do have a Sunshine Cab Company T shirt, which I'm not going to explain what it is.

People devoted listeners will probably know what that means. Jack Burton Trucking Company, things like that, things that I agree if you have to spell it out for the person, it's too lame. You need to seek out the right people with that kind of stuff. Right around the time that you and I were attending conventions, I picked up a United States Colonial Marine Corps T shirt that, for all intents and purposes, just looked like there was a branch of the military called the Colonial Marine. And I fucking love that shirt.

At no point anywhere stitched or ironed on was the word aliens. But again I have to stress, this was before Etsy, This is way before any of that Amazon. You had to really seek out this kind of pop culture effemera, and it really marked you as a real devoted fan. All that proves is that there have been people out there making the cool shit all along. It's almost just a matter of connection.

And thank god the Internet can connect us, because you said, can we still get those things? And I'm like, I know, if I googled for two seconds, I could find us the nerdiest fucking bullshit ever with no insignias whatsoever. It's easy. Now, it's almost too easy. One might say, what you deal with spider Man.

Honestly, spider Man is my favorite superhero of all time bar none. When I really stop, then let me go first, because he is not my favorite of all time, not that I have. Who is your favorite Batman of all time? Yeah? Fuck, I do have a Batman tattoo, But I have a Captain America tattoo as well.

All right, Oh that's fair. So those two are at war those that's the Marvel DC, my favorites from each of them. Favorite Marvel is Captain America. Favorite DC used to be Batman. I don't think it's Batman anymore.

Who is it now? I'm pretty sure it's swamp Thing. Okay, I think my favorite Marvel is spider Man. Favorite DC. I'm gonna be lame and say Batman.

Probably, I don't to stop and think Superman. Although I love the character, I loved the iconography, it was never my favorite. I think Batman. Yeah, there's no shame in liking one of the greatest characters of all time. Speaking of so spider Man.

For me, I have read the comics and I watched all of the cartoons. Spider Man I'm as familiar with as any superhero. But that's because Spider Man has been the most exposed as far as other media. There were comic strips in the newspaper, there were comic books, there were cartoons. He showed up on the fucking Electric Company.

It was just it was wal to wall web slinging. And that's with good reason. He is a good character. I love the character, and I love the What I love about Spider Man, let me just say this about it. I'm a big fan of the movies.

Obviously we're gonna get to all of those, but my Spider Man experience is limited other than the fact that it was always available. Every time you would turn on a TV, there'd be a cartoon or something on. But up until then, he wasn't my guy, particularly not during the nineties leading into two thousands. But I did like that he was rubbing shoulders with Easy Reader. Sure, Morgan Freeman, the Electric Company all that to me that that is so formative because the character you could have not included him in that segment on an Electric Company w wouldn't have made a difference.

But I always got excited just the sight of Spider Man, someone in a Spider Man costume and approximation of the outfit clambering across a sound stage was exciting to me because I love that visual. The costume, you have to admit, is one of the coolest superhero outfits ever. Oh yeah, unquestionably it is one of the most iconic and I'm sure worldwide known, and it should be. But that combination of colors and the design overall is just spectacular. Yeah, I agree.

I out fit for what it represented was never as good as a red and blue. What I did take away from Spider Man from the very beginning, and I think this is true to this day. Spider Man was the Marvel hero with the best rogues gallery of villains no one else's Marvel lineup could match. Over at DC, they were killing it in every direction. Every character had a bunch of villains who were fucking awesome.

That was never the case with Marvel, except with Spider Man, who had banger after banger. I gotta stop saying banger who had killer after killer. It was that this may be a little cliche, but for me growing up, obviously, it'll be no surprise any of the listeners that I was a nerdy kid growing up. And I always love the fact that at least the early Peter Parker was like me. He was a nerdy kid growing up.

He didn't have a lot of friends necessarily, and he was struggling to fit in. And I think not just me, but I think that's relatable to a lot of people. So besides the fact that the costume and the character is eye catching for a kid, once I started reading the comic and started to grasp the character and understand his origins and what he was all about, that to me was it was refreshing. Although I really didn't have a great deal of basis for comparison, I just related to the character a lot better. I'm not a millionaire who can devote my life to fighting crime, and I'm an expert in martial arts and electronic devices, but I in another dimension, I could have been Peter.

Parker had there only been a radioactive Spider in your vicinity. Oh yeah, I don't think. I didn't imagine that in my head. I wonder if that's possible. Where would one acquire a radioactive spider that confluence of.

Events mit was not too far from us, that's true, But I see radioactive Spider Department. That's right. I would think those two Tesla coil things that the Spider clambered down, slid down between and it got zapped. You got another teenager here looking for our Spider Department. I did.

I met Spider Man once. I remember it was at the Liberty Tree mall. He was actually at the Liberty Tree and I got his autograph and it was a real, real good memory for me. I think I actually got Killer Kowalski's autograph during the same show. Wow, that's Spider Man in Killer Kowalski, two superheroes.

He can't really come back from that series. Now, like all comics at the time originating over at Marvel, there is a complicated and let's call it take on how the character came to be. Now, ordinarily that's just a two person battle between stan Lee and Jack Kirby. But now we're going to pull Steve Didko into the mix. Who is also going to claim credit as the creator of Spider Man.

I think it's Steve Ditka. I think so too. But the thing of it is, though it's yes, he probably did come up with the original character. And but we talked about this a little bit dealing with Captain America, and we might have discussed this with regards to the Hulk. You still couldn't.

You still wouldn't have Spider Man as we know him today if it wasn't for stan Lee. I as much as. I'm not even I'm not even taking this stance against Lee in this case, I think he is one of the originators. I think this is one of the cases where Kirby is out of line. I think he had created a character named Silver Spider in the fifties and then thought I'll just recycle that, and then as soon as he handed that to Lee, Lee was like, no, this isn't anything that I want.

This is just Captain America with cobwebs. Steve, can you think of something to do with a Spider Man? I just adore Steve did COO's artwork on that first run of whatever it was, twenty thirty forty issues or what have you. By the way, I also need to qualify my fandom by saying, I don't think I've read Spider Man with any regularity since the late eighties. So this's probably a great deal of lore in history and backstory that I'm not privy to.

When you got into Ultimate Spider Man and Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider Man and all these different offshoots I checked out. I was in high school. I had discovered girls by that point, and I didn't have as much of a comics tod have as much of a place in my life at that time. But anyway, Steve Didko I mentioned this about The Hulk. They had published these digest versions of these comic books.

We talked at length about this with The Hulk. I had a similar experience with Spider Man, where I would get these things from the Danvers News Agency. My mom would buy them for me. So, just like the Hulk, I would take these little Spider Man digests everywhere I would go and read them everywhere, And so I became very enamored with Steve Ditko's art style without really thinking about the artist himself. When I think of Spider Man, I think of Steve Ditko's artwork first and foremost in my mind.

Yeah, there's no question he's the man here. This is the first time Marvel went to a third party artist and said, take this character, and it's yours. Because that's effectively what happened. He did everything inside those books, when initially it was just going to be him inking for Jack Kirby. Kirby gets more credit than he deserves here because he was Lee had him do the first couple of covers.

So that's Jack Kirby's drawing on the cover of the first couple of Spider Man. But who cares. It's not even his design. It's fucking Ditko's design that Kirby's recreating. And I'd like to point out now I have a pretty pretty good working knowledge of early comic books and the sort of the stories behind them, but I was unaware until today that Steve Ditko was a roommate and shared a studio with another artist by the name of Eric Stanton.

Now, while in high school you were no longer looking at Steve Ditko's work, I was very much going into Boston into Newbury Comics and doing my best to purchase these little digests called stand tunes, which are the works of Eric Stanton. Eric Stanton was a fetish artist in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and so any of those old stag magazines, obviously Playboy, but like literally hundreds and hundreds of porn magazines that were out there, there is no question Eric Stanton has artwork and at least one issue of that run. And with those published, sorry, were those published as like their own series or were they published inside of porn mags as articles? I was looking at them in the Stantune Digests, which were collections of all of his work from the fifties onward.

So was all of the fetish art work but localized as if it were just a comic book. Sure, but when they were originally published, would it be like much like Stephen King's early work was published in WI magazine for example, Serially, was it the same thing? Afforded this Stanton? Absolutely, This is like Gayan Wilson in Playboy magazine or something or Okay, yeah, it's like that, but we're New Yorker cartoons think of him that way, and come to find out it's it was Eric Stanton who came up with the webs coming out of Peter's wrists. In fact, there was a lot because they Ditko did a lot of fetish work himself under an assumed name, and so they did a lot of work on each other's stuff.

So the fact is we will never know how much of an influence Stanton had on those early Spider Man because he, knowing Steve Ditko was already fighting for credit with mart with the Marvel Big Boys, decided that his friendship was more important and kept mum about every thing he actually did. But historians believe that it's a little more substantial than he led on. I never was privy to that. That's fascinating. Yeah, I'm gonna obviously encarage.

I'll try and find a link and put it in the show notes to some of Eric Stanton's work. But my god, like one of the best of the fetish artists out there, playful and fun. There's something classy I think about those sort of like early like erotic artists. It wasn't there was a like you said it was. I think there was a playfulness around it, and I think it was not just a cheap thrill type of deal.

I think it was a little more creative than that. Oh, don't get me wrong. There's some cheap thrills, and there's some murderous type stuff out there, but murderous, there's some it is fetish art, This isn't This isn't pin up art. This is yeah. Yeah, Well, is it the kind of thing that you think eventually led to things like heavy metal?

I know that's not necessarily considered fetish, but it was more adult. Yeah, it's a weird subgenre of comics because it was for no one really, you know, they were never collected it as their own books until the sixties. When the sixties was when it blew open wine. That's when all the independent zap comics and fucking R Crumb hit the scene, And I think those were more of an influence on heavy metal than the work of Eric Stanton. But I guarantee you everyone who drew for heavy metal knew who Eric Stanton was and had admired his work.

This is all fascinating, by the way, But so you weren't an early consumer of any of these, Like you didn't necessarily read Spider Man semi religiously at all. No, I Remember I owned a bunch because I would always I told you this before. At the local five and dime, you could buy just a giant plastic bag of comics, and invariably there was going to be Spider Man in there. So it was always out of order and lack of continuity, and I know it was somewhere amazing Spider Man. Spider Man was in so many goddamned books that I could never follow him, and I didn't bother because I already had my own guys.

And that's where I tended to check out too, because they were just publishing him in too many different separate titles, and you had to understand, this incident happened in the Spectacular Spider Man, this incident happened in Spider Man. And then, not to mention Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider Ham became like a brief I had a brief dalliance with that title. So there was just too much. Even now, no matter what publisher you're talking about, there's just too many. Damn.

It's like a soap opera. You know, there's a whole lore in history to General Hospital, and this stretches back decades. Comics are the same way, only the characters don't really age. Yeah, but I will say this, this is a kudos to stan Lee. He didn't call it Spider Boy even though it was about a teenager, because he knew he would age.

So Peter Parker is one of the few characters who seem to have effectively aged for a while. Basically, he got through high school, became a young adult, and then froze there. But it was also that was part of the character's mystique too, and that was a very savvy choice if you can apply that choice to Peter Parker giving himself the name of Spider Man because he wanted to a obscure the fact that he was a high school kid. He was his physique was changed by the spider bite, so he did, and it was There's probably something to be said for the metaphor of the boy maturing into a man through this metamorphosis of this spider bite. So I do think there's probably something to be said for those metaphors at play.

