In many ways, the 1970s were the first golden age of superheroes on TV. You had Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk, not to mention stuff like The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman.
In addition, two TV movies were produced as back-door pilots based on Marvel’s heroes Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. The former had been done in animation (complete with iconic theme song), and also in some amusing live-action shorts on the kids show The Electric Company (which was your humble rewatcher’s first exposure to the character), while the 1978 TV movie was the sorcerer supreme’s first time being adapted into another medium.
Both, unfortunately, share issues with pacing and with grokking the source material.
“That character in the clown suit, he worked out pretty good”
Spider-Man
Written by Alvin Boretz
Directed by E.W. Swackhamer
Produced by Charles Fries & Daniel R. Goodman
Original release date: September 14, 1977
In a New York City that looks a lot like Los Angeles, a doctor walks out mid-exam without a word, and a lawyer does likewise in the middle of closing arguments. The two of them then rob a bank and crash their getaway car into a brick wall, leaving the pair of them comatose. Two thugs take the money from the car before any emergency services show up.
Grad student Peter Parker is trying to sell photos to the Daily Bugle, but J. Jonah Jameson says they’re too arty and not newsworthy. Jameson refuses to send Parker on an assignment—he’s only talking to him because he respects that he’s working his way through college.
Parker goes to his college lab where he and his lab partner Dave are working with radiation. After Parker can’t accept a delivery due to not having the money to pay for it, he and Dave continue their experiment, during which a spider gets into the radioactive chamber. Said spider later bites Parker.
While walking down the street, Parker is pursued by a car down an alley (he senses that the car’s about to hit him before it happens). He leaps out of the way and crawls up the wall, much to his shock. Meantime, the car is driven by a judge who just robbed a bank and crashed the car. Parker was too busy gawping at his newfound powers to notice the two guys who take the money, but he does talk to the cops, including the cigar-chomping Captain Barbera.
Parker experiments with his powers, crawling all over the outside of his house. Miraculously, nobody sees him. He then tries to do it in the middle of town for no compellingly good reason, and he stops a purse-snatching by virtue of scaring the crap out of the thief by crawling on the wall.
Rumors of a “spider-man” spread like wildfire, and when Parker hears from Jameson about said rumors, he says he knows all about the person in question, and he can get pictures. Jameson is dubious.
Parker talked about a costume, so he goes home and somehow sews one. (Where he got the money for the fabric and sewing equipment when he can’t come up with $46 to pay for lab equipment is left as an exercise for the viewer.) He sets up his camera to take photos automatically and brings them to Jameson. While at the Bugle, word comes in of another respected person committing a robbery and slamming his car into a building. No staff photographers are available, so Jameson reluctantly sends Parker.
While there, he uses his spider-strength to free the thief—a professor named Tyler—from being pinned by the steering wheel, then he offers to give Tyler’s daughter Judy a lift to the hospital. Unfortunately, the EMTs bump Parker and knock the film out of his camera, exposing it and ruining his pictures.
Tyler has no memory of what happened. Barbera is suspicious of this, and also of Parker just showing up at the last two crime scenes.
Judy says that her father was seeing a self-help guru named Edward Byron, and the two of them go to one of Byron’s meetings, where his notion of self-help is less new-agey and more tough-lovey, as he comes across as a drill sergeant more than a guru. Parker expresses skepticism at the efficacy of Byron’s program and leaves.
However, Byron is using the members of his program. They all get a special lapel pin, and he broadcasts a signal over that pin to control the people. Byron sends a command to Tyler to kill himself before he can tell the police about him, but Spider-Man manages to save him.
Parker creates artificial web shooters in his college lab, er, somehow, and then checks out Byron’s HQ after hours as Spider-Man. He’s met by three Asian guys wielding shinai. Spider-Man beats them mostly by confusing them by crawling on the walls, though they give him a run for his money.
As Parker, he returns to see Byron, saying he wants to give the program a chance. Byron gives him a lapel pin. He goes home and uses his unusually fancy home computer set up (how he can afford this and not be able to pay for his lab equipment remains an exercise for the viewer) to discover the signals Byron is sending out.
Byron gives the mayor an ultimatum—give him $50 million or he’ll make ten people commit suicide. The meet is set up, and ten people—including Parker—prepare to kill themselves. Parker does so by going to the top of the Empire State Building, but the curved, pointed fencing that is there to keep people from doing that very thing pokes Parker’s pin and knocks it off.
Returned to his senses, he goes to Byron’s HQ and trashes the antenna he’s using to broadcast his signal. The three kendo dudes, having already gotten the crap kicked out of them by Spider-Man, let him in without a fight, and Spidey finds Byron being hypnotized by his own beam, since trashing the antenna turned the signal inward, er, somehow. Spider-Man says he should go to police headquarters and turn himself in, which he does. Meantime, Barbera arrests Byron’s two thugs, who give Byron up in a heartbeat (so even if Byron confessing via hypnotic suggestion isn’t considered a viable confession, he’ll probably still go to jail).
