As I progress through the Many, MANY Intros Of Spider-Man, there are two shows that won’t be on the list because they don’t have a real intro. I thought it would be interesting to feature both on Saturday Night Showcase, to give them some form of representation.
However, I can’t find a full episode of Ultimate Spider-Man on YouTube, the one where Peter becomes a SHIELD trainee along with other, teenified heroes and Peter sometimes has comedic fantasies that break the fourth wall. Marvel HQ on YouTube has a trailer for them but I guess they took them down. Nobody else on YouTube has them, either. I’m not happy with the version I found on Dailymotion, since the darn thing kept autoplaying in the embed and I’m not doing that to you guys. So here’s what this show tries to pass of as an intro.
I can, however, bring you Marvel’s Spider-Man, which is essentially a reimagine of the lore on the level of the MCU version, but still with the same costume and powers. Peter is again in high school (because of course he is), but in the first official episode (I could post the shorts, later combined into the first episode, “Origins”, as Peter learns his powers, but I want the regular episode experience) he starts going to some high tech super brain science academy.
Neither show has an intro, just the old comic panel turning into the title thing Marvel movies were doing prior to the MCU and a title card getting pulled away by webbing or being invaded by Spidey. Enjoy.
See, this is the problem with the show. The writing is great, the acting is good, the action is outstanding, and the story should make for a really good show…BUT IT ISN’T SPIDER-MAN! Honestly, if it wasn’t for character names you wouldn’t know it was supposed to BE Spider-Man until he gets his traditional costume in (I think) the next episode. Had they called this something else and altered Peter’s powerset a bit it would have stood brilliantly as its own show, with its own characters with their own story. Instead, the namesakes take some of the fun out of it for me and that’s why I didn’t keep watching it. It’s a real same, because it’s a good show but a terrible adaptation. Is it that hard to make something new and get it on TV or movies? If so, the studios and networks need to stop holding good ideas back, and these creators need to find a way to push their new ideas without slapping an old idea on top of it.
I want to like this show, but trying to tell me this is Spider-Man when I can tell at a glance it isn’t ruins the experience for me. And there’s nothing “woke” here, nothing political on either side. It’s just people not caring about the source material even when they’re making something so good it should be allowed to stand on its own feet and be amazing (no pun intended) without the baggage of adaptation. Disney XD really did this show a disservice, even if it did get three seasons. Like Battlestar Galactica, this is what led to today’s bad adaptations, except the activist writers can’t make a good show because they don’t even care about the story. They wouldn’t have gotten in had those in charge of the legacy didn’t do a bunch of namesakes and make it look good, so that the source material just becomes lazy branding. If they looked at this show or Ron Moore’s reimagine (and many other reimaginings) and said “make something new out of this so the original isn’t torn apart”, things may be much better in the world of these adaptations than they are now. It just makes me sad.
Next week, the last installment of the Many, MANY Intros Of Spider-Man, for now at least, as we really de-age our heroes and villains.
BW Media Spotlight 