PEL Presents PMP#229: What's Spider-Man Up To?

Discussing the new Spider-Man movie

0:00This is Pretty Much Pop, a culture podcast. We used to be your favorite podcast. You listen to us all the time. I promise you just don't remember. Today, we're getting ourselves up to date with Spider-Man franchise in light of the new one, a brand new day. This is Mark Linsenmeyer, equally unsuccessful at chemical or biological web extrusion. This is your friendly night with Adele Baker. I'm Sarah Lynn Brecken. With a great podcast

0:30comes great responsibility. This is Lawrence Ware, and I thought that being Spider-Man sounded really cool until I realized that it basically means I'm the neighborhood's unpaid security guard. Do you have a take? Okay, so a take on the new movies. Why not? That's what's sweeping the world right now. It's the reason we're doing another Spider-Man episode. There was a Spider-Man episode on this podcast some time ago, but there have been two in this series since then, plus an animated one, plus I used the opportunity to sort of think about the whole Sony angle on this. I mean, I'm not going to get into the business side of it unless you guys want

1:03me to get into the business side of it. Full disclosure, I'm quite friendly with the Sony people because they've invited me to screenings for the very first animated Spider-Man film. They were very kind because my son still is a huge Spider-Man fan, so they gave me advanced screening, brought me to the premiere, all that kind of stuff. So like, full disclosure, I have a very friendly relationship with those people. But that doesn't keep me from being critical of the films. Now, this most recent film, I was really worried about it because for me, any superhero film is really dependent on the

1:36villain for it to work. I was really worried about this film because I didn't know who the villain was going to be. Having seen it, I'm not going to spoil it yet, but having seen it, my concerns were validated because I don't think the villain is great because of the baggage that I know that comes along with this particular villain. But the film itself, I thought was really good. It was outside of the villain issue. I thought it was the most human Spider-Man film live action. I thought that the acting was quite good. I thought it did a really good job of kind of really honing in on the

2:06repercussions of what happened at the end of the last film. So this is probably my second favorite live action Spider-Man film behind Spider-Man 2. Like I really enjoyed it a great deal. I think it's definitely the best of the Tom Holland ones. So I have some criticisms. I think that the villain doesn't quite work, although I thought it was cool, but I really enjoyed the film on a human level. Like I got teary-eyed at many points of the film with his relationship with MJ and his relationship

2:37with Ned and seeing the repercussions and seeing how lonely he was, even though he wasn't willing to admit that he was lonely for a bit there. So I really enjoyed the film, but I have

Normie perspective on superhero films

2:46criticisms. I think we're all kind of familiar with how much I watch and pay attention to superhero stuff. So I'm truly kind of the normie out of the four of us, I'm guessing. I had seen the previous Spider-Man with Tom Holland only because the entire world was going to see it. I had not seen the previous two Tom Holland ones. I just finished the first one and that was cute. A lot of the MC universe stuff, I just find confusing and baffling sometimes. And I don't understand.

3:22So the Punisher coming in was not a positive thing. You had no idea who this was and didn't care. I didn't know who that guy was. I didn't know. It was the actor first. I was like, oh yeah, he's from the Odyssey and the bear. I know that guy. He's from The Walking Dead too. I mean, it was a bear crossover. We'll spoil that much. I mean, a little bit short. Mikey didn't really die. He just went underground and became a vigilante and moved to New York. A vigilante who kills people for fun. A lot of the references and Easter eggs and stuff completely go over my head. My mind is not

3:54blown by probably most of the things that the people who are really into this stuff, their minds are blown. However, I enjoyed this film. I went to see it with my daughter. And we had a really good time. I agree with Lawrence. I thought the performances were great. My favorite parts, I think, of this particular movie and also the first one too was seeing his relationship with Ned and MJ. But he and Ned, that chemistry that they have is just so fun to watch.

4:25And I think for movies like this, what I think what kind of eludes me is they're superheroes. They can't really die. They're hard to relate to. And what I really like is in this movie, what felt like the biggest stakes were the stakes that were with his humans at home. And that's what really stuck with me. I really, really loved this movie. And I went in with, I was ready to be a real refusenik on it because it's the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man movie. And we know that everyone is sick of

5:00Marvel films. Everyone is sick of superheroes. We just had, you know, a Superman movie, which was really good, but, you know, very quickly left the popular conversation. I knew that people liked this movie, but I wasn't quite ready to believe it, but I had such a good time with it. And I think this movie is incredibly impressive. Firstly, because of the effort and the energy involved. Lawrence is absolutely right. The villain is not like, when I think probably the same as Lawrence, when I think of a great Spider-Man film, I default to the first two Sam Raimi movies. And the villains are the

5:34centerpieces of those movies. And the problem with, one of the problems with the Andrew Garfield series of Spider-Man is that they kept trying to have that formula, but they'd already run out of all the best Spider-Man villains. So you end up having to make the rhino or the lizard guy super exciting, and they're just not. So this movie does not try and do that. As Sarah said, and this is my favorite thing about it, it brings the stakes down to a really, really personal level. This is a Spider-Man movie that is all about Spider-Man. And this is why I was thinking about Superman, because the

6:07Superman movie we just had was barely about Superman at all. This Spider-Man movie is the fourth in a series of Spider-Man movies. And we are learning like new stuff about Spider-Man as a character. It is all about Spider-Man doing Spider-Man things. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is this tendency towards lily gilding. You've got these incredible characters who have survived for decades at this point. But Marvel movies, often they, you know, they default to having universe ending stakes. This is something we've talked about a lot.