Parker gives Jameson pictures of Spider-Man with the three kendo dudes and goes off with Judy hand in hand.
“I am several hundred years too old to be all right”
Dr. Strange
Written, produced, & directed by Philip DeGuere
Original release date: September 6, 1978
The Nameless One approaches Morgan Le Fay—who has been trapped for hundreds of years by the sorcerer supreme, who goes by the name of James Lindmer—and gives her three days to kill either Lindmer, whose powers are waning, or his successor, if he winds up passing on the mantle before Morgan can get to him.
Morgan and her prominent cleavage both agree readily and they come to Earth. Morgan takes possession of a college student named Clea Lake and has her push Lindmer over a railing onto the street. However, he is still a strong enough sorcerer to heal himself and he walks away.
Clea continues to see Morgan in mirrors and have nightmares and such. For his part, Lindmer has his acolyte, Wong, seek out Dr. Stephen Strange, who is destined to be his successor.
Waking from a nightmare, Clea sleepwalks and is almost hit by a cab. She’s taken to East Side Hospital, where she’s put in the care of Strange. She has forgotten who she is, and she didn’t take her purse with her. She’s also deathly afraid to go to sleep. (Strange refuses to prescribe meds for her, but the head nurse tries to dispense them anyhow, as that’s SOP, which leads to Strange and the hospital administrator butting heads.)
Lindmer comes to the hospital to check on Clea—using his magic to coerce people into letting him into places, which isn’t very heroic, but whatever—and he also talks to Strange for a bit, giving him a business card that has a logo that matches the design on the ring that Strange wears. Said ring was willed to him by his father—both his parents died in a car crash when Strange was eighteen—and he’s never taken it off.
Clea is given thorazine so she can sleep by the administrator, and she lapses into a coma. Strange goes to Lindmer in the hopes that he can help her, and Lindmer shows him how to release his astral form. The astral realm is where Clea’s spirit has gone, and Lindmer teaches Strange a simple spell to cast if he meets resistance. (He does, he invokes it, the problem goes away. Cha cha cha.)
Despite having traveled to an astral realm to rescue a comatose woman from a demon, Strange is skeptical about this world of magic (dude, seriously?) and he rejects Lindmer’s offer to take up the mantle of sorcerer supreme.
Morgan manages to penetrate the wards of Lindmer’s home (thanks to unwitting aid from Strange and a cat) and entraps both Lindmer and Wong. She then possesses Clea while she and Strange are on a date and Morgan tries to seduce Strange (both literally and figuratively), including putting him in an outfit very similar to what he wears in the comics. However, while Strange is initially entranced by her slinky red dress and mighty mighty cleavage, he eventually refuses her (after making sure to give her a smooch first). Lindmer reveals that he let Morgan trap him so that Strange could see for himself what the stakes are.
Strange stops Morgan, and the Nameless One punishes her.
Clea has no memory of what happened, and when she’s released, she and Strange have the exact same conversation they’d had previously about whether or not to go out on a date, which is only a little creepy, and Strange agrees to become sorcerer supreme—though he apparently doesn’t give up his day job. Even as the Ancient One passes Lindmer’s power onto him and gives him a doofy purple outfit with a bright yellow starburst (which looks nothing like what he wears in the comics, and also, ew), he still keeps his gig at the hospital.
And then he and Clea see Morgan pushing a self-help program.
“Ignorance has been a kind of protection for you”
Both these movies were back-door pilots, but only one led to a series. Spider-Man had two abbreviated seasons from 1978-1979. Dr. Strange was not picked up.
The two movies share a great deal in common. They both take place in New York City, but are very obviously primarily filmed in Los Angeles. (Seriously, the two cities look nothing alike, why do people keep insisting on trying to make L.A. look like NYC?) At least they filmed at the actual Empire State Building for Parker’s almost-suicide, and Dr. Strange makes good use of second-unit photography to disguise itself as being in New York better than Spider-Man does.
They both have leads who have a certain charm, but it’s very low-key, and results in them leaving much less of an impression than they should.
But most of all, both films show only a cursory understanding of the source material, and simplify the storylines a little too much. Both characters have strong origin stories in the comics, and both origins are utterly botched here.
In the comics, the main reason why Parker decides to use his powers to fight crime is because his inaction leads to the death of his uncle Ben. In the movie, he has no such motivation, and he only seems to create the costume because he word-vomitted in Jameson’s office and somehow talked himself into the costume. But he has no reason to actually become a crime-fighter except that it’s because the script calls for it. The creation of the web-shooters is also given absolutely no explanation.