I've read some comments from comic book fans at the time who were saying that the Stanley approach, which was let's not ignore that this is a teenager's problem and Let's not set this in some fictional version of New York. Let's set it in New York, and let's have you know what, the communists are raging around the country right now. Let's have them fight the Red Scare over and over again. Let's not ignore that either. To comic book fans at the time, it was like it was like a breath of fresh air and made DC look old and stale at the time, And that, to me is Stanley's greatest innovation with comics, no matter what he contributed to a character's costume or backstory or whatever, it was that, starting with Fantastic Four and then snowballing right into Spider Man.

Spider Man wasn't afraid to get heavy. We're talking about the death of Gwen Stacy, which even now, if you go back and reread that the comic that storyline appears in, it's really heavy stuff. It's very powerful the way he saves her, But it's unclear whether him shooting the web, the impact of her, the jerk of her on the web broke her neck, or if just the fall that was such a very dramatic thing to happen. And what is basically the story of a guy running around in red and blue tights fighting crime. But then you also had storylines like Harry oss Born becoming addicted to pills, which it's exactly what you're describing.

They weren't afraid to let the real world seep in to this fantasy world, and that made that endeared it to me even more because it wasn't just people in tights running around doing things. It was they were dealing with real world issues too, and they didn't get bogged down in that at the same time, on one of my earliest memories is watching the Spider Man cartoon. I just loved it. Now looking back watching it now, it's very silly. The animation is cheap, and there's a whole lot of looping and reusing of like they would do with the cartoons at the time.

But seriography is that what is that the name for it, where we just keep reusing the same you know, running motion or something. But it was delightful to me because it really was a comic book come to life. It's a cliche. But aside from I don't know, watching old the Batman TV show, which wasn't a cartoon, but it was very cartoon like in its sort of conveying the character. The Spider Man cartoon had it all for.

Me when I was your age or the same age when back on the time you're talking about, My opinion on Batman and those early Spider Man movies was just give me a cartoon, goddamn it. I was always disappointed at the end of the Batman credits, when all of Batman's rogues gallery of villains had bring baffed and powed and oofed across the screen that we ended up with a live action thing on a back lot. Yeah, right, I have to. I had the same feeling as you're seeing the Penguin and the Riddler and the Joke. We got those characters in Batman, but it wasn't the same at all.

It wasn't the comic book come to life. So as terrible as the animation is, as cheap as it is, and as ham fisted as the dialogue, still remains those cartoons and swear everything to me, because first of all, he was in the original sort of Marvel hour that tunes from sixty five, sixty six, sixty seven. But then he had his own cartoon that's the one we're talking about, which everyone knows the goddamn theme song thanks to the Ramones and the cartoon itself. But after our heren't know how many people. They keep bringing it back in every movie though.

It is a little easter egg like in his ring tone in Spider Man two is the Spider Man theme from the cartoon. It's silly, yeah, but it is a great theme. Yeah, you're hearing it in your head and you can't. It's just that catchy. I'd like to point out that chilling bridge in the chill of night at the scene of a crime.

Oh Jesus Christ, this is getting really heavy Spider Man. It is the moonlit night Spider Man is fighting crime. So then okay. That leads us to our first live action Spider Man and a portrayal by Nicholas Hammond, who most recently in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Yeah, fucking killer in that.

When we talk about the timelines converging and Spider Man No Way Home and Nicholas Hammond's lack of involvement, I'm going to get really angry. That is upsetting. He was in the Brady Bunch too, Do you know that? That's right? Heah, something suddenly came up.

Well, yeah, that's the football in the NES episode. Right, that's right, all my nose. That was Nicholas Hammond was the he stole the playbook. Oh my god, what a dirty dog. Yeah, he's definitely.

He's our first live action Spider Man. He's our first thirty year old Spider Man. He was a little long in the tooth. I think he might have been balding a little bit. What do we have to say about those Spider Man TV movies and their attempt to turn it into a series, which they did again.

It was a case where I got super excited. As a kid. All I wanted to do was see Spider Man clambering up a wall. So it was very frustrating to me as a kid to have to wait through all of this endless dialogue and these scenes with Nicholas Hammond. Then I always wondered how Nicholas Hammond aka Peter Parker fit all of that hair into his Spider Man costume, because it's basically a very sheer, bald cap appearance.

How do you get all that hair packed in there? I didn't understand as a child that it was a stuntman playing Spider Man and not him. I didn't understand why he had metal eyes with a million holes in them instead of the traditional white. As I understand it though, and I only learned this recently, is they they did away with those, the whole poked eyes. I think in the next season they went for a more smooth kind of basic lens as opposed to the one with all the dots on it.

It was really weird. It was disconcerting as a child anything else, not to mention the wall crawling. If it's going to be taking place outside, we're going to see it from a far, far distance, so we don't look at the harness that he's on as he slowly mimes moving up or mine is moving down, and. You didn't get I may be missed remembering this, but I don't remember ever getting the wise cracking Spider Man as he's fighting everybody and making little quips in that particular, not at all. He was pretty quiet as Spider Man.

He was pretty quiet as Peter Parker too. He was like a little a bit stoic. He was like a character from a Nancy Drew novel. So that all of this, like I said, was fairly frustrating to me, as what will we five or six at the time, seventy eight seventy nine. Yeah, yeah, but that led us to the greatest achievement in Spider Man history, Spider Man and his Amazing Friends.

Well, you're skipping one though. I'm not skipping anything. Okay, you're gonna You're gonna go back to Japan. Oh my god, you missed, you missed Supider Man. I did miss Spider Man because I didn't know about Spider Man.

Yeah, we didn't want I wasn't aware of it until relatively recently where it was actually believe it or not. There was a Disney Plus show right after sometime after Disney Plus first debuted. They had a really good show that that Disney Plus had did this all the time. They'd have a really cool, interesting sort of documentary show about some aspect of the industry, and then they would summarily remove it from their servers, never to be seen again. They had a they had the because this is all in the Marvel Wheelhouse.

They had a great show on the history of Japanese Spider Man, also known colloquially. If I could say that word as Soupeida Man, you are you aware of the what the character, who he was, and how it was bonkers. It was completely bonkers. I believe he like Green Lantern, it's he inherits a mantle from from from space. He's he is, He's a he's a pro motorcycle rider who happens across I believe.

It was like a crash ship and it's exactly what you describe. It's from the Spider planet or something. And he accepts the mantle of it's from Planet Spider and he gets to be contact to him and it gives him some powers. But he also gets a metal bracelet that houses his costume. It shoots webs, and it also controls the giant mecha ship that he flies that can also transform into a giant robot like Showgun Warriors style.

And mechanical Spider. What a missed opportunity, No, And I wish I remembered more from this fantastic show that was on Disney Plus, because there's a It's fascinating the efforts that Lee went to get this show made, because he was all about promoting the character in any his the He was all about promoting Marvel in any way, shape or form, and this was a big part of that. And he really fought for this series and the fact that it was produced in Japan gave them license to go completely bonkers with the character, and I think there was unless I'm mistake, And I think part of the reason why they went so crazy with it is because they didn't want any direct comparison to the actual Peter Parker Spider Man character, so that gave him creative license to go nuts.

Oh, I love creative license. We're going to get a really interesting one right before the end of the eighties when Cannon Films is almost about oh Spider Man. But that's of ways away. Yeah, but it's again, I was not privy to it as when it was on you And by the way, anyone can go to YouTube and look up Japanese Spider Man and find all of these episodes and watch them. I encourage you to because they're fascinating.

Show notes everybody. Yes, but that leads us to the greatest iteration of Spider Man, Spider Man and his amazing friends with I love it with Iceman and Starfire Firestar Starfire, Starfire. There's got to be a character named Starfire somewhere there is. I think he was an X man. Oh, there you go.

Yeah, I didn't mean to congender swap them. No, Sunfire was the X Man, but I digress. I love that fucking show Man. It was honest, seemingly every day and could not wait. And that was more of the wise cracking Peter Parker that we had hoped for.

Right, Yeah, it was like for me, it was appointment viewing every Saturday afternoon. I would watch it as part back when we had Saturday morning cartoons, which have gone away for a long time now. But this was pre internet, this was pre a lot of things. So that's what kept a young kid's attention on a Saturday afternoon. Spider Man and his amazing friends with Iceman doing his thing.

Firestar, they're doing whatever it is she did, and she heated she did not forget. We should encourage people to go back and watch or listen to the podcast that we did on the Yummy Awards where Spider Man, Fire Star and Iceman make an actual appearance. That's right, I forgot about that. Yeah, that's in the show notes too. Everybody go check that one out now.

Thus begins a fallo period for Spider Man. This is the Fallo period for Marvel as a matter of fact, where they're basically on the edge of bankruptcy the entire time. And this is when Cannon Films gets involved. Now Canon is struggling to try and get a big budget movie made. They'll eventually settle for Superman, But for a while, they were going to make a film version of Spider Man, to be directed by Toby Hooper, director of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist and Invaders from Mars and Life Force.

Had he already made Texas Chainsaw Massacre two. By that point, Yes, for Cannon Films, Yeah, that's. What I'm saying. Yeah, like he'd already had a relationship with the company. Absolutely, so it only makes sense that he be involved.

And it's not such a crazy idea that a horror guy would make us make a Spider Man movie, because that's eventually what happened. However, speaking of let's just take this character and go crazy with it, they were going to turn Spider Man into a Spider Man. It was going to be more horror than anything. He was going to be multi limbed and voracious for human blood. Not exactly your friendly neighborhood web slinger.

No, but and who's going to want to see that? I have to ask nobody. I don't understand any of the motivations behind it at all. Was it a case where stan Lee was like, look, you can have the license, but you can't step on our toes as far as the character or the existing ip. But like with supepider Man, where they're given license to go a little crazy with the character, but that's a bridge too far, it sounds.

To me it doesn't sound like a restriction so much as it's a we have this guy who wants to do it this way, and we also want to put our stamp on it. I guarantee you. Whatever deal that they had did not include merchandising, did not include comic books, did not include all of where the real money is to be made with Spider Man. So any change to the character that a studio can make it they're gonna do, at least at that time period, because the fans, they don't think are are gonna throw up that much clamor. And then they control that version of the character and can use the name.

This is also such a reflection of the time because maybe there's people listening to this saying, are you kidding me? These superhero movies are like easy money. It's like printing money basically. But people have to remember this is pre this is even this is probably pre Batman eighty nine. Right, So, around the eighty six eighty seven.

Superhero movies were far from a slam dunk at this time. No, In fact, people were look other than Superman. There weren't really that many attempts other than some TV movie type shit. But around this, around the late eighties is when we start getting things like The Punisher and all of the sort of offshoot Marvel properties that got sold off for pennies because they were just so desperate to make any money or make any ripple in the market whatsoever. But again, these are all happening and they continued to happen after Batman made his debutan.

Obviously it was a massive fucking success, But all of what you're saying is exactly right. Batman was the exception to that rule. People did not regard these in any way as other than kids movies based on kids' properties. And the success of Batman did not usher in the golden age of comic book movies. For whatever reason.

It was a monster success, but all it did was give us more Batman movies. It didn't really encourage anybody to continue the trend and start to have other characters in their stable make the leap to the big screen. And I can't understand why. On the one hand, if you wanted to make a DC movie other than Batman, you had to make it a Warner Brothers. That's a huge problem, and they were in the Batman business at that time.