6:38They default to having universe ending stakes because for some reason they don't trust us to be interested in these characters that we've been interested in for decades. Spider-Man Brand New Day is all about Spider-Man. It trusts you to be interested in Spider-Man, is confident enough to tell a story just about Spider-Man and Peter Parker. All of the other characters are like peripheral at best. They're all really, really good and serve a really cool story. But that story is all about Spider-Man. And I love it for that. I think it's incredibly confident, pulls it off. The movie itself is paced brilliantly. The acting, I think everyone

7:12turns in a great performance. Something that's true about every single series of Spider-Man films is that they all feature the best talent available at the time. And this movie is no exception. I hope Sadie Sink plays Jean Grey for years and years and years to come. Whoa, spoiler, spoiler. Is it spoiler that she's in it? Yeah, it's a spoiler. It's a spoiler now. Okay, there you go. There's your one spoiler. So I'll back away before I do anything else. But I love it. Not perfect. And I will talk about many of the reasons why, but a really terrific movie,

Theater experience and 3D format

7:44I thought.

Theater experience and 3D format

7:45So we're going into this. I did not review the other three movies. In fact, until you just reminded me, I was thinking there were only two of them. So that's how much we did on this podcast. It was after the first of those four movies came out. That's when we did it. And I think that's when the first Spider-Verse one had also just come out at that point. So that's been a long freaking series. I was really hoping that the third one would be out by the time we were talking about Spider-Man again. I just watched the second one two days ago because I hadn't gotten around it because I was waiting because I knew it ended in a cliffhanger. But to this movie,

8:17I really enjoyed it. And I watched it in the theater in 3D. And was it going to make me queasy? What was that like? It was wonderful. It did not make me queasy at all. And I didn't have clearly in mind when I got the tickets like, oh, because you're going to be swinging from building to building and you're going to have this vertigo. This is exactly the kind of movie you want to see in 3D. Did you see it in IMAX, Lawrence, or anybody? No, I don't think it's in IMAX yet because the Odyssey still owns the screen. Oh, okay. I mean, I was reading on the internet, like, should I see it in IMAX or 3D or something?

8:52You know, actually there were, no, there were IMAX Spider-Man showings near me. And supposedly some of the action scenes, they broadened it. So I guess the, you know, the screen just gets longer for parts of it. It's like that, there was one Harry Potter movie where like part of it was in 3D and like, okay, get your glasses. But I saw that in the IMAX theater, I recall. And part of what they were saying per our last discussion, the IMAX gives you louder sound. Like I don't want louder sound. I want a comfortable. So I saw the regular screen, but 3D and it was just a nice,

9:22you know, very well balanced. Even though I don't, it's the same theater that I don't generally like the way that they run things. And the previews were pounding my ears. The actual movie was fine. So I recommend the, you know, while it's in the theaters, if you haven't seen it yet, yeah, check out the 3D thing. I feel like the last one before this, you know, which brought in all the other, no way home. Yeah. All the other Spider-Men from the other series is was gimmicky. Hard disagree. We're playing with this multiverse thing and I'm surprised that I liked it as much as I did,

9:55right? Because it seems totally cheesy. How long can you milk this at the end of the last movie? You had to forget me. And now I'm, you know, we're, uh, I'm trying to think of other examples that we've seen in film where like there's a, and Farscape, deep spoiler. There's one of the main character clones for a while. And one of the clones has a romantic relationship with the lead and then dies. Will anyone listening to this know what the hell Farscape is? Yeah. I don't know why Farscape's the most relatable reference that you can... The point is, you know, maybe the notebook, I don't know. I don't freaking remember. I don't

10:28have them ready to mind, but like you're dealing with someone who you love, but who doesn't remember, does not remember all the wonderful experiences you had together. That's a, that's a, you know, a trope that I've seen before, but for some reason it worked well enough here. And we've also seen in movies before the, I can speak out of many bodies, right? We just saw that in Pluribus and I fall for it every time. I think it's the creepiest effect where somebody continues somebody else's sentence. Do you have any other movies come to mind? I know we've seen this multiple

11:00other times where there's some otherworldly force or a ghost or whatever shit that's like speaking through. So, so you don't even have to have like, the villain is not a particular actor. It's just like the, the Borg, whoever the... I mean, Invasion of Body Snatcher comes to mind, but that doesn't exactly kind of capture what is going on. It's not body jumping, right? Pluribus is not body jumping either, but yeah. Yeah. Am I the only comic book person here? I mean, because this is a straight up comic book storytelling. Like this is what they do in comics. I think that it was just translated to the screen very well. Like this is the stuff that they do

11:34in comics. And I'm really kind of impressed that Tom Holland is the longest running Spider-Man because typically like Tobey Maguire got three movies, Andrew Garfield got two. Although I think Andrew Garfield was a really good Spider-Man. It's just the films around him weren't very good. This is the longest running one. And I'm really impressed with it because going to something that Al said, the previous Spider-Man movies in this series have kind of not been about Spider-Man, like not really because the Spider-Man that I grew up on and grew up reading, it was a very local