Similarly, in the comics, Strange is indeed a doctor, and an arrogant sumbitch he is, until an accident costs him the use of his hands. No longer able to do surgery, he travels to the East to find a guru who will heal him, and finds more than he bargained for. In the movie, Strange is a lothario, but actually a decent sort (mostly), and he was destined from jump to become a sorcerer.
In each case, the adaptation removes any sense of character journey. Instead of a Peter Parker who is a nerd who is picked on by other kids, and who sees being a hero as a release, a way to become what puny Parker never could be, we just get an ordinary-ish grad student who is struggling to make ends meet. Instead of a kid who gets heady with power and then has a comeuppance when his newfound arrogance gets his father-figure killed, we just get a guy who gets powers and, uh, becomes a superhero and stuff.
Strange doesn’t go through any real changes. His world changes around him, but he’s still the same guy at the end that he is at the beginning, except now he has powers and an awful costume.
On top of that, both movies have pacing issues. Dr. Strange isn’t too bad in that regard, but Spider-Man is almost disastrous in its first half hour, as we spend way too much time watching Parker and his lab partner play with radiation, and the spider getting irradiated, and then Parker getting his powers, and then him taking a nap and dreaming about what happened so we can watch it all over again, and make it stop already!
Plot issues up the kazoo here, too. Why does Morgan only have three days to stop Lindmer? Byron is moving quickly because he doesn’t want the police to figure out that all the robbers are part of his program, but the cops never even come close to the possibility of figuring that out. (Then again, Barbera and Monahan mostly just stand around and make snarky comments. At no point are either of them ever seen to be doing much by way of policework.) Why does Lindmer let himself be captured by Morgan? How is it that Parker can create a costume and web-shooters and has a computer that can detect Byron’s microwave, yet he has to borrow $46 from his new girlfriend?
Hilariously, both have almost interchangeable female leads, as Eddie Benton’s Clea and Lisa Eilbacher’s Judy are both remarkably similar in personality and looks (the former being mostly pretty dull, all told, and mostly you wonder what Parker and Strange see in either of them), and both have our heroes working for old white men who complain a lot and don’t like our heroes very much.
The actors do the best they can with the material. The movie’s Jameson—like everything else—is toned down, but David White does decently with it anyhow. (I love him asking if he can step on Spider-Man the way he would a spider.) Michael Pataki is fun as the cigar-chomping Barbera, Hilly Hicks has a relaxed charm as Robbie Robertson, and it’s amusing to see Robert Hastings—the voice of Commissioner Gordon in Batman: The Animated Series in the 1990s—as a cop. Nobody ever went wrong casting Clyde Kusatsu or Jessica Walter in anything. The former’s Wong is more assistant and helper than the stereotypical manservant he was in the comics, and the latter manages to rise above the rather risible writing of her character to be genuinely seductive and menacing. And hey, that’s Michael Ansara as the voice of the Ancient One!
Ultimately, though, these movies are much like the main characters: affable, but less than they could be.
They were not the only characters to be adapted in this era, though. Both Captain America and Howard the Duck had their turns in the sun, the former on television, the latter on the big screen. We’ll look at them next week.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is not ready for prime time.
“it’s amusing to see Robert Hastings—the voice of Commissioner Gordon in Batman: The Animated Series in the 1990s—as a cop.”
Hastings was also the voice of Superboy in Filmation’s 1966 cartoon series.
When I first saw the Hammond Spider-Man as a kid, I wasn’t familiar with the character’s comics origins, so I didn’t see its deficiencies. In retrospect, I can see how it falls short, but there was stuff I liked about it then and still like now. Nicholas Hammond was a likeable lead actor. The Spidey costume wasn’t bad for its day, and they did some stunts and effects with it that were kind of impressive, even if you could sometimes clearly see the winch at the top of the skyscraper Spidey was climbing. I liked the way the suit actor moved in the costume and used body language to convey expression. (Although it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the stuntman who played the Japanese Spider-Man in the near-contemporary live action series produced by Toei. He used sort of a spider-based martial-arts and movement style that worked very well for Spidey, even if everything else about the character was profoundly changed.) And I really liked Dana Kaproff’s funky, sax-heavy musical score in the second season.
The thing is, Peter may have had no character arc, but ’70s TV heroes rarely did, at least not in shows aimed at younger viewers. They were generally meant to have consistent, unchanging personalities and to be intrinsically good. And it’s not like Marvel itself always gave its heroes tragic pasts to justify their choice to become heroes. Look at Fantastic Four #1 — even though Ben Grimm is dismayed at the monster he’s become, he immediately says, “You don’t have to make a speech, big shot! We understand! We’ve gotta use that power to help mankind, right?”