Even whatever development they were doing on other characters, it wasn't as ferocious or intense as any other property that they were developing. Marvel kept selling it off to anyone who would fucking take them, and that that was a problem. The only ones who were who were actually seemed to be making an effort with the ones that were totally unaffiliated from everybody, And that was like the Rocketeer and The Phantom, all the thirties heroes. Weirdly enough, the Phantom and what's oh the Shadow of course, with. Yeah, probably that was like the biggest budget out of all those.

Maybe Rocketeer might have been too, but the Shadow was a ten pole release with Alec Baldwin, the effects, everything else, Oh and Dick t of course. Oh yeah, So all of the thirties heroes all jumped onto the screen based on the fact that I guess that Batman was himself a thirties hero, but guys different planets, different planets entirely. It took let's think about this, how long until we got are the Sam Raimi Spider Man. Movie was two thousand, two thousand or two thousand and one one or the other. I think it was two thousand, which the first one was the one that directly referenced nine to eleven, so it must have been two thousand and one or two thousand and two.

Yeah, the trailers started making their way. If you remember, the trailer was a helicopter getting caught on a web between the twin towers and then they pull that. Yeah, I remember that, but that we'll talk about it when we start to get into the Rami movies. But it was an extraordinarily faul period for comic book movies. Once the Batman movies had started to run their course and become literal parodies of themselves, and you didn't have any more of the phantom type movies or the Rocketeer.

There was really nothing there were. It's just that they weren't easily recognizable as comic book movies because the mask was a comic book Blade was a huge comic book. But again, Black was a comic book. Yeah, Ghost World. There were comic book movies getting made all the time.

It's just that they weren't the traditional superheroes. Superhero movies were the problem, Yeah, because nobody could get over the idea of the person and the tights like still seemed to be the huge stumbling block. You'll notice Spider Man did it right, because you can't not do the Spider Man outfit at that point in history. But on the flip side, look what they were doing with X Men. Let's get away from everything comic book as much as possible.

Yeah, but even that was in the wake of the rainy Spider Man movies that kind of paved the way for movies like the X Men. I will say that what little time I spent on the Warner Brothers lot and friends who were working there and stuff, I did read a plethora of X Men scripts starting in like nineteen ninety two. It seemed every year a new draft of a new idea for an X Men film would rear its head and then nothing would come of it. So there were people always pushing It's just that nobody could. Nobody could conceptualize these movies being a success or.

Even one one that followed us throughout high school and beyond was The Watchman. Watchman, Let's not forget was a It is a comic book, it's a graphic novel, and that I remember reading the sam Ham screenplay that we got it, you got it a millionaire picnic or somewhere, and that took decades and decades to be made. But that's another case of a comic book property that they struggled to make for a long time. Yeah, they were going to make it initially, and Joel Silver wanted to make it with Schwarzenegger as Doctor Manhattan. That's right.

That was the sam Ham draft is the one where the plot is to kill Doctor Manhat right. It's Ozymandias's big plan is to create a wormhole just large enough to put a barrel of a gun through and kill John Austraman before he gets into the accelerator. Interesting, I forgot about that part of it. I remember it. That was all fine, That was all fine, But then it causes a time rift where our lead Watchman, Rorshak, Silk Spector, and night Owl end up in our world where the kid is reading a Watchman comic and then looks up and sees them and they're like, where are we?

They're taking what is really the deconstruction of the superhero and just making it into a summer blockbuster with no real regard for the themes of the original book. Although I will say Sam Hammon concocted an opening where there was a terrorist action against the Statue of Liberty, where the Statue of Liberty ends up getting destroyed and at the last second Doctor Manhattan shows up and the comedians like, where the fuck were you? Not enough to rescue what sounds like a pretty whacky do plot. Though certainly no, it was going to be a terrible movie if they made it. Had no understanding of what that book is actually about.

It all, it was a blockbuster attempt at making it, which is look Sam ham script for The Batman was serviceable, But Charles McEwan is the one who came in and did all the rewrite work on that and kind of turned it into what it was. Oh woe. Charles McEwen was the one who came up with Batman creates the Joker creates Batman thought, because now I sound like a dummy. No, no, because the thing is okay, which leads us basically to the end of the end of the nineties, and at this point people are softening up about superheroes. I think what's happening really is generations are now coming into power in the studio system who actually read comic books, who were continuing in their adulthood to read comic books, and understood all along that if done right, would be fucking gangbusters at the box office.

And so that leads us to our first Spider Man of all time, Columbia Pictures, which is licensed it from Marvel, because again, Marvel still doesn't know what the fuck it's doing as far as getting movies made, and they don't have the luxury of having an entire studio behind them the way that DC does, even though, like you said, DC's answer to everything is put out another Batman movie. Yes, it's so crazy. They have such a fucking stable of characters. There's so much they could do, There's so much to be mined, and it's like eventually the television kind of ate their lunch. Because then you had the Flash, which was really popular Green Arrow.

This is decades later that became the dominant DC force in getting your characters on the small screen as it were. Yeah, I'll say the Arrow Verse, the Small Verse sort of shared universe kicked ass in the early twentieth century or the twenty first century, whereas anything DC was putting out was garbage. Yeah. The Flash series itself on the WB was one of both. My kids adored that, at least the first three seasons, because things went off the rails a little bit after that.

But I watched it because as a parent, I'm watching what they're watching, and in terms I know we're not. This isn't a flash podcast episode. But having said that, the budgets were pretty good for a TV show. The character looked good and moved. Of course, for not forgetting the fact that we had a flash TV series way back after in the wake of Batman with was it John Wesley's ship played the Flash and.

Mark Mark Hamill as the Trickster. That's right, And that was for you and I. That was a big deal at the time because the same they had the same It was a Bob Ringwood did the costumes for it, so it had a Batman flair to it and score. He did, so it was like heavy Batman. It really was, and it didn't really nothing really because that was amazing.

I was just about to say it was Amanda pay Is who I yeah, she was all over eighties. Tell her she was like the go to English hottie or she was in Max headroom as well. She was she was also missus Corbyn Burnson. Oh my god, I didn't know that. Now I don't like her so much.

So I so anyway, So we all these years go by, we don't really get anything but Batman on the big screen. A lot of TV stuff kind of came and went, and then. Some other fuckers are always trying to ice Skate Uphill just want to say Blade is the fucking superhero to beat in the nineteen nineties. That is true, and I don't want to undersell that. And I wonder if maybe he wouldn't warrant his own episode of the podcast.

We're going to do a midnight suns We're going to get into all the horror characters. Ah, gotcha, gotcha. But yeah, that probably just kept the heartbeat of superheroes on the on the big screen alive. Was Blade? Because it still holds up.

It's still such a vibrant, exciting, action packed great movie, great summer blockbuster movie and Wesley Snipes was cool as hell. Still is still love that movie. Yeah, I reviewed it recently over on the year in Horror and I think it still fucking holds up, still holds up. But even with again, it makes me crazy in the face of all this success, because that was a successful movie. It begat two sequels, so it wasn't a flash in the pan.

But in the face of that success, why didn't we have more superhero movies? I'll tell you why. Because they couldn't get over the superpower aspect of it. Blades easy, He's just a vampire who's really strong. He doesn't fly, he doesn't crawl on walls, he doesn't open portals.

These were still stumbling blocks. Even with all of the computer revolutions. Remember we also had Spawn around this time, teaching us exactly the limitations of CGI, reminding everyone how hard it would be to make a decent looking superhero movie. And that was Mark Depey doing that fucking movie. It was like the fucking the guy for computer generated everything.

If you squint really hard, you can look at a movie like The Matrix as a superhero movie as well. It's one hundred percent of superhero movie. He flies away at the end. That's what I'm I literally just rewatched it the other day and I remember thinking, and that was pre Sam Raimi Spider Man two. That was ninety nine.

So maybe that was what got everyone going, Oh, we can do anything. We can make people do, run up walls and hang in the air, and look look at the potential here for superhero antics. Yeah, that could be it. I don't have any empirical evidence, but. We're saying it.

So now it's true. It's on the internet forever. That's right. Everything you hear on the internet is true. But then here we're We've been teasing it, but here we are.

It's now two thousand and two, and we're greased with the first Sam Raimi Spider Man movie. Good fucking lord Man, wise Man. What a revelation, right, Yeah, it's totally have everything you wanted. Yeah, they got the swinging right. It felt he had a great Toby maguire was fantastic as.

Peter Parker, likable, affable, kind of weird, kind of odd, interesting, fun. Yeah, you kind of want somebody who's a bit of a loser obviously, but is optimistic in the face of that. His life is not fun. He's living with his aunt May and uncle Ben. They're struggling to make ends meet.

He's a brilliant kid. This was all I'm not going to say. It leapt off of the page onto the screen because it was it wasn't of its time. It was a modern updating of the character and so forth. But they kept all the essence of the original series.

I love that, and it gave us the Green Goblins first appearance on screen. And if there was a problem with the movie, not the casting, it was that fucking suit. I was gonna say that because just every once in a while, my algorithm on Instagram or something will show me the test footage of the original Green Goblin mask. You know what I'm talking about, I. Know exactly with the eyes blinking and then he would scowl and they raised it.

I'll make an angry face and suddenly he was the most horrific looking thing ever and he looks, oh, I don't know, exactly, like the fucking Green Goblin, living and breathing. That is my biggest problem with that movie is giving him. I know why they did it, obviously they had to do it, but giving us just an armor clad green Goblin without any expressiveness or the sneering that was essential to the character was he sneered. You just couldn't see his face, which was a real shame. How about just paint Willem Dafoe's fucking grotesque gargoyle face and say, now this is the green Goblin.

That it's a big shortcoming. But Jesus, it was an incredible movie. It just it felt like a comic come to life. It didn't skimp on anything that made the character fun and interesting. It gave us all the action.

It It was just a breath of fresh air. Here's the moment where I went, oh my god, this is everything I want and for this particular superhero. After he saves MJ for the first time and he's swinging away triumphantly and he runs against the side of one building and goes whoo, and I went, oh, yeah, that's right. He actually likes doing what he's doing. He has fun being Spider Man, and I.

Love that little moment. This is we just made reference to this. This came out just after this came out in the wake of nine to eleven, so we were all feeling a little weird about everything at that point. Yeah, yeah, if you're talking about that scene where it like, if you miss with one of us, you missed with all of us. They're Spider Man.

That's I love that. That pulled me out of the movie and went, oh, now we're just addressing the real world for no reason right now. No. I loved because it gave me another reason to root for the character and feel like a kins Like it showed how much the people of the city loved him. And I don't know, I hear what you're saying, and I'm not discounting that, but it didn't take me out of the movie.

It just made me feel a little reassured and a real place of darkness. I felt, Okay, this is a hopeful moment. It made me feel good. I won't take that away from you, obviously, but I think what you felt in that moment is what I feel in the sequel when they carry his body into the train. They amped it up to eleven at that point, that scene where he saves everybody on that subways, we're.

On the sequel, now, okay, everybody, that's unwarranted. And it goes without saying that Spider Man two is still a high water mark for all superhero movies. It is as good as Spider Man one was. Spider Man two is incredible, mostly because of doc Oc and Alfred Molina, and the action is great, it's interesting. He's a great character.