12:05thing. It was about his neighborhood. It was about what he was going through. How am I going to pay my bills? It was a very, and the previous Spider-Man films, like he had a benefactor in the name of Tony Stark who was able to kind of give him this cool spider suit and he didn't have to worry about the things. And this is the first film I think in this series where it's very boiled down to the neighborhood, right? But as Black Widow said, you're dealing with small potatoes. We deal with big things. And that is Spider-Man's, that's what he does. He deals with the neighborhood stuff. And so

12:40this is the first film where he's not wearing this cybernetic uniform. He's not dealing with world ending issues. He's not over in Paris dealing with some super duper monstrosity that can kind of destroy the city. He is dealing with something in his neighborhood and it's very local and it's not super big. And that is where Spider-Man is at his best. And I think that this movie does a really good job of kind of bringing that to the forefront and bringing out what Spider-Man is really all about because yeah, the villains are kind of important, but what's also important is how am I going to pay my

13:16bills? You know, can I get a good shot of Spider-Man so I can have a little bit more money? That's what I really kind of love about the Spider-Man character. And this film is the first one in this series that does it very well. Now, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man does it very well as well, but this one does a really good job. It had been seen before is why I think we... The opening sequence of him doing his job as Spider-Man I thought was so much fun. I thought it was fascinating. And it was him being your neighborhood Spider-Man. You know, he was stopping robberies. He was, you know, he was doing all of the things

13:51that were so localized and in his city of New York. And I just found that whole setup so satisfying because it shows him he's now kind of at the peak of his powers. He knows, especially since watching the first one where he's really kind of getting to know himself and his powers and how to work the suit and all of that kind of stuff. And he was kind of this gee whiz kid. And to see that jump into becoming a young adult and really kind of understanding his role. But at the same time,

14:26he feels very, very hollow. And I felt that that was an excellent setup for what was to come.

Jean Grey as the villain

14:34Let's talk more about the villain here. Spoiler alert. If you've been on the internet, listen, this movie has made so much money. I'm sure you've probably seen the movie, but nevertheless, just be aware we're about to spoil the film. Right. So yes, this running up to the X-Men, which I'm excited about. And I agree with Al that this is a great casting choice and an interesting start for this character who is not presented in the comics as having a particularly wrenching backstory that I recall. It's not like Cyclops, where like the first time he does anything is like things coming from his eyes, killing people,

15:08rogue, right? Killing her boyfriend or whatever. And only in X-Men three, do we get the written in backstory for this character that you were completely out of control until Professor X came along and, and did something, you know, so clearly we're going to approach that in a different way. Is a McAvoy going to be Professor X again, or do we have any idea at this point? He's definitely not going to be Professor X. Okay. I mean, there's a lot of rumors out there about who's going to be what. Nothing's really been confirmed, but it's clear that Sadie Sink is going to be Jean Grey. So listeners,

15:43you know, at this point, probably because you've seen the movie, because the movie right now is sitting at $1.7 billion, right? It's already made a billion plus 700 million. Like it's, it's going to be a phenomenon. Maybe the highest movie of all time. We'll see. Anyway, but the bottom line is that Jean Grey is the villain and that Jean Grey is like early in her powers because she is a, okay, Sarah, stick with me because I'm going to start being nerdy here. She is an Omega level telepath, but she also has the ability to telekinesis, but she's kind of not as strong in her telekinesis as she is with her telepath. Now she is very strong in telepathy here,

16:20although she hasn't really reached her zenith yet. Although she discovers her ability to do telekinesis here, it's kind of yada yada. But the bottom line is that she's the villain and she's doing all this bad stuff because she has like this kind of trauma at the core of her character, which is something that I was not prepared for. I don't know, as Marcus said, I don't know any story about Jean Grey. It kind of gets into that part. Like I know that in the comics, she had a sister, but like, I've never seen her have that kind of backstory in the comics. And I'm a hardcore,

16:53like X-Men is how I got into comics. So I'm a hardcore X-Men reader and I don't know anything about that. Like Mark, did you know anything about that? Al, have you seen anything like that from Jean Grey before? No, I know Al's not a super comics guy in this area or did you know anything about this? No, I mean, I used to, so Spider-Man and X-Men were the first comics that I read when I was a kid and that was around the whole Dark Phoenix saga when that was in print. So Jean Grey is obviously a huge character. I don't remember her backstory other than, was she one of those X-Men

17:24who swung between the Magneto team and the X-Men team? I don't think so. I think she was busy swinging between Wolverine and Cyclops. Yes. No, that's right. That was it. You know, fighting over her. What I really loved about this take on Jean Grey is like, firstly, that she is again, starting from, starting small. In the previous X-Men movies, they had to introduce her as this already super powered telepath, which made it a little bit forced. But here they're taking the time to introduce her as a threat to Spider-Man, but not a threat to the world yet. And it gives

17:59them somewhere to go. And they're also setting her up in the Magneto role, which is super interesting to me. I kind of hope, like, obviously we're going to get X-Men again. So, you know, we kind of expect to have the Charles Xavier and Magneto two-hander, but it would be interesting to have other characters from the canon kind of play those roles. We've seen it twice over now. And the take on Jean Grey, I think, is a really promising start because it suggests that, you know, we're not going to see the same thing over and over again. Some Googling while you're talking. Yes, Sarah Grey

