Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man & Other Spidey Adaptation Errors

What’s wrong with this trailer? The cringey “humor”? The race swaps? The gang that beats people up on stream? That outfit? Well, technically all of that, but since I’m late to the party and everyone else has already been all over that, allow me to go elsewhere.

While a lot of fans praise The Spectacular Spider-Man, it was the start of some troubling trends when it comes to bringing Spider-Man out of comics. It only got worse as further adaptations came out, to the point where the last few have been Spider-Man in name only, with the costume. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man up there can’t even claim that from either outfit we see them wear. I’m not even sure why they’re called Spider-Man adaptations when the only one to get it right comes from the preschool series.

I’m not going to go show by show because that could get long and boring. Instead I want to simply take a look at the trends in recent Spidey adaptations to see what each of them are doing wrong and how, surprisingly, the closest one seems to be Disney Junior, who is still making it’s own mistakes. Hang tough, true believers, because this going to be a ride of shame.

Probably the biggest trend is putting Peter back in high school. Ever since The Spectacular Spider-Man, you can’t seem to get a Peter Parker who make it to college. Even Sam Rami had Peter in high school just long enough to have an origin, then has him graduate and goes to college. Instead, the usual solutions, and Rami still did this with Harry Osborne and Mary Jane Watson, is to bring the college supporting cast in the high school setting. That’s because Peter didn’t really have a circle of friends in high school. The only supporting cast Peter had was Aunt May, Flash Thompson, and the Daily Bugle staff.

In college, Peter met up with the other names you recognize: MJ and Harry, Gwen Stacy, all the girls Peter dated before their introduction…it was all college, where they didn’t know Peter as well or write him off as a “bookworm” and thus didn’t have Flash to chase them off for lack of popularity. College was a personal reset for Peter while not altering his time as Spider-Man until the whole Miles Warren nonsense. In every animated adaptation from Spectacular on his cast has to be brought down to high school, and we haven’t seen Peter in college since the 1990s cartoon and the MTV show inspired by the Rami films but not quite the same continuity. (I’m thinking he graduated by the time Unlimited took place in, but the show never says one way or the other and it is a different continuity from Fox Kids’ other Spider-Man.) Rami did this, but he wanted to get these characters infused to Peter’s life while setting the “present day” of the films after his rookie years.

Somehow this is less embarrassing “comedy” than the new Disney+ show.

That’s why the shows and last two movies go with high school. They want to do Spider-Man’s rookie career, not an established Spider-Man. In the Rami films Peter didn’t get any supervillains until college, either, where he would end up fighting the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, the Sandman, and because Marvel forced him into it, Venom. Fox Kids would also be the last time any of the characters resembled their comic counterparts, and if fan theories as to who each of the kids in the trailer are, that may an even bigger problem in Your Friendly Neighborhood. The going theory is that the effeminate guy Spidey rescues is Harry, which gets everything possible wrong about the college jock at odds with his dad because he pursued sports instead of science, who died of a drug overdose in main continuity, only undone as part of writers who can’t get over Harry or Gwen and keep trying to undead them in the dumbest ways possible outside of the actual “undead” Mephisto’s games. The only only evidence is race swapped Norman Osborne because we’re stereotyping hairstyles now, but that’s a different conversation. It’s a guessing game which woman is Mary Jane…but maybe it isn’t either of them.

Marvel’s Spider-Man on Disney XD had yet another alternate Harry, a genius who didn’t get to join Peter in a super hip new science academy for teens because of bias. The only regular cast I know made it to that show are Miles and Otto, who are nothing like their counterparts. Miles was not a super science nerd. Virgil Hawkins, aka Static from the TV version of Static Shock, was from the first episode. (I don’t know about the comics.) Doctor Octopus was de-aged and part of Peter’s circle of confidants and crimefighters. Like Your Friendly Neighborhood, Marvel’s Spider-Man feels like a completely different show idea had the Spider-brand tossed on it to get Disney XD/Disney+ to make the show. Even Ultimate Spider-Man, who at least had an out with depicting Peter in high school but tossed out any chance of a Peter/MJ romance as Bendis had decided she needed to be geeked out in the comics, gives us de-aged versions of Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and the second White Tiger, plus Agent Colson as their contact with SHIELD. Meanwhile, the unrelated game also called Marvel’s Spider-Man turned Mary Jane into Lois Lane and had Miles Morales aged up to roughly the same age like in the cartoon namesake, though I could be wrong about Miles.