But the scene where he is trying to save a hurdling subway car from crashing because it's on a line that's going to end. It's under construction, and he's desperately trying to figure out how to save them, and he basically just threw grit and determination and raw strength. He saves this subway car full of people or this train, but he's through the course of the fight, he loses his mask, so he is effectively naked without it, and he saves everybody, but the exertion causes him to pass out. And it's another one of those moments like you describe where everyone's he's just a kid. Oh my god, he's no older than my son.

And a kid walks up to him after he wakes up and says, don't worry, Spider Man, your secret safe with us. I got chills because you just I don't know, it just felt so right to see everybody behind this hero that's given everything to the city. Oh. I thought that part of the scene was lame. I liked when they were carrying him over their heads, like Brooklyn, Jesus.

See, that to me was a little too on the nose. It was a little too biblical for me. That's a little too on the nose. But yeah, Spider Man, your secret's safe with us. Is it's right in the pocket of subtlety.

But that's not faux symbolism of him being clear. There is no symbolism. It's just symbolism. Spider Man is Jesus. What is the problem here?

I don't know. We're having very photo negative type reactions to the scene. I like you like, you don't like the stuff that I don't like. You got your chocolate in my peanut butter. That is such a topical reference right there, Father Balone.

That is easily a forty five year old commercial that you're referencing right there. Ah, we're talking about Spider Man your fuck. But but anyway, you have to admit though, that that second movie is such a peace for the character and for superhero movies. I really feel like if it wasn't for all of these Sam Raimi Spider Man movies, but the number two in particular, we may not have the MCU as we know it today, because it really set the template. Noe, there'd be no MCU nothing, there'd be no X men continuing if it weren't for this fucking series of movies.

Man, he got it all right, all the time until we get to part three, which we're gonna get to in a second, because I just want to extol the verses of Spider Man two a little bit more. It is one of the movies where I will go, let me just put on the bank Robberies scene. I just want to watch the bank Robberies. And then I watched the movie, or I put on or I'll come on and I'll go, oh this, I love this one scene. Then I watched the movie.

It's that good. It pulls me in every single time. I don't think that Marvel was gonna do better than that for a long time. Yeah. Well, let me ask you a question, as a matter of purely of opinion, what is your opinion of the Spider Man costume in the Raimi movies, in particular the ray raised webbing look of the costume.

I accepted it at the time because everything else was so good. I'm not a fan of that costume. I agree, I because we've since had the Tom Holland costumes, which are Hughes so much closer to the original comic. It's hard to put those down. But like you, I accepted it as par for the chorus at the time, but in retrospect, like I rewatched, I rewatched some of two, and I watched Spider Man three, I don't love that raised outline look as much as the original.

Really, it was an interesting thing at that time, and I'm sure it made them more comfortable that it was a little more real world, that it was tactile or something that wasn't just spandex that this kid was pulling on. And it was also, let's be frank, it was also an opportunity to sell more toys, because now it's every time there's a new comic book movie, they have to change the costume in some ways so they can sell more toys to kids. I'm sure that didn't hurt. Yeah, of the three that we look, if we had never gotten another Spider Man, then I wouldn't say anything necessarily against this costume. But even starting with the Andrew Garfield movies, when they gave him those gigantic, fucking cartoon eyes that I love.

I think the Tom Holland costume can use a little bit of that. But both of those costumes are better than the Raimie costumes. But that's that's pretty much it. Look neither of the Andrew de Garfield movies are going to touch these movies. Nor is the third Raimi film going to touch either of these two movies.

Yep, yep, that is true too. What to take into it? This is the most decisive one of the series. Yeah, let's talk about movies by committee and how Marvel won't learn this lesson when they really should have because Kevin Fau's on the set of these movies. Remember, he's getting his education on the sense of movies like Blade and Spider Man and X Men.

What was his capacity at that point? He was Marvel's He was Marvel's liaison, so he was their line producer, basically the guy that had to be on set that nobody wanted there. Got it makes sense? So yeah, it's from what I understand, Rainy didn't want anything to do with Venom in this movie. He wanted it to focus on basically on Sandman, Fan Man and New Goblin.

That's it, and New Goblin and he was forced to add in the character of Venom and by extension, Eddie Brock, which was the Toe for Grace character, which is probably controversial decision number one of many poor decisions of this in this movie. I don't mind Toe for Grace is Eddie Brock. I know Eddie Brock is a big, roughneck kind of guy, but I didn't mind him turning into Venom. It's just when he keeps on midway turning into Venom, when we see his face in the venom suit, then it became I'm totally ridiculous. I just found and I know that it was the point, but his character was just so grating to me.

And again, he's doing his job and it's not his fault. That's the character. He's supposed to be, a suck up that's always undermining Peter Parker. I will say the best part for me of To for Grace is he's been disgraced. He's fired from the Daily Bugle and he goes to the church and he's praying, and he's you think it's going to be this sort of lime, Just please give me the redemption.

He prays, He prays for God to kill Peter Parker. He's in the middle of a church asking for God to strike down another person that I thought was worth the price of admission. There God answered his prayer in that scene. He did, he did. He gave him the symbio.

You can do it with this. The thing is, let's talk a little bit about the symbiode in this. First of all, let's back up for a minute. I am old enough to remember the very first appearance of the black costume, before it was known as the sim Out, before there was any such thing as venom. This happened in the midst of the first Secret War Secret Wars mini series of twelve issue mini series, which I adored as a kid, and in that had did you read those, father Malone?

Did you read Secret Wars? I did? The first one I did. Actually, yeah, okay, you kind of couldn't get away. If you were reading Marvel at the time.

Guess what you're reading, fucking Secret Wars. Like it or not. These types of crossovers are much more common these days, but at the time it was a big deal. With all these different Marvel characters are gathered on this planet called the Battle Planet, and they have to fight to the death, and the winner gets whatever they want. And so you had one side of the planet with all these superheroes like Spider Man and Captain America and the Fantastic Four and all this, and then you had Doctor Doom basically leading the other the villain contingent, and they're battling and there's all sorts of stuff going on.

But in the midst of the in the aftermath of one of the battles, Spider Man's red and blue outfit is written as rip up and torn up and destroyed, and he didn't ever replacement. But they find this machine, this alien machine in their base that you think about, so you think of something and it creates it for you out of thin air. And he asked he thinks about a costume, and lo and behold, his costume comes out black. And that was the first real appearance of the black costume. And then eventually you learn that it's actually this alien symbiote that causes all these problems, and before you know it, the character of Venom is born.

But before that, it was just a cool idea to change up Spider Man skin. I don't know how much they thought through the black costume and its ramifications. I suspect they red conned it along the way. Oh, they certainly did. He was in the black costume a lot, and then it suddenly became an alien symbiote.

And then we have some of the best action figures, the most articulate and well constructed action figures of all time. I want to eat your brain remember that one. Oh my god, absolutely. It was a Venom action figure, and I think they had to recall it because it was so disturbing and you'd press a button and it would say different phrases, and one of the phrases was I want to eat your brain. I want to eat your brains.

Like really mean a little scary for kids. But so anyway, so we have Spider Man three. Raymi is already being forced. I was making a Todd McFarland joke, by the way, about they articulated action figures that that would come in our future, because Todd McFarland was the pretty much the venom guy there for a while. He was he was, and he was the action figure guy for a long time too.

You tell me like that was our first taste of Todd McFarland. And now all of our action figures are made by Todd McFarland. That's true, So you had so it right from jump. It feels like venom is just thrown in to this movie as an afterthought because it just literally just randomly drops in via a meteor coming down from the sky and it hitches a ride on Peter's scooter. Yeah, let me say something about that now.

That feels like Raymy saying fuck you to the studio because it was already built in the last movie that MJ was about to marry j Jonah Jamison's son who is an astronaut and was about to go on a mission. Yeah, and you with himself in the comic became was the man Wolf. He brought back this thing from outer space and he becomes a werewolf essentially. So why not just have him return on his mission and the symbiotes on the fucking shuttle It drops it literally like you said, it drops out. He's on He and MJ are in the fucking Central Park and it just drops out of the sky and hooks itself onto his mope head.

Get out of here. So random. And but parallel to that, you have Flint Marco Sandman, who honestly has even less to do in this movie. It's such a which is not to say that the character in the original comic was that deep and interesting. He was basically just the two bit crooked that Hulk style was caught in a big bomb blast and it fused his body with a pile of sand.

He became the Sandman. And now in this they give him the sort of maybe that was in the comic at some point, but he's a criminal who I hated that they did this. He it turns out he's actually the one that shot buckle Ben. They retcon the fact that it wasn't the other guy that that Peter killed essentially in the first movie. Now this it's so, why why are we going back to that?

Well, give me a break. Yeah, But literally, the Sandman just spends the whole movie just wandering, and every once in a while a cop spotsman says, hey, that's Flint Marco, Hey stop there, and he does Sandman things and he goes away. It's it just feels so I don't know, it just feels like there's not a lot of affection for the character to give him anything interesting to do. The it doesn't seem like there's any real plot going on in this sense, there's no villain to speak on. It's very meandering.

Yeah, and then you have so Harry. They set it up in Spider Man two that Harry Osborne is gonna take on the mantle of the Green Goblin. He's starting to see he's seeing his dad. He's going nuts. And now he figured out that that's who Spider Man is.

And now he's got the glider. Now he's got everything. And then so within the first ten minutes of the movie, he is on a Goblin glider attacking Peter, who is just driving home. He's not Spider Man yet, he's just Peter. And in the midst of this battle, he hits his head and he gets amnesia.

I wish I was making this up, and he forgets everything about Spider Man, believing that Spider Man killed his father. He forgets about taking on the mantle of the Green gob Who wrote this? You know, Raymie had a hand in writing this screenplay, But who's responsible for them alone? You know, No, I chose specifically not to research this movie further than I had to. I'm sure this was written by the hand of probably a half dozen writers.

Because it feels like everyone's afraid to make a real definitive choice about what's going to happen in the movie, and it's just like you said, it's meandering. There's not a lot of plot. Peter ostensibly wants to propose to MJ. MJ's careers in a shambles because frankly, she's no good. She has a part of Broadway, and Peter goes to see her, and then the critics just savage her the next day to the degree that she's fired and she has to take a job as a singing waitress in Times Square.

Okay, let's talk about Peter. Let's talk about dark Peter and the million memes. The thing is Peter himself. He's gone from being a likable optimist. He just seems, I don't know, a little too wide optimistic and hopeful in the face of a really crappy life that he has for himself.

He's still living in that slummy apartment. His relationship with MJ is tenuous at best. He's what's kind of an anorexic neighbor feeding him cake. Right, that the door will never close properly on his apartments. All these little frustrations that he's got built up, and I guess that's a choice to make him an optimist in spite of all that.

But to me, it just felt like a weird form of mania on his part where he refuses to entertain any of the darkness that is surrounding him. Frankly on a day to day basis. Yeah, could this not have been the dark night of Peter Parker's soul? Like all of the he puts up this front of being so jolly all the time, but he's dying inside and that's what causes the sym be out in some way. Yeah, the comic there was, at least I remember the first time the comic had Spider Man no more him throwing his costume in the trash can because he just decides everybody hates me.

J. J. Jameson has been leading the charge against me forever. I'm just I'm sick of it. I'm done.

We got a little bit of that in Spider Man two, and that's really where it kind of stayed. And then they introduced Gwen Stacy and they do nothing with her in this, Like, how are you going to set up the darkest turning point in Spider Man's career up to that point, the death of Gwen Stacy and not follow through on that. She's there, she dates him briefly, and then she's gone. She disappears, and that's it. It's just an overstuffed nightmare of a screen.