18:30appeared in the comics. And yes, at some point she got some powers. She was, became an Atlantean brief, you know, whatever, any, but the comics are so long running, anything that could happen to any character that is ever brought up, even if they're like introduced as dead, you know, they're going to show up at some point, given that it's, you know, 50 plus years of multiple authors, five different series at a time sometimes. So not surprising. I see this as sort of an interesting

Reviewing other Sony spinoffs

18:57inverse to the Sony thing. So the, the other thing, rather than rewatch these movies, I took the opportunity to like, see what Sony, you know, this thing that now it's not doing anymore. So I watched Madam Web. I watched Morbius. Oh my gosh, you went to the worst stuff. I watched Craven. Those were the three movies apart from the three Venom films, which I coincidentally had watched Venom three pretty recently, just, you know, because I noticed that it was on Netflix. I'm like, well, I watched the other two. I might as well finish this off. I mean, Tom Hardy is amazing. So like Venom itself,

19:27is fine is, is I think a worthy watch. Because of Tom Hardy. Yeah. Because of Tom Hardy. And really all the, all the, the others have good actors in them. I mean, Matt Smith as the bad guy in Morbius, like, you know, come on, it's Matt Smith, but it has good pieces, but the movies are bad. Yeah. Right. Sony owns the rights to the Spider-Man and Spider-Man's villains. I guess they can use them. And so instead of just having Spider-Man fight various villains, let's have these standalone things about the villains, but we need to make them all heroes or anti-heroes or something like that. So in, in this, we're going to have somebody who is a good guy, main Marvel

20:02character, be the villain. We're not even going to bother. Yes. We have Scorpion in there for a little while, but we're not even going to bother, you know, going into that deep well of Spider-Man foes because Sony's kind of already debased them enough. We're just going to do something that connects more directly to what we want to do as a central Marvel. I thought that was good. Yeah. One of the reasons I was nervous about this movie before seeing it was that the posters that I saw on the buses in Sheffield all very prominently featured Scorpion. And I was like, God, is this really going to be a movie where Scorpion is the villain? You can't, you can't drag a whole movie

20:35out of this guy. But the film, I think, gives him exactly the right amount of depth, which is to say not at all. He gets about five minutes on screen, which is perfect. I think the movie does a good job of kind of misdirecting us because the marketing had me thinking that the hand was going to be the main villain. And there is certainly the hand there, but it really did a good job of misdirecting me. So it sounds like in London or wherever you are, I know you're not in London, but anyway, over in the UK, they were kind of featuring Scorpion. I wonder if they were kind of just doing that to throw people off the scent because walking into the film, I had no

21:08idea whatsoever that Jean Grey was going to be the villain. Now I had a strong suspicion she was going to be in the film, but I did not see, anticipate seeing her as the villain because she's never really played that role. Like that's never been her function in the X-Men. She's always been a relative, honestly, a rather bland character. And this is the first time, but I do think this is a wonderful time to kind of back up and say that comic book writing is a skill. It really is. And there is storytelling mechanisms in comic writing that should be respected. And I think that the filmmakers kind

21:44of understand that and try to bring that kind of essence to the film and try to play with the characters a little bit. So they're not, because in comics, man, they're running so long. You have to do all kinds of variations on characters. So you're not tied to any kind of one kind of character and the filmmakers kind of understand it. And that's the reason why they have the liberty and feel comfortable doing this with Jean Grey. And I kind of respected it, even though I didn't quite love it, but I respected it more than I loved it. I have to say my daughter and I were sitting next to three middle school boys and hearing them respond to some of the things that I didn't really

22:19understand in the movie or were going over my head was an absolute delight. And when Jean Grey flashed across the screen for the first time, they could not hold their shit together. They were absolutely losing their minds. And I just thought that is great writing right there because I'm pulled in and I don't know who Jean Grey is from a hole in the wall, but these boys clearly did. And that was for them. They knew that they were going to have an audience full of 12 year old boys

22:54and girls and non-binaries who are going to understand exactly what that reference is and how excited they were going to be about it. I thought the same thing about Punisher because I'm familiar with the Punisher, but I've never watched the shows or read his comics. And I thought it was really, really smart how he was used in the movie as just very legible comic relief. He was set up very clearly as exactly the competing vigilante, Spider-Man frenemy, and he serves really useful functions throughout the film. All of the fan service was structural. Everything that I noticed that was

23:28cool because I knew about it was also serving an important point in the film. Even though a lot of it clearly was fan service and just what you wanted to see in a Spider-Man movie, like Mark, you mentioned that you saw it in 3D, even 2D, the web-slinging scenes, the best web-slinging scenes that I've seen in a Spider-Man movie. The way that the camera is moving, the fight choreography is fantastic. It was all clear. You could actually see it. Yeah. Crystal clear. Christopher Nolan, take notes. And, you know, because we were slightly mean about Tom.