Then you have the MCU, which changed everything possible. Peter’s in high school again, Aunt May is de-aged to the cool aunt instead of the doting older aunt, MJ now stands for Michelle Jones, Ned Leeds and Flash Thompson bear no resemblance to the source material whatsoever, and like every other Spider-continuity starting with the Rami film nobody can believe Peter can create wrist-mounted silly string being a chemical whiz with some fair engineering skills and an instinct to make spider-silk that his body shouldn’t be capable of doing. How, out of everything in Peter Parker’s story, is this the hill nobody can die on? Even in this new show, Peter has webbing but he has to carry it in a backpack with blatantly obvious hoses to cut to stop his webbing. It’s when he gets the Osborn suit that he doesn’t seem to need something so huge. I don’t understand this way of thinking. Web-shooters are most believable thing about Spider-Man even at that size. We’re lucky if he can design his own costume properly now, I guess.

More Spider-Man than any of the other Spider-Man stories we’ve had in a while.

So how is Disney Junior doing the better adaptation? First, I do admit it gets a lot wrong. Being a Disney Junior show every got de-aged except for Iron Man because both he and Aunt May maintain their MCU concepts, meaning you get hip Aunt May again. However, Peter is a science guy, creating webshooters and gadgets like Peter Parker would…even if in this show that means a secret headquarters in a giant Spider-Man head nobody ever sees, robot sidekicks, kid-sized vehicles that make your Power Wheels look weak, and the short-lived girl version of Doc Ock and Electro. Also, we get Ghost Spider, in a dimension with Peter, but instead of her mom dying it appears George died first and mom became the police officer. We can guess why. Still, nobody calls her “Spider-Gwen” despite being based on that version of Gwen Stacy, while Miles gets his own superhero identity of sorts, even though Spin is more of a nickname for the computers while Peter gets Spidey despite the suit-up sequence still calling both Spider-Man.

Still, it’s Disney Junior. All of their superhero and helping people shows are kids with powers and cool vehicles and headquarters, or talking puppies, or kittens with supersuits, or elementary school aged Jedi who somehow still fly starships without adult supervision and go all over the galaxy.. It’s par for the course at this point. I’d be surprised if they did a show starring an adult hero (though at least they’re still heroes). I’m surprised Iron Man is an adult when even Hulk, Ant-Man, and KING T’Challa (not prince and also Black Panther) are all kids along with every other Marvel hero that gets into that show. Like with Batwheels, the villains’ motivations are heavily altered for the age group but are still close enough to the villains’ usual goals. Green Goblin is now a prankster, Black Cat a kleptomaniac who tries to be good on occasion, Rhino steals stuff, and so on. The only odd one is girl Electro who wants attention and electricity, and it’s still close than so many namesakes out in adaptation land right now.

In short I really have no interest in this new show, and I already lost interest in Spider-Namesake from the MCU after seeing Homecoming. They at least got Peter right (you aren’t imitating that hairdo in live-action but I don’t think the animated Spiderverse movies even tried). Marvel’s Spider-Man, the last Spider-Man cartoon not starring elementary school kids, at least looked good even if it didn’t look like Spider-Man outside of Peter’s costume. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man can’t even boast that. Luckily I don’t have Disney+ anyway so it doesn’t matter. I just want a good Spider-Man show that’s a proper adaptation again. We’re lucky to get one or the other in the 21st century.