Yeah. I don't know what they thought they were doing at all. It's crazy. But then let's but now you brought it up, let's talk about Emo Peter Parker. What the hell in the middle of this?

Were they just making fun of him at that point? Did they hate Toby McGuire at this point? I think it's interesting. I'd forgotten about this. At a certain point, they were going to recast Peter Parker because he I want to say, if Toby maguire said he didn't want to do it, or maybe he was ay for more money.

But he made the case supposedly that he had a back problem and he wasn't gonna be able to do the part, and they're like, fine, we're just gonna get Jake Jillenhall to do this. We'll just put him right into the character and that's it. And suddenly Toby maguire recovers and now he's in Spider Man three. I don't I'm not sure that he regrets that decision. At this point, because it is really a laughable performance when he gets especially when he gets taken over by the symbiote, because the symbiote, the dark costume that he eventually dawns, has an effect on his psyche and it turns him into this dark, vengeful, angry character, which he probably should have been just by dint of the fact that his life sucked at that point.

Yeah, and then he's dancing. He's poorly, very poorly dancing. I don't know who the villain in this movie is. I don't know who the hero in this movie is. It's just a bunch of characters doing a bunch of stuff.

Yeah, it's not. Yeah. And to think that they went from such a triumph of Spider Man to this in the span of six or seven years, it's absurd. Man, It's really remarkable. They had everything going for them.

And like you said, when when you make a movie by committee like this, it's the old sort of the old thing of too many cooks, spoiled broth. This is a very rancid broth that they cooked up. Because nobody's happy at the end of this. The moviegoer is not happy, the director hates it, the actors probably aren't thrilled they were in it. It's not good.

Venom didn't bite off one head. No, he did not. That's how much Sam Raimi was uninterested. Sam Raimi, one of the greatest horror directors of all time, did not do any horror stuff with the effectively Spider Man's horror character. Yeah, closest we get is we see him with it with all the teeth, like he's going to bite off Spider Man's head.

But we don't really get a lot. We gotta scarred up Harry Osbourne. That's a little creepy. But even he does about face. He becomes heroic at the end, which makes no sense.

When tofer Grace emerges from Venom in the goo and he's got werewolf teeth. I don't think I've ever laughed harder. It's not good. But and I think of this often, not necessarily just in the context of this movie, but any movie that you watch and you're like, what were they thinking. It's such a colossal waste of money and talent, millions and millions of dollars wasted for this.

I don't it's my understanding that when the word came down that they were going to do Venom as the villain. The idea of the studio was, and that's it. It will be a Venom movie. But they had spent since before Spider Man two the time and money and effort to create a Sandman character. ILM had been working the entire time on generating a sand creature.

So the goddamn it, we got to use the sand creature because we already spent all the money on it. Again, pick one thing and drop it or do another thing. Who cares? At this point they're spending money after they're throwing good money after bad. They really are.

Like I said, you can't watch that. Nobody's going to be happy with this movie, and filmgoers responded, I don't know that. It was like a I'm sure it didn't make as much money as Spider Man two, but it's not a beloved part of the character's canon. At this point, people just look at Spider Man three with total derision and just mock it. We were going to get the Vulture in Spider Man four.

That was spent. That was Raimi's plan. The storyboards are out there. It looks pretty exciting. Could have been good, except Columbia decided to go in a new direction because suddenly there's an upstart to the superhero films going on, and that's Marvel itself.

Marvel Studios. They've got pretty much all of their main characters except fucking Spider Man, their most popular character. God damn it, Columbia has it and they're gonna hold onto it. How are they gonna do keep making Spider Man movies? Yep?

So then we have the Mark Webb directed Amazing Spider Man with Andrew Garfield. Now, I was in a Hall h presentation for that Spider Man movie where Andrew Garfield was in line as one of the questioners, and that was kind of cool. He had the costume, but it was like a bad version of the costume. Yeah, it was like a kid version of the costume. Pulled the mask off as he started talking.

That was pretty cool. I think he seems like a very affable, nice guy, and I do. We're gonna get into a deeper I by and large, I like his portrayal of Peter Parker. It's a little different. I like his Peter Parker.

His Peter Parker feels truest to me of the adolescent teenage version that they've been hinting at the entire I bought that Peter Parker. It's the quippiest. He actually is the one who's having fun, and you're making fun of the criminals as he is dispatching them one after the other. What I didn't like, and this is born out after finally watching the third one or the second one, is they can coct this notion like I don't remember how they explained how Peter's parents were originally killed in the comic book, I don't remember that, But in this movie it's Campbell Scott and they he is a scientist for Oscorp. And in the first movie they introduced this idea that he's he was on the run for some reason no one understands.

People believe that he was stealing company secrets or they don't know what he was up to. But then you learn in the second movie that he was actually trying to protect the world from some tech that he was developing, that the radioactive spider tech that he was developing for Oscorp. He had no choice but to go on the run because they were going to weapon his research, and I did not like that. I understand why they did it. They needed a new spin on the characters, but I thought it was completely unnecessary, and I just I'm happiest watching Spider Man do his thing taking care of the criminals.

I don't need all of this backstory to tie into the future of Oscorp and then the eventual introduction of Harry Osbourne. I didn't need any of that. Yeah, Spider Man's original appeal was that he's like you or me. He's just a teenager living his teenager life, and then suddenly we've got a movie about corporate intrigue exactly. That's my exact point there.

But the thing I like about Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker is whenever anyone describes Peter Parker will describe him as a loser and nebishy and that sort of socially maladjusted teenager, And all I can ever think is he pulled Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy and black Cat. What the fuck is anyone talking about? Andrew Garfield represented that version of it. He was a little more cock sure, a little more sure of himself, and I liked that a lot. He was because that's when Peter Parker gets these powers.

It increases his confidence and he becomes he starts to move away from being this nerd and becoming a more well rounded version of himself. That's exactly what you get here. He comes into his own through this accident that creates Spider Man. But that's about it. The rest of the movie.

I didn't particularly care for his Spider Man doing Spider Man shit great, and some of the web slinging and web swinging stuff is some of the best I've ever seen, honestly, how it's incredible once we get to our villain, who I personally have been waiting the entire fucking film series for, the Lizard. The Lizard has always been my favorite Spider Man villain, Doctor Kurt Connor's in his One Armed and Ness, which they kept teasing over and over again with Dylan Dylan Baker Dylan Baker the Raimy movies. I kept waiting for the fucking Lizard to show up. So we get him here and it's just a it's not a great CGI creature. It's not.

It was weird. And then he had what's his name as Captain Stacy Dennis Leary's Denis really was bizarre. Look he's fine, but he's. I'm surprised he wasn't on pills and cheating on his wife like every other character he's played. I just for me, he's too freighted with all of the stuff that I'd seen him in previously for me to take him seriously.

And it's not necessarily his fault. It's I remember reading this about Ed O'Neill. He was in one of the one of the Tom Clancy movies. I think it might have been like. October for October, it was when he was the fucking guy building the submarines that they come and check the fucking blueprints for.

I remember this, and he was. He was in the movie, but he was also at the time he was best known as al Bundi from Married with Children, and every time he would appear on the screen in this Tom Clancy movie, people would just laugh. And it wasn't Ed O'Neill's fault that he was so good is Al Bundy. But so maybe there's a bit of that at play with Dennis Leary and me just remembering him from MTV and note the comedy albums No Cure for Cancer and so forth, and then Rescue Me, which was like he's just making himself up to be this big ladies man. He's this old firefighter and somehow he's pulling all these gorgeous women.

That's based on the life of famous comedian Dennis Leary and not the regular old fireman. Oh look, firemen have a reputation as Lithario's, so that it's not unwarranted. It's just not him. It's not him, That's what I mean. You could have anybody in that part.

It just wasn't him, so I didn't dig him as And to be honest, that first Spider Man movie, the Andrew Garfield one, is so forgettable. I couldn't really tell you much about it except I remember the lizard was in it, and there's some cool action sequences, and as you said, the web slinging, the web swinging and all that stuff is so well done. It's when I loved the PlayStation Spider Man game Spider Man Spider Man two, and the web slinging in that just feels like that movie. It's like they I almost feel like they took a tip from how they rendered him moving and applied it to the video game. Because it's so fluid.

It doesn't look just like a bunch of ones and zeros flying around the city. It looked more realistic to me. Should have lent some of those ones and zeros to the lizard and his flat faced nonsense. It was forgettable, and then it should But then he looked. Like one of the Koopas from the Super Mario Brothers movie.

You remember the Coopers. I do I love Mojo. If you ain't got no Mojo, Nixon Man, your movie needs some fixing. Some fixen. So then that leads us into the amazing Spider Man two, which introduces maybe I don't know that it's my favorite Spiderman villain, but it's one of them, which is Electro, which is one of the most one of the earliest Spider Man films that you couldn't have we were Unfortunately, we were not given the Electro with the bright green and white or green and yellow outfit, with the lightning bolt masks and sun.

He looks like a mum and Shan's character. Instead, we get Jamie Fox playing another frustrated, nebishy villain that needs needs something awful to happen to trigger his violent impulses and everything. All the work that they did in the first film to ground this Spider Man in the real world is immediately thrown out the window into a dumpster that is set on fire when Jamie Fox walks on screen as the nerd character excuse me there, Spider Man. But they give us a bit of a bait and switch because the first big action sequence is the villain is Paul Giamatti, who is eventually going They had designs on him becoming the Rhino, that was who he was gonna be. So you're the first villain you're given is Paul Gumatti, and I'm thinking, Okay, they're gonna have both Electro and the Rhino in this, But then Paul Gumotti gets taken down and he's gone for the rest of the movie until the very very end.

So all we have is we have Electro and then we have another fucking take on Harry Osborne, only now it's insufferable because it's Dana de Haan, who's just a weird He's probably a really nice guy in real life, so forgive me for making these generalizations, but he just he's a weird looking dude, and he's so smarmy. He just gives you the sort of spoiled rich kid vibe. I just I didn't buy the fact that he and Peter were supposed to be like childhood friends. What's weird is you just described the character to a t and then said you didn't like the fact that he was those things. No, Harry Osbourne in the co books isn't a spoiled rich kid.

Yeah. What I'm saying this character is though, So you're saying you don't like, you don't like both the characterization and the portrayal. I just think we kind of got some of that with James Franco's. He was a little more warm. He wasn't just because it's frank.

He just seems like a I was gonna say, a decent guy, but he seems to he seems to act that way, and I. Have to say so, I I think I made reference to this. I had only recently I avoided Spider Man three because of all the bad all the baggage attached to it. But I finally watched it for this very podcast, and it was a little sobering to see James Franco doing his thing, knowing that, obviously, with all these accusations came out after the fact, I can't look at it, look at him there and not think about all of the bad stuff that he's alleged to have done so that that probably colored my perception of him in this. But anyway, Dana Dehan is just the weird looking I don't know, it's obvious from jump that he's going to be evil in this movie.

There's no subterfuge. He's just an evil looking guy. Yeah, and I kind of liked his goblin actually, at least he was at least it was freaky and not a fucking oh thank god, but I'm blanking on the fucking lucha libre. It's not like a fucking Lucha libre mask. You mean, like a lad Yeah, man, it's at least it's a it's a goblining creature that he does.