23:59Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Shots fired. Just because we were saying that the Odyssey was a bit dark, but also nice to be able to say that Tom Holland, when, you know, we didn't have many lovely things to say about his performance in the Odyssey, absolutely knocked it out of the park. Sucking. The man can act. The man can act. Yeah, yeah. The man can really act. And the most impressive thing, I think, he clearly really cares still about these movies. Yeah, he does. That's just really lovely. Mm-hmm. I actually liked also the fact that they stuck to the Peter Parker has been forgotten

24:30bit. They could have done something, I've seen this before, where they'll have some sort of cliffhanger or whatever at the end, and how are they going to deal with that in the next installment? I've seen the mini soap operas. I've seen the mini soap operas through my day. 10 minutes into the film, they figure out a way to have everybody remember who he is again, and they didn't. I was so happy that they stuck to that. And even when MJ finds his letter, she realizes that he's been pining for her all this time and that they had a

25:02relationship. They could have tied that up into a nice little bow, but no. She had to say, and she was great, by the way. Mm-hmm. She had to say to her real-life husband that she didn't love him. She did not know him. And I thought, that is a heartbreaker. I know. When I was watching that scene, I was like, oh, Tom doesn't have to act very hard in this if his little wife is just standing there saying, I don't know who you are, really. That's me. Yeah. This is great. Clearly, I'm out of the loop. I did not know they were married in real life. I did not know.

25:35Really?

25:37Wow. Okay. Wait, are you serious, Mark? So, there you go. Get the fuck out of here. Are you serious? It is. Holy crap. They're one of the biggest couples in the world, man. I can't believe you know this. Just don't follow this shit, I guess. I don't know. I was also really impressed that they gave MJ that space to have the actual reasonable human reaction to that. And then there was that beautiful scene where he's like, can you take me home? And he's swinging her home and clearly processing these very real feelings. It was great. I'm going to lay that at the feet of the director because Dustin Daniel Cretton, yeah, he did

26:10Shang-Chi, but he got started with small emotional films, like Short Term 12 and Just Mercy. He made really deeply emotional films before he got pulled into the Marvel kind of universe. And so those emotional beats very much resonate with the kind of stuff that he's been doing for many, many years. Telling small stories, making sure that the characters have a great deal of emotional depth. Like he did a wonderful job. Now, yeah, he did the action parts well, but it's clear that

26:45what he's really interested in are the emotional beats of the characters. And so I think that's the part of the reason why those kind of moments shined so much because he is a director who knows how to bring that kind of emotion to the screen. Like those films, you go back and watch those, it's all about emotions. It's all about connection. It's all about, you know, the interpersonal relationship with these people. And he brought it to the forefront brilliantly.

Comparing live action and animated versions

27:07Do we feel like this series of films is in dialogue with the animated series that's going on at the same time? The animated movies are also amazing. They're my favorite Spider-Man films. Yeah, they're really good. It's incredible that a franchise can have two of its best iterations going on in parallel. I rewatched the Spider-Verse movies and I didn't like them as much this time as well. The second one, especially, I didn't like it as much this time because I think I was hungering more for what the new movie gave me, which is the small contained story. And by definition, like across the Spider-Verse

27:42is, you know, it's huge. Integral. Yeah. And that's great because it's doing a completely different thing. Like the Spider-Verse movies are all about anyone can be Spider-Man. The day movies, I guess, home day, the Tom Holland movies are more about like this particular Spider-Man. But I absolutely love Miles Morales. I'm really glad that he's taken off. I remember when Miles Morales was first published in the comics and there was this obviously huge, like, is he, is he going to stick? Because people have tried, they've tried to do a non-Peter Parker Spider-Man before and it's always, you know,

28:15it's always had to go away again. But Miles has stuck around and is amazing and has amazing movies. So I absolutely love those Lord Miller films. But I'm also really glad that there's room again for a much more personal and grounded, intimate Spider-Man, which is why I love the Sam Raimi movies as much as everything else. Yeah. I mean, I feel like those movies are more in dialogue with the MCU movies because I want to say the MCU movies came first. And part of the reason why the Miles Morales films really

28:47resonate with me so much is because he's a black Spider-Man, but he's a black Spider-Man that is like legitimately black. Like there's oftentimes in the history of movies, there've been characters that were black, but not really. Like, like they're black in their, in their color, but they don't have like a connection to the black community. They don't have a connection, you know, in a significant way. And I'm thinking more like movies in the eighties and the nineties. Is it black writer director? That is really the big difference, right? If you have Ryan Coogler writing it, then it's going to be.

29:19Yeah. But Ryan Coogler is not involved in the cross Spider-Man movies. Sure. First movies, but, but nevertheless, like they bring into the writing room, people of diverse backgrounds to make sure that they kind of present that kind of character on screen. And so when I watched that film, yeah, there's Spider-Man stuff and the Spider-Man stuff is really good. And the animation style is brilliant. And I think it's really well done. But what really resonates with me is the fact that like his relationship with his parents and his relationship with his, with his community, that's what really resonates with me with those films. And they get

29:51that so bright that I kind of forgive the, like, because in the second film, it gets really cosmic and there's millions of Spider-Men and there's all this intergalactic stuff. And I kind of don't like that in my Spider-Man films, but I forgive it because it does such a good job of really bringing the emotions to the foreground. And so, yeah, I mean, those films are just amazing. I mean, I'm raising black sons right now and I'm just happy to have a superhero that they can relate to, man. I grew up in a time where I didn't have any superhero to relate to. I