Anyway, I’d forgotten that David White played Jameson in the pilot movie. In the series, he was played by Robert F. Simon. Though both Jamesons were very much softened compared to the comics’ version, played as an avuncular, gruff but caring mentor figure, more like Perry White or Lou Grant. I guess that, since Jameson was the second lead of the show, they figured he needed to be more sympathetic.
As for the Dr. Strange movie, I only recently saw it on YouTube, and I reviewed it on my blog. The upshot: I thought it was fairly good for a ’70s superhero pilot, with pretty good effects for the era, though it was obviously trying to approach it as a hospital drama with a supernatural angle, using a familiar and comfortable formula to ground it for mainstream audiences (kinda like how modern genre shows like iZombie and Lucifer are reworked to be police procedurals).
I have a soft spot for the DOCTOR STRANGE tv-movie, which I loved as a teen. Even though it took liberties with the original comic, it was the only one of those CBS adaptations (including THE INCREDIBLE HULK) that didn’t seem to shy away from the more fantastic aspects of the comics. You had actual demons, sorcerers, astral travel to other dimensions, the Sanctum and even a low-budget attempt to mimic Ditko’s visuals, as opposed to, say, wasting Strange on crooked politicians and teenage runaways or whatever. It was a comic-book movie that wasn’t afraid to be a comic-book movie. And, yeah, Jessica Walters is great.
“I am Ishtar, bloody Ishtar!”
But am I the only one who thinks that the costume Morgan gave Strange was better than the cheesy spandex thing he gets from the Ancient One? :)
See that? Grad student. In the 70’s, they didn’t feel like he had to be a perpetual high school kid!
It is obvious why Parker cannot afford his lab fees, he keeps spending his cash on useless shit like sewing lessons…
I always feel the thing that the Tobey Maguire Spider-Movies got right was the organic webshooters. In a world with a grown man climbing up walls with magic fingers which still work through spandex, it is the Spidey can invent webshooters in his cave with a box of scra…sorry, which breaks my suspension of disbelief.
” (Where he got the money for the fabric and sewing equipment when he can’t come up with $46 to pay for lab equipment is left as an exercise for the viewer.) “
a) perhaps the fabric and sewing equipment were Aunt May’s.
b) he’s Spiderman, he has sticky fingers.
c) really tiring of the use in every review of the tired phrase “. . . left as an exercise for the viewer.” Its lazy.
@3/Daniel: In the comics, Peter spent only 3 years of real time in high school (1962-65), 13 years of real time in college (1965-78), and 5 years of real time in grad school (1978-83). In the J. Michael Straczynski run from 2002-8, Peter was actually teaching at Midtown High. And he was a married adult for 20 years of real time (not counting periods when MJ was separated from him or presumed dead). So I agree, it’s odd that every adaptation these days wants to revert him to a high school student as if that were somehow intrinsic to the character. I guess that reflects the Ultimate Universe or something.
@4/random22: Very much disagree about the webshooters. A vitally important part of Spidey’s character is that his scientific genius is as much a superpower as his spidery gifts. He doesn’t just fight or web his way out of problems, he thinks and invents his way out. That’s what the webshooters represent.
I actually liked Homecoming‘s solution to the problem, by having Stark mentor Parker. It never made any sense that Parker could create those web shooters and make the costume, yet perpetually had money problems. I’m willing to set the costume aside (unless I can make fun of it, of course), but the web shooters were always the elephant in the room, because if he just patented the stupid things and sold them, he and Aunt May would be set for life.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@6, KRAD @7 has it nailed. The patents on them alone would be worth thousands, if not millions or even billions. Parker would have to be a worse businessman than Gil from The Simpsons in order to remain poor and still have invented the webshooters. That is why I prefer the organic shooters. When I was a kid I always thought that was what he had anyway (yes, I know, bad at comics) and it took me a while to actually notice the gadget part.
@7/krad: The Garfield movies got around it by establishing the webfluid and shooters as Oscorp prototypes that Peter essentially stole. Though at least they gave him the technical knowledge to figure out how to reverse-engineer and modify them for his purposes. That’s a pretty good compromise between allowing him to be a genius and acknowledging his limited resources, although the stealing bit isn’t so great.
In the new Marvel’s Spider-Man cartoon, Peter basically misappropriates the resources of the school science lab to create his apparatus. Which is a bit implausible when he’s at Midtown High, but then he transfers to a school for geniuses called Horizon High (based on Horizon Labs from the recent comics) and uses its more advanced resources to create his final costume, which has high-tech features similar to the Homecoming costume.
As for why he doesn’t patent the webfluid/shooters, I think the comics have explained that part of the reason is that the webfluid dissolves in an hour, so it doesn’t have long-term applications that would make it profitable. I think the other reason is that he’d have to expose himself as