And I get that. Dan de Han or Dane de Han, I don't know how to pronounce his name, his name, Dan de Han. I believe. I think he always struck me as like the a a shadow person version of Leonardo DiCaprio. Just.

What could have been. Yeah, just like the dark parts of Leonardo that were left over in his creation that they had enough left over to make Dane de Han. So it's like twins, but instead of Schwarzenegger and Devido, you have DiCaprio and Dehan. Yeah, that makes sense when you think about it. It really does.

I never really thought of it el version of DiCaprio. Right, yeah, I will say I'm not gonna. I was gonna. The only thing I half liked him in was and You're Gonna kill Me for this, Father Malone. It was the Metallica three D movie called Through the Never It's a fantastic concert movie, but they felt the need to bolt on these songs.

Remains the same esque Fantasy Sequences. Two D tomorrow. Anyway. I didn't mind him in that because I thought the movie itself was so strong. But nevertheless, let's get back.

Do we really need another Green Goblin Jesus Christ, Father Malone? Really? No, not right now? God go with it and make it meaningful like. You could have had Electro.

There's the shocker, There's there's a whole cadre of villains that are just waiting to make that for years. They really threatened to do it. Here at the end of the movie, when they're going through the Oscorp lower levels, they show you that, oh yeah, pootrements of all of the Sinister Six villains. Yeah, and that was on the boards man, they were gonna do that. They were The Sinistor six was the next on the docket, and fucking thank God in Heaven, Marvel Studios came along and said, hey, you guys want to do a trade.

But before we get there, though, I will say that the if nothing else, Spiderman two finally gives us a real death of Gwen Stacy, which will become important when we get into the next trilogy of Spider Man movies. If you will, that's that was worth. It can be dismissive of these movies, but we can't dismiss them because they're not going to go away. And and to it, I will. I had sympathy for Andrew Garfield, even though I don't have no special affection for his movies, I do think that he was done a little dirty by how these these reboots were treated, and he despite how negatively we view these movies now, it was through default of his own because I think we agreed that he actually comported himself really well as.

The character agreed. And I think that second movie, I think they knew that ending was going to be so fucking strong that it didn't matter what came beforehand, right, because if they had that ending at the end of the first film. It could have been a very memorable Filmy imagine killing Gwen Stacy at the outset. Oh man, they but they really it was a gut punch because we had two movies with which and Emma Stone is really good as Gwen Stacy, I have Yeah, say, Mark Webb was not really anyone's top choice to to make this action blockbuster. The thing that I remember him from most was that movie Five hundred Days of Summer.

Was that the movie with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zoey Deschanel. Yeah, so it's no surprise that some of the strongest stuff in his Spider Man movies, it is the interactions between Spider Man were between Peter and Gwen, and it didn't hurt that the two of them were actually involved off screen too. It gave them They had a lot of chemistry, is my point, and there was a semi improvisational quality to their bantering. So that stuff is actually really good. Agreed, It's just the rest of the plot and the characters in the villains and dialogue and that fell apart.

Yeah, which now that us to captain America. All roads lead to Captain America because they decide they're going to do a monster rally fucking civil war movie. They're gonna have all the Marvel heroes beat the shit out of each other. Yeah, we know would be really good for the fans. Let's bring in our fucking most popular character of all time.

Boy, howdy did they ever? And was I just jumping out of my skin when we finally saw Spider Man as part ostensibly part of the MCU at that point, and not only it's we talked about this already. How sometimes we'll dip into one of these movies to watch a sequence or two. That sequence at the Airport in Berlin. I've probably rewatched that I don't know fifty times since it came out in a video, and a big part of that is Spider Man.

Spider Man is fantastic in it. It's everything I wanted a Spider Man to be, and it gave me one hundred complete faith in Tom Holland and his portrayal of Spider Man. I knew immediately they had the perfect guy. It is one of those again, Marvel's Marvel as a studio, there innate ability to catch the exact perfect person for their character and not only that to characterize the character in the most perfect way possible. This is this is comic book Spider Man that we always wanted, but it also feels real world and it feels lived in and it feels comic bookie and outsized and everything.

And Tom Holland is the fucking perfect guy for the role. He's amazing. He's so physical. Obviously, he's a dancer. I think he was in Billy Elliott on Broadway or something, and he can do he's I don't know if you could call him a gymnast, but he can do a lot of physical acting, can do flips and all this kind of stuff.

But what I think is really great is the character's first introduction isn't necessarily in that Berlin airport scene. It's when Tony Stark goes to see him at his apartment in Queen's with his aunt May, played obviously by Mursa Tomey. So you get to see the character as this teenager interacting with Stark, and it's he's just he's so good with Robert Downey Junior. They have such chemistry immediately, and that carried through all of those Spider Man movies and the related Avengers movies. Just I can't say enough good things about Tom Holland in this part.

And bravo for Marvel for figuring out that Peter Parker's aunt would not be a fucking grandma. Yeah what is that? They It made a little more sense in those amazing Spider Man movies because they, like you said, it was Campbell Scott and they aged him up even so he's almost fully gray and you figure if he has an older brother, yeah, they would be old, they would be old people. It would be Sally feel That makes sense there. But the Toby Maguire movie are like, that's his aunt.

Yeah, they stuck to the strict definition of aunt may as the silver haired with the heart of gold who doesn't know what's going on. At least they hipped it up with Tom Holland where they give gave him. I don't know what's the milk equivalent for ants. I don't know. I don't want to think about it, but I get what you're playing.

I don't know, but it's his the action scenes with him going toe to toe with the Winter Soldier and the falcon and all this kind of stuff. It's amazing. He steals cap shield Man. Yeah, I love that and the inner play between Cap and Spider Man, and that that final bit where Cap has put him in an impossible situation where he's got to hold up that piece of metal and he's like, yeah, you got a hard kid, where are you from? And he's like Queens, He's like, eh, Brooklyn.

It's like this tip of the cap, so to speak, from Cap to Spider Man, like hey, you're okay, kid, you got a future, but not today. He will be an Avenger, just not today. That's right. First he has to have his own adventures. Holy fuck, Spider Man Homecoming.

Is it a perfect Marvel's film. It's pretty damn close, pretty fucking close. I'd say it's got. Goddamn Michael Keaton. That's amazing.

Look, Marvel traditionally has a villain problem. There is no villain problem here. This is the most relatable villain as a human being. This is one of the most lethal villains as a fucking outsized costumed character. And for the first time in any of the Marvel movies, there's a scene of such tension just through dialogue.

The scene in the car. Oh, it's absolutely brilliant. Where I finally believe every fucking word coming out of a villain's mouth that he is going to hurt that kid and hurt everyone he loves. I have no doubt he'll do it. It's just when they're having this conversation and there's that subtext like they're keeping up appearances for his daughter.

But oh man, it's just so good and it's you. We actually get really a feel for the young Peter Parker. Finally, he's in high school doing high school things. He's going to parties, he's hanging out with Ned. He's just this nebishy kid who you can tell he's a good kid overall.

He's learning, he's making mistakes. He makes a ton of mistakes in that first movie. Don't forget when Iron Man comes down on him. You look, man, if you can't toe the line, then I guess you don't deserve the suit because its huge mistake. But he's making mistakes all the time.

He can't like pursue somebody without being dragged behind a van. It's yeah, he's he makes a lot of mistakes, and that was so refreshing. He's fallible, he makes mistakes, but he learns from them, and that I agree, it's as close to it certainly as a first stab at giving the character his own movie. In this context, I don't see how they could have done it any better. Couldn't have my God, And the plot not only ties into the rest of the MCU, but doesn't isn't dependent upon it.

So it's good for fans and good for just casual viewers of the movie. The idea that the entire heist is based on them moving all of Stark's equipment out of the tower to what will be Avengers headquarters doesn't hurt the friendly neighborhood Spider Man of the entire rest of the film. Hey, Spider Man, do a flip. Yeah, the effects are great. I love the costume.

I love the fact that it's this high tech costume that Stark has developed for him, and it's got all these crazy you can see the eyes, the apertures for the eyes opening close and gives the character personality in a way that we've never seen before. Do you see what cosplayers do that cosplayers have gotten those lady printed fucking Yeah, Oh my god, it's so heavinly it's insane. But then to learn after the fact to get the costume to look like that he's basically wearing this helmet underneath the mask, because that that effectively shapes it into that distinctive form that's silhouette that we all know. But I was reading why all previous Spider Man looked like look like shit, Like, look back at Lamon's thing.

It's like, it's just some guy with him wearing a fucking leotard. What's up with that? But Zindaya was always afraid that he was going to suffocate her something because it's just he's It's like, it's like wearing a helmet underneath this thing. If he if God forbid, if he gets nauseous and throws up, that's curtains. How do you he might choke to death on his own vomit wearing this stupid costume.

But it's so good. Yeah, he's fine. Okay, I think it's like a hard shell though. Yeah, but it's a hard shell that I'm sure it is scored so you can see through, scored so he can breathe through. And then it's just a little thing pulled over the thing with a hundred crew members ready to jump if anything goes wrong.

Sure, this was just her observing this off. And by the way, kudos for them for giving us a different MJ. Then I'm not saying that I really loved her interpretation of MJ from the beginning. It got better as the series went on, but I at least give them credit for doing something different that didn't completely stomp all over the character. It was actually, you know, refreshing that she was this kind of withdrawn, kind of snarky character.

That's a great foil for Peter. I loved MJ in this Yeah, that's is one of the best ideas that they came up with, was to make MJ more like this girl. She's like Alas Sheedy in the Breakfast Club if she was exactly realized. Yeah, but the three of them, Ned, MJ, and Peter are like and it only grows movie by movie the bond because it's clear that these actors really have an affection for each other and that totally comes through in their performances. I think, and I like that they they're starting to, in looking at this universe, lay a little bit of blame in some areas.

The reason any of this happens is because Tony Stark, who has destroyed the city, now has a union contract to take care of it. For what with damage control. Is he damage Control. Yeah. Yeah, it takes over the fucking operation from Michael Keaton, almost bankrupting him.

Yeah, it makes him sympathetic. You see him do a lot of awful things in this movie, but look at the core of it, he's a struggling businessman trying to provide for his family and that I guess that counts for something. He's getting crushed by the big businessman, Tony Stark, who will function up and then be paid to fucking clean it up. And you don't get anything out of it except displaced from your homes for months at a time because Tony Stark had to create a fucking robot that wants to save the world but wants to actually destroy it. Yeah.

So it was a one. I can't say enough good things about it. I love that first Spider Man. But what did you think of Far from Home? I loved it, I really because Mysterio was again one of those villains that I read my little digest of Spider Man comics and it's I love the take on the character where he true to the idea of the character.

He's not what he seems, and I thought that was fascinating and I liked their You know. I like that idea, that the illusion of what he's presenting versus what's really happening. I thought it was just a neat twist on the character. I really liked it. I liked that what carried over from the first film is that the villains here are all being made by Tony Stark.

This is like Batman syndrome. These are all Stark employees who've been fucked over by Tony in some way over the years. And I love that we get that flashback where we back into Iron Man and realized. I love that who he's yelling at was what's his name, Ralphie? Yeah, from from a Christmas story?

And I love what was the Tony Stark built is in a cave? What was a nickname that they gave him when he had his dark suit? They called him the night Monkey or something. I love the stuff in Europe. I love the character is always getting taken down a Pegar two through circumstances beyond his control.