30:23had Batman and I had Spider-Man and yeah, I had X-Men, but most of those guys were white and they didn't come from my community. And my sons now have Black Panther and they have Miles Morales. And that's just, that is significant for black kids. And I cannot tell you how big those movies are in the black community. Like they are huge because they see themselves in those characters and they see themselves represented authentically. And I think that's really amazing and really beautiful. Right. The reason that we have this whole multiverse thing is because of business considerations and

30:56marketing considerations. And the, you know, the fact that these movies get rebooted, that we had the multiple Spider-Men. It didn't make any sense at the time that Andrew Garfield, like that we're going to have another origin story. Like I was mad when that first spectacular Spider-Man came out because like, why do we need amazing Spider-Man, amazing Spider-Man? Why do we need this rebooted with a different actor? Just continue it or something. And you know, Spider-Man is supposed to be a teenager and that's a, so this is sort of related a little bit. I want

31:27to ask. I mean, come on, there's been Spider-Man stories where he was adult and he was older. Like there's been stories where he was older, man. Yeah. The noir. Well, Spider-Noir is a whole different thing. Yes. We should definitely talk about that. You know, in cartoons in particular, like, right, the Simpsons don't age and that is the way. So even the comics themselves have had a hard time. Like, how do we deal with the fact that people get older and we want to keep presenting these things 20, 30 years later. And then when you get into movies,

31:59it gets even worse because real human beings age. And so you very, at the very least have to recast. We talked about, we talked about the Superman issue, right? Superman should not look older. So let's keep replacing Superman and rebooting Superman and all this kind of stuff. In the Miles Morales ones, when they would introduce a different iteration of Spider-Man, they would show a comic book cover like that. This represents earth five to five is this comics because that is kind of, that's how not seriously we should take this multiverse stuff. It's like,

32:32it's just people putting out different books. It's like the star Wars legends or the star, you know, it's okay to have these multiple iterations. It's just different creators producing things at different times. And so the way that they treated that in the no way home of, let's bring the guys from the other movies. I almost felt like there should have been even a more direct connection. The one thing that they did in the second Spider-Verse movie is they had a couple of live action scenes. Like he peeks into an alternate world and like, or here's live action Donald Glover for some reason, just sitting there in the middle of the animated stuff. Like that was a

33:05hilarious, were there any direct connections? Was like the Asian lady that he peeks at in one of these things like directly from one of the other Spider-Man movies? Am I missing something here? Yeah, I didn't. I thought that that was an Easter egg I was supposed to get, but I didn't. That is an Easter egg. I don't remember what the Easter egg is. Donald Glover was like really rumored for a very long time to be Miles Morales in the live action movies. So that's the reason why you peeked in and see Donald Glover. That Asian lady, I forgot. It's an Easter egg. I don't remember what the Easter egg was. If you'd asked me a couple of years ago, I didn't know what it was, but yeah.

33:37Yeah. So how do we feel about the resolution of the, or the continuing dealing with the multiverse stuff? We got to finish the job. We got to bring in the X-Men to the new universe. We got to have the Fantastic Four travel across. Well, you know, something big is going to happen with this. Is it Secret Wars that's going to patch them together? Is that, or? I'm kind of over the multiverse thing. And one of the reasons why I didn't like Across the Spider-Verse nearly as much on reviewing it is it commits this like interesting sort of sin in storytelling, which is it takes like, what is, as you say, a kind of fictional metaphysical

34:10fact that has to be there because of the commercial realities of IP and makes the story about that. Like instead of just telling the story, we incorporate the multiverse into the story. Okay. It's a fun way of telling, of doing like a space, weird space opera movie and having a lot of different spider people flying around. But what effects of that is it slightly cheapens the story of any individual like spider person. One of the things I was thinking about when I was rewatching Across the Spider-Verse is that it kind of feels like the message of that story is that

34:42Peter Parker's pain is not important or is less important than it was before we saw that story because Miles' arc is, I don't have to have that pain to be Spider-Man. But Peter Parker did have to have that pain to be Spider-Man. And the movie kind of leaves that dangling. So it's a difficult game to play when you start taking the multiverse stuff like very seriously because you expand the possibilities, of course, but you also kind of cheapen the stories that you've already told because you're like, well, if you don't like my Spider-Man, I have others. I don't know.

35:15It is a little goofy that the necessary deaths like Uncle Ben or something equivalent is necessary to get Spider-Man going. Do you need Gwen Stacy's dad to die? Is that a necessary? That's a thing that happened in the comics. But I didn't remember that. I remember Gwen Stacy dying in the comics, but not Gwen Stacy's dad. So like, you know, this is a bedrock, all Spideys in... I'm just quibbling with, you know, one of the... I mean, there just has to be a tragedy, right? So really what they're doing is making like weird metaphysics out of basic character arcs. So like, yeah,

35:46there needs to be an inciting incident. Sorry, if you wanted to be Spider-Man without having any character arc. I mean, I thought it was fine. I mean, I don't know if it cheapens it. I just thought it expands it and it makes room for there to be different Spider-Men and different kind of things. So it doesn't have to be an Uncle Ben. It could be any number of different kinds of things. And so I was okay with it. I didn't have as many quibbles, but again, I was kind of wrapped up into the animation and watching my son enjoy it so much. So maybe I wasn't thinking as critically as I could have been. And the music and the textures is just so well

36:18presented. It's all beautiful. Yeah. I mean, it's a quibble. I think it's a quibble that is worth having. It doesn't undermine the movie for me at all. Honestly, what I need to see, and it's really hard for me to think very much about that film yet, because I need to see the third one. I need to see how they bring it to a close. Once they bring it to a close, then I'll be able to kind of think a little bit more critically about it. But I just, I'm not there yet. I need to see the last one. Sarah's like not saying anything. Sarah, Sarah, she is lost guys.

36:49Sarah, did I get you to watch a little bit of Spider Noir based on- I watched the first episode. I did. Yeah. I also watched only the first episode. So maybe-

Evaluating the Spider Noir series

37:00I watched the entire series. Did you like it, Sarah? I did not. I didn't like it either. I thought it was really stupid. But, you know, Nicolas Cage is always fun, but I thought everything around Nicolas Cage was lame. I didn't like it because I thought it was very much the Nicolas Cage show, and Nicolas Cage knew it was the Nicolas Cage show, and he wasn't trying very hard, and I didn't like it. I enjoyed it because I like noirs. So, you know, I just thought it was an interesting

37:31spin on noir, bringing superhero. Now, is it great? No. But was it fun? Yes. I enjoyed the fact you watched it in black and white and in color. I thought the color looked vibrant. I thought the black and white, the textures of the film and the cinematography of the show, rather, was really good. And so I'm a huge noir person. Like, I teach noir in my class. And so them playing with the tropes of noir and bringing it in conversation with superheroes, I enjoyed that. But that was more of a intellectual enjoyment than an actual visceral enjoyment of the show.

38:03So, in the first Spider-Verse movie, the spider noir apparently is not the same character, but Nicolas Cage was doing the voice of that, was introduced. That's so confusing. And so now that just gave them the idea of, hey, Nicolas Cage, will you do this? Like, even though he's really kind of too old, frankly, to be doing this part. And it's part of the joke of the show is that he's old. Yes. I only watched the black and white. I started watching the color and it seemed wrong. And it did seem like after the first episode, which I watched with my wife and she didn't want to see any further, that it was kind of a pointless exercise. I, in light of this

38:36episode, I powered through and I think the season ended in a kind of a satisfying way. I like the electro. I liked just the way that they did the effects as if they only had the technology available to the Wizard of Oz, right? You know, the 1930s movie, very expensive for that time. But like the Sandman is mostly just going to have some makeup on his face that makes him look like he's a little sandy for most of the time. I warmed to it. I think if you kept going, you would get the idea. But a lot of it, I felt like it was self-indulgent on someone's part.

39:10Yeah, it was silly. It was self-indulgent. If you love film and you love noir films, it plays with those tropes enough to kind of keep you going. It doesn't need a second season. It was a nice experiment. It's a curiosity. It's very interesting. I like what they did with it. I'm happy they did it. It was fun. It's silly. They don't need to continue it. But I don't begrudge Al or Sarah at all for not going with it because the first episode wasn't very good, but it gets better as it continues. But again, if you love noir, it's right there in your wheelhouse. If you

39:40don't, I understand why you wouldn't probably continue with it. My question watching Spider Noir was why does it have to be this particular superhero? Because across all of the other iterations, and specifically the ones that we were just talking about, the Spider-Verse and also the Tom Holland versions and the previous two versions, live action versions, there's been this Spider-Man, Peter Parker, or Miles Morales, that they have these inner struggles that you can relate to as a viewer. And they have this struggle

40:15between wanting to be grounded in their families and their friends and in their neighborhoods and also wanting to be a hero and wanting to do good. And so that's kind of the overall connective tissue that I can see as a normie, but that I can see in these characters. And I didn't see that in noir. I was like, why, why did they have to pick this particular superhero? I felt like you could have kind of plugged in almost anybody. I wondered what the point was. I think that's a good point. And it's just, and ultimately like Spider-Man is a bad fit for

40:48noir. Noir superheroes are great when you can do them properly. Obviously Batman works great in that kind of setting. Batman. Yeah, Batman is the best. Correct. Yes, yes, yes. Moon Knight worked really, that was a very noir-ish kind of thing. Daredevil and Punisher and that TV shows that didn't see Punisher. But Jessica Jones was very, very, very noir-ish as well. When it works, it's great. But Spider-Man is a big, colorful, smack-talky web-slinger. I just don't, I don't see the need for Spider-Noir at all. I think it's just, it's taking a throwaway joke too seriously. I mean, Spider-Noir dates back to 2009 though. I don't remember. I know that the cover was done

41:25by Patrick Zurcher, but Spider-Noir, it has a long history in the comics. There was like a noir universe in Marvel. And Spider-Noir was one of those characters who was introduced in that noir universe. And so that's the reason why they did it is because of that Spider-Noir kind of background. Now the question is whether that was a good idea to begin with, and it kind of wasn't. Like that noir universe really didn't go anywhere. So it probably wasn't a good idea. But the issue with this show is that I think Nicolas Cage did a wonderful job in the movies. And they were like, Hey, you did a good job in the movies. You know,