You can laugh at the character a little bit, but at the same time, there's no question that he is one of the most powerful characters in the MCU. He's fantastic. And these movies, these Spider Man movies aren't afraid to give us comedy in addition to some great action and some awesome villains. I have very few complaints about Far from Home. Mysterio was going to be I believe was going to be the secondary villain in Raymie's Part four.

That's when Bruce Campbell was finally going to be revealed from his roles in the previous three movies to have been that actor all along who ends up being Mysteria. No kiddings, they were going to tie all that in all these funny little cameos he made. Correct that would have blown my mind. Would have been fucking cool man, because that would have been great. And can you imagine a world because mysterios power is to to reshape your reality, which the sequence that they do that in this movie is one of my favorite sequences in any Marvel films, where he's stumbling down that nightmare world and we get a zombie Tony Stark scrambling out of the grave insane.

Yeah, they weren't afraid to go there because because let's not forget you know, we were still getting over the events of Endgame at that point and dealing with the post Tony Stark world that to a certain degree, That's what the next couple of Spider Man movies deal with a little bit, is how does Peter deal with life without his mentor? And to see him in this illusion like this zombie skeleton in a partially formed Iron Man suit. Oh my god, that's horrific. Now imagine Raymi did it. We got a lot of that.

We already talked about Doctor Strange in the last podcast, and that we got a lot of that with him, the zombie Doctor Strange with the cloak made of dead souls and things. That was pretty intense. Speaking of Doctor Strange, just tying us back into the beginning, I'm now going to go back and look at a lot of the Steve Ditko Doctor Strange issues because evidently fellow office mate Eric Stanton had a bigger hand in what was going on in Doctor Strange. And now I'm curious to see if there's any bonded shit going on in there, because if it is, it's from Aaron's, it's from it's Stanton. I'm fascinated that someone should write a book about the fetish connection.

But in Marvel Comics. Do you not want to see a movie about that? Fucking that studio shared by Steve Ditko and Eric Stanton doing fetish work and superhero work simultaneously. It's the stuff with wonder Woman is widely known, and I think they've already they made a movie about the creator of Wonder Woman and all the stuff that he was up to. But in the seventies, Eric Stanton had a character called Blunderbroad which was a direct parody of Wonder Woman, where she failed at every mission and ended up getting tortured by her villains.

Someone somewhere must have written a book about this, because I how have I I've this is the first I've heard of any of this, and I'm completely fascinated. I don't know if it exists, but if it is there, hey, listeners, send me that book. Yeah, I pull your way. It's insane. But so anyway, so we have far from Home and things are really clicking for Spider Man and it's rolling, and then we finally get now, okay, before we get to that, let's set the stage.

Then we go through pandemic, right, yeah, I think, which which basically ties in. I think it hit just after Endgame and no one's going to movies for a long time, and the world's in a really bad place, and out of that. This is my own personal reflection on way home. People are just getting to the theaters. I know, this might have been the first movie that I went to after the pandemic started to ease up a little bit and we were getting vaccinations and so forth.

And that was my first theatrical experience after not having gone to the theater for maybe more than a year. What was your experience there? That wasn't the first movie I went back to the theater for. That movie was a anniversary reissue of Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. Oh okay, And then I don't think I went back to the theaters until Spider Man, but that was definitely I definitely saw it in the theater and it was packed.

I remember it being packed. Yeah, that's exactly my point. It was packed in the way that it felt like movies hadn't been like that in a long time. Because of obviously, people can see these things at home and so forth, And I with any big ten pole comic release, or any big movie for that matter, I try to stay away from spoilers as much as I can. I know you're a little more indulgent with you don't really care as much.

I'm not looking for them, but I'm not gonna cry if I run into one. I assiduously avoid them as much as I can. So I frankly, I had heard whispers that we might be some of the stuff that might be happening, but I did not know that. And forgive me, if if anyone has not seen far from home at no way home at this point. You're dead.

I'm sorry. I'm gonna spoil this. I went went, I did. I had no idea they were going to bring back Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield. WHOA, So you avoid that?

Like I said, I just, I just you know, I did my best. It was not easy. You employed the cone of silence. I can't, I guess. But so when that scene hit with Ned and MJ in Ned's grandmother's house as they're trying to figure out where Peter is my favorite with the sling ring, and first you see Andrew Garfield bound in and you're like, holy crap, this is crazy.

And then seeing Toby Maguire was less of a thing because I figured at that point all bets are off. But man, oh man, the place went absolutely bananas. In a way that was so heartening as a moviegoer, as somebody who loves the experience of a theatrical experience of going to the movies. You just don't get that much anymore fathom alone. No, it happened in the Endgame, it happened in the Infinity War, it happened in Civil War, it happened in this film.

Yeah, I don't think it happened in either of the other Spider Man movies. Actually it was this film, not that sort of level of rabid craziness going on in the theater. Yeah, it was insane, and it. Was for Andrew Garfield. Toby Maguire gets a woo afterwards, because we've already expended our flabbergasted.

You were the pump was primed at that point that you didn't you weren't surprised when Maguire came in. But the fact, like I said, setting the stage, that that we were just coming out of COVID we wanted that communal experience. It just it hit me like few film experiences have, and I was just really I just loved it. It was just so memorable to me. And as we said, as I guess, as I said, I don't know if I assume you agree to a certain degree.

Andrew Garfield was done so dirty by those two Spider Man movies that finally he gets his chance to close the loop on the character and get the ending that I think he deserved. Oh my god, I was bawling at the end of this fucking scene where he saves and I'm almost crying now when he saves another MJ. Holy Jesus, it's insane. And he when he gets it when he's talking to Peter at his low point and he basically says, look, I don't want you to end up like me, because after what happened, I got rage full, I stopped pulling my punches, I got bitter. He sells that.

Even now I'm getting chills just thinking about him, because he's so good in it. And the fact that these guys, these three Spider Men, effectively become brothers and look out for each other and their banter is really funny. And they're comparing notes about, oh, you can create webs out of your wrist? What's that. It was amusing in a way that I don't think I've been tickled by a Spider Man movie before.

It felt Look, you can anyone can come down on the multiverse idea, and that's fair. I'm not here to defend that, but it was so creative the way they brought all of these Spider Men together, and to a lesser degree, the super villains. Doctor Octopus gets a grade from me because he also gets his grace note. He gets to have his redemption that he really didn't necessarily fully get. In Spider Man two, you get the Green Goblin, who Willem Dafoe is great anyway.

Can I just say that it's almost the perfect portrayal of the Green Goblin as a character because he's always just been a chaos element. Yeah, he's always these elements. He's essentially he's schizophrenic. He's got this crazy demon inside of him that comes out and he doesn't know when or what's going to happen. I also liked Electro.

I appreciated the fact that they didn't just give us that stupid, nebishy nerdy guy. He's got past that where it falls apart from me though, falling alone. If I have to levy any criticism at the movie and doing that rhetorical thing where I'm answering my own question is I was a little bit let down by the fact that we have the Lizard and we have Sandman. But it's so clear, at least in the case of Sandman, they're just reusing old footage of Thomas Hayden Church and just shoehorning it into the picture. That rang a little hollow for me.

What did you think. I don't think we needed sand Man. I thought he had a full and complete story in Spider Man. He doesn't die at the end of that movie. He zooms off to wherever.

Yeah, so that was not necessary to have him in the story. And the same with the Lizard, who doesn't really add anything other than another couple of punches at the end. This really should have been a Octavius and Osbourne and maybe one other villain versus the three Spider Man. Do you need at least as many villains as Spider Man. That's what I'm saying.

So Electro was fine, fucking coc Oh and Norman Osma. There you go, three perfect. I guess they have them all there, Yes, But the thing is Doctor Octopus. By then we knew that he wasn't going to be the villain. They have that bit during the Statue of Liberty scene where it's unclear, but then he does a face I guess you'd call it.

But and by the way, kudos. I thought that the deaging on Dafoe and Melina was actually done pretty well. Didn't notice it at all. Yeah, it makes sense because all of these actors are at least what ten to fifteen years older than we remember them being, or more in some of their cases, So I thought that was a tasteful use of the aging. They do great age stuff just in general, just thinking Of'll Cap at the end of Endgame, or Peggy at the end of or in the middle of Civil War when they get fucking Haley atwell on the in the gurney basically the gurney bed.

True overall, I'd loved No Way Home. I don't know how much that is colored by this communal experience I had in the theater. But what was your opinion of the third Spider Man movie. I liked it less than the other two, but because it's less of a Spider Man movie. It's like saying I will never loves Civil War as much as I love Winter Soldier because Winter Soldier is a Captain America movie and Civil War is an Avengers movie.

With Kapp as the lead character. And this movie feels like not an Avengers necessarily, but it feels like a digest almost like a what if kind of thing. But while maintaining the regular timeline I mentioned, doctor Strange is in this fucking movie. It's his fault that all of this happens. I guess it is his fault, but he never should have agreed to any of this shit.

But it's also Peter's fault for kind of setting these events in motion just in the first place. No, it's not his fault. He's just doing his Spider Man thing. And then Tuck Bryan is, let me change reality for you, kid. No, you're not exactly wrong.

But again, the real villain of this movie is doctor I guess. But and also we neglected to mention that by the end of Far from Home, Spider Man has been exposed by Mysterio. In his last ditch gambit before or he died, he revealed Peter's identity. So everybody knows now at the beginning of The Way Home that Peter is Spider Man and vice versa, so he's forced into hiding. Basically, his life is just getting worse and worse.

Broy the movie here yeah, which was also a delight because it was his first appearance in a movie. I knew all the spoilers except Daredevil was going to be in it, so when the camera panned over to him, was like, holy shit, Yeah it was. That to me was like an appetizer for the reveals to come. But again, I can't be certain if my my love of this movie is just because of in a weird way, that nosalgia I feel for my experiencing it, or if it was a genuinely good movie. I'm not sure, but I guess ultimately it doesn't really matter.

No, because it's where there's a brand new Day coming. I don't know if you know. Brandon, wasn't that a I think that was a sting song, brand New Day, terrible song. It was actually called brand New Day. Let's play it here.

It is now. Boom, so let me let me switch gears a little bit if I may. Tom Holland obviously extremely busy. He's already flat out said in interviews that he's ready to hand the Spider Man mantle off to somebody else. I think he probably feels, maybe rightfully so, that he's getting a little bit old to play Peter Parker at this point, what do you think.

I would say he is right now the age when most people were playing Peter Parker before him, And but I think he's probably now played the character more than anybody and is more movie definitely more films than anybody. He has because let's think about the Civil War, the three Spider Man movies, Infinity War, End Game, so that's what five six movies. Yeah, and now he's got a new one coming out that's more. You're absolutely right, he's now played Even before this new movie, he'd already been that character in more movies than any other Spider Man before him. That's I didn't think of it like that, But that's interesting.

And he's going to be in Doomsday and he's going to be in Secret Wars. He can maybe retire as Peter Parker. Because here's the thing, the kind of the wonderful thing of the one movie that we haven't mentioned yet and there are two of them, is into the Spider verse. Ah, good call. I had a note here, but I neglected to.

Be and I wanted to leave it to the end because guess what, I'm totally fucking cool with Miles Morales. Finally, making his fucking live action debut. Let him take the mantle. We don't need a new Peter Parker at all. I agree with you there.