41:59you're a compelling character in the movies. Let's just do a live action thing. And it just kind of didn't work. I don't know. That's where the noir thing comes from is that it comes from that noir universe that they experimented with back in, I want to say it's 2009, 2008 kind of time period. Now that Neil Gaiman is disgraced, they will never do this, but there is a comic called Marvel 1602 that he did, which is all the characters in the Elizabethan area era. That was such a weird, that was really weird. Yeah. So it's kind of a fun thing, but like, you don't have to make a 10 episode TV series

42:30out of this or something like that. Yeah. That's my thinking. Like, not that no one wanted to see Nicolas Cage do this again, but like, does it have to be a full, a full series really? Well, it's just, it's just so funny because the character is such kind of this gee whiz innocence that is just not really welcome in noir at all. You just don't see that. It's such a strange combination. Al, you were asking for comics recommendations and I just pointed out that there is a stretch called Brand New Day, which was a follow-up in the comics to a stretch by J. Michael Straczynski,

43:03who's great, Babylon 5 writer, Babylon 5 creator. Yeah. One More Day, which was seen as just a scandalous, stupid, in comics universe attempt to sort of reboot Spider-Man. Did you guys know about this or did you look into this? I didn't know about this. What happened? What did they do? In the One More Day storyline, there's a demon that Aunt May, who in the comics always looks like she's a hundred years old. So she really should die soon anyway, but Aunt May is about to die. And to save Aunt May's life, Spider-Man has to make a deal that he will no longer be married

43:36because he's been in this, you know, he's like 40 years old and he's been married to MJ for a decade, two decades. I don't know. He will no longer be married to MJ just because they wanted to start writing Spider-Man as a single guy again. They wanted to have the Spider-Man in the comics. So the One More Day is the new thing where he's just more like the 1960s Spider-Man working in his neighborhood and not being, you know, they just felt like it was a big drag on the story to have him be a married guy. It's a big drag on life. Being married is terrible. MJ's still there,

44:09but like they don't have this history and, you know, he's facing similar things, but they don't, you know, just, oh, oh, actually you remember me after all. Like they never resolve that. They just use it as a reboot. As far as I know. That's, that's a weird way to do that. Yeah. She could, she could have just like divorced him or died. I mean, you, you don't want to suggest that, but the usual way to deal with that is you just, you know, kill MJ and then you get a storyline out of it. I mean, but then you're dealing with the death of MJ. I remember

44:40when that happened, I remember reading like the first few issues of that kind of storyline and I was so pissed off. I just stopped reading it. I was, I didn't like what they were doing with Spider-Man at all. And I kind of didn't follow up and pay attention to what was happening, but I'm not at all surprised people were pissed off because that was a really bad idea. It was a terrible arc. So it's 2007 when this happened. So the same time around as this, uh, noir and they were just, we're really grasping at straws at that point of like, what we're going to do with

45:10this character. What, you know, what's going on with the universe. I just don't understand why

Enduring popularity of Spider-Man

45:14Spider-Man remains such an indelible character. Like anytime that you do Spider-Man, right. You're going to make a billion dollars. Like people love Spider-Man. He's up there with like Batman, even more so I would say than Superman. Like Superman made 600 million last year. Spider-Man's on track to make well over 2 billion. Like it's just something about Spider-Man that really resonates with audiences. And I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. I don't know why it is. It's just something about Spider-Man. And it seems like Marvel was like on his last legs and barely

45:48holding on and now they're back. And if they do a good job with Doomsday and then with Secret Wars and really X-Men, they're going to be all the way back, you know? And so it's just interesting that Spider-Man remains as popular as he is because I just don't know very many characters who have this kind of staying power. One of the reasons I really liked this movie and it made me very hopeful for the future of comic book movies is it, it turns out that all you need to do to make a billion dollars off a superhero movie is just make a good superhero movie. Make one that tells a story about

46:21the character that the movie is about. It doesn't have to be a big like tie-in. It doesn't have to bring in like 300 other things that you're setting up. This movie does set up some cool things but it doesn't exist to do that. It tells a really interesting personal story. We'll learn a lot more about all of the core characters along the way. And it's a really good time. It's just a really well-made movie. They haven't overthought it. They've just committed to the premise and delivered. And I'm really glad that this movie is making all the money in the world because if anything

46:52reminds Hollywood that the most important thing is to make a good fun movie. Yeah. And just like stop trying to make the next 20 movies focus on this one. That's really true. And I think because the Spider-Man story is a coming of age story, it makes it timeless. So no matter when you bring this character back, you're going to have a generation who's going to be ready to watch it, we're always going to be interested in those kind of self-discovery types of stories. Those are

47:24absolutely timeless. We see them across the board do well. And when they do them well, especially in something like a superhero form, it's like catnip. We can't resist it. And it's easily adaptable to the time period. So you can have a Tobey Maguire version of this character. People in that generation, millennials, are just going to eat that up. And then you know what? If it's well told, we all will, right? And so now we have a new Gen Z version of this same story that's adaptable,

47:58but essentially telling the same story in a new way. Thank you so much.

48:31Bye, guys. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you.

48:40Pretty Much Pop is part of the Partially Examined Life Podcast Network. Get more Pretty Much Pop at prettymuchpop.com. Get bonus content for every episode at patreon.com slash prettymuchpop. perfect ministra.com slash prettymuchpop.com cu-