I was very late to the game with Miles Morales because I was always Peter. But once you were on board, weren't you totally on board. With that kid? It wasn't until because I'm trying to think if I played Spider Man two before or after I saw the Spider Verse movies, it might have been one or the other won me over to Miles if it wasn't the video game, which is a great portrayal of Miles Morales because you actually get to play as him and Peter to a certain degree. But the Spider Verse movies are so good.

But I feel like this third one they've bungled it in the sense that they just keep delaying it. That movie came out three years ago. Now the last one. Is it across the Spider Verse or into I don't know which one is which, And it was such a peak for me. I walked out of that movie going, yeah, this is fucking awesome.

I can't believe how they've set this up because now he's in this alternate universe with this other evil Miles and his uncle is the villain in this and all this, I'm like, I cannot wait for this to come out will And I know part of it is the nature of the type of animation they're doing. It's very time consuming. But at the same time, man going on four or five years, that's all. That's an eternity, it is. But for me, I saw the first movie and then forgot all about it, and then it was like, hey, here's the sequel.

I wasn't as anticipatory of it. I didn't need to get right back into the Spider Verse at the end of that film. Maybe the cliffhanger wasn't as cliffhangery to me. I just I really enjoyed the first one a lot. The second one, to me, topped it in almost every way because you really get to see all.

I just I loved the Spider Spider Man, the Spider Punk, the Indian Spider Man I thought was really cool. I don't know, there's just a lot to recommend in that movie. It was vibrant in a way that none of the other Spider Man movies are. As much as we love them, this was a totally different vibe. Which this one feels like a fucking comic book actually came to life.

Yeah. I was, to be honest, I was dubious at first at the sort of at that direct aping of the comic book with the panels and everything and the words on the screen. But by the second one I was all in. I loved it. I finally got it in a funny way.

But for them to set up that cliffhanger and not deliver for years just I don't know, man, it's just so frustrating to me. I get it. But I think part of that is I know that there were accusations of severe crunch with the artists, which you never want to hear. I hear about that all the time with video games. I never heard of it with filmmakers, where people are having to put in unreasonable hours just to get these movies over the finish line.

And I hate that hangs over this third movie. But it's just it's a very dense picture that I guess requires this much effort. We used to wait three years between Star Wars Movie's Friend. Yeah, but we had nothing else to do. We didn't have the internet.

We just busied ourselves. We forgot about them, and we would talks like our friends. Without all of the distractions that we have these days, it would be even more gnawing at one that the new Star Wars movie isn't coming out yet. But it's not because somehow the availability I could if I wanted to, I could watch any one of these movies in minutes. We live because it streaming.

It's so easy. But back then we talked about eighty two, eighty three, eighty four, eighty one, these movies weren't. You couldn't just go to the video store and watch Return of the Jedi or Empire Strikes Back or what have you. So all you could do was read the books, read the comics, talk to your friends about it, debate over what's going to be in the next picture. I remember talking to somebody about, Oh, what do you think is gonna happen Darth Vader?

Do you think he's really his father? What's going to happen in Jedi? But it somehow absence just made the heart grow fonder in that case, and we just I don't know, we just used our imaginations and we had patients in a way that I don't think because everything we can have everything now because we're in a non demanded society. Maybe it's gone the other way. That's what I'm getting at.

It's everything is now, So of course you want that movie now. Yeah, but I guess that is the point. No, But look, it'll come out when it comes out. And you know how long I've waited to see Captain America back on screen. I didn't Actually, I didn't want him to come back.

It's really lame that they're bringing him back. I'm extremely dubious about a lot of things, and I know we're gonna we're gonna talk about this as we get into Doomsday ultimately, but I don't know. Man, They've got They've really got themselves a tall order, because not only are they bringing back Robert Downey Junior, which I know you and I view with a very jaundiced eye, but they're bringing back Captain America, who had a beautiful ending in Endgame. The perfect ending for that character. Perfect.

Well, he finally gets his rest, he gets his woman, he gets to live his life in peace. How are they going to bring him back? What are they going to do? I have a friend who When it was announced that JJ Abrams was creating direct sequels to the Star Wars movies, said I will never see those movies, and I said why, and he said, because it's going to undo everything. The further adventures of these characters undoes everything that they fought for in those first three movies.

And he was absolutely right. Yeah, so that's why I'm look. I think the Russo brothers have made some of my favorite Marvel movies. But when's their luck going to run out? Who knows?

By the way, can I mention one thing before we kind of move on? Now? Can we? Can we give a particular shout out to JK. Simmons.

Oh yeah, forgiving us the perfect j Jonah Jamison. I don't think he'll ever be topped. No, that is the perfect casting of all time, honestly all time. That's so good that they brought it back for Far from Home. Exactly, And that was our first inkling that we got some timeline shit on the way.

Yeah, some multiple universes, which I agree it got old real quick, But I don't necessarily blame Marvel. I don't think they trafficked too heavy in timelines. It's just that everyone else started doing it immediately. Everything everywhere, all at once is a multiple a multiple universe movie, and it became the biggest movie of all time. After that, it was like, okay, we've seen that and the splash.

The Flash is a multiverse movie, and that's the biggest cautionary tale against it because there was no soul to it. There was no heart there was it was just empty calories. My god, I was thinking about that movie again today, that fucking laughable sequence, all drenched and terrible white out where they've cgied everybody poorly and all they do is just stand there and look. I was watching a YouTube video. I think it's just a bunch.

It's a channel for a bunch of effects artists. And this particular thing came up in my timeline, which was it was like their top ten dead celebrity resurrections in movies, and they ranked them. They they had Peter Cushing and Rogue one they had and one of them was Christopher Reeve and in the Flash or Princess Leah in Rogue one, Prince Princess Leah in that the last Jedi was that the one that you they brought her back and they seed Eater in or was that? The third one was Skywalker okay, which they rated very highly, And I was surprised. Oh they Yeah, there's that scene of her with her and young Luke.

Yeah, that was pretty good. Actually, the Billy Lord was doing the body work for their for and there. But there were they would show a bunch of scenes and there were stuff that I didn't even realize had been cg'd after the fact that I was like, oh, okay, that I guess I get it now. But they talked about the Crow Brandon Lee, the guy in Fast and the Furious, how they brought him back and his brothers did the body work for that and stuff. So anyway, it reminded me of that, the fact that the Flash was so bad.

It was empty fan service. Of course, people are gonna be like, oh, this is Christopher Reeve. Oh I missed him so much, But it was like it served no real purpose except to make us go, oh, that's kind of cool. But it wasn't because it looked like crap. It looked like crap.

It took the wind out of the whole concept. Yeah, he and it was just creepy because he didn't speak. It was clear that they just this was the most they could do to bring this actor back. It was just so disheartening and this was my God, they brought back Michael Keaton as Batman. That should have been cause for excitement, and it was.

But not this story. Yeah, not this story, not this timeline. That's the world that my eighty nine Batman lives in. The fucking Flash Universe. Get the fuck out of air not good anyway, Batman returns immediately.

So all of this is to say that I think you and I both are looking at Doomsday with a very very cautiously, very trepidaciously because who knows. It could be really good or it could be really not so good. But until then, we're gonna get fucking brand new day. And we finally get the Scorpion on screen. Yah.

I know it's been waiting for that, son of a bitch. Yeah, but hopefully I see. The thing is I suspect it's only going to be at an introductory fight. I don't know how much we're gonna get of the Scorpion. I think it's going to be pretty quick.

I think we're gonna get a fight at the beginning, and then I got a fight in the middle when the main villain is controlling everybody. I don't know who the main villain is yet. By the way, we know it's Sadie Sink, but we don't know who she's playing, is what you're saying? Right, Wait, we know it's Sadie sinc. Well, pretty sure that she's the one who's causing all of this to happen.

We just don't know any of that. Well, I'm sorry, you spoiler, motherfucker. I guess I'm not as immune to spoilers as The prevailing theory is that, or at least for a while, is that she was going to be playing Geen Gray, which is why she can do all this. Such would Jean Gray be fucking with Spider Man? I don't know.

I'm not the writer. Oh is it going to be an auto which this is gonna be like an incourasion? It probably won't, but in this case, it's a little fun. To is a variant? Did you hear that they're they're thinking of Adam Driver as MAGNETA really yeah?

And then as somebody as Professor X top Patrick Wilson as Professor X. Those are the front runners for those characters. You know what was interesting, and this is slightly off topic. I don't know if I told you I was watching a it was a live it was at a convention. It was a live podcast professionally recorded for which was refreshing.

It's usually these things are like someone on a phone recording. It was a It was to do with the Matrix, and it was Laurence fishburn and Joey Joe Paneleiano getting interviewed by this guy about the matrix and related things. And what was interesting was at some point, remember if he was just fantasy casting, but Lawrence Fishburne basically said he'd love to be Professor X, And I was like, pretty fucking interesting. It never would have occurred to me. But you know what he if anyone could pull it off a news spin on the character, man, he could do it.

Too old now he's too old, he could still I think he could. He could. He doesn't have to be young young. I think they could put a spin on the character and make it work despite his age. Yeah, but if they're casting everybody young, then.

Who knows he could be an older wise. Clearly, if they're looking at Patrick Wilson, they're looking for someone in their forties and fifties and not sixties and seventies. Oh, it's just going to be another bald white guy. I mean, no, wrong. I think they're not going to get away from that.

But boy, what a great what if? Can you know who they should cast? Jonathan Majors? What could go wrong? Right?

Yeah, that'd be great. I think we both can agree that, next to maybe Captain America. I think these have been some of the most satisfying solo films of the MCU. Now some of the least satisfying films of the MCU. We're gonna be covering next time because we're gonna be covering the Midnight Suns.

We're gonna be covering Marvel's horror characters and their appearances on the screen, including ghost Rider two movies, including Fucking the Other Guy there are. We gonna be doing things like Werewolf by Night with the Man Thing and all that. You're goddamned right, we are, sir. I'm talking about the Midnight Suns. There you go.

There's some highs there, some lows, but it'll be fun. Oh, there are a lot of highs actually, and we get we'll get to them until next time. Until that next onon Doomfest HB. Where can people find you if they're looking for you? I co host the Night Mister Walters Taxi podcast with my best friend here, Father Malone.

I also host the Noise Junkies music podcast, and I have a band camp site hpmusicplace dot bandcamp dot com. As for me, you're listening to it, it's midnight viewing. Every Monday, it's either a fest or an anthology. Every Friday, it's Father Malone's weekly round up, unless I'm too lazy that week, in which case I'll broadcast something from another show, like our Vault seven two show, our Fallout podcast that's only a Patreon This Friday, you're gonna have a or no this past Friday, actually put out a fucking an episode of that. If you want to come over to the Patreon channel, We've got a lot of shows over there that aren't available regularly.

I'm tired. I'll talk to you all later. We're on our way out for HB. I'm Father Malone. Try to enjoy the daylight.

It's a pretty sad day at the funeral. Norman Osborne has bitten the dust. And I heard Harry said he wants Spider Man did Ah, but his buddy Pete he can trust. Oh Damn Jay is all hot for Peta now, Peter, he just shuts her down. Mary Jane, don't you cry.

You can give it a try again when the. Sequel comes around. Oh lie a lot, did he die? The lad did he die? An sling Us the web?

You're the spider. Man, sling Us a web tonight as we all Shore could use us a hero. Now we think that you'll do all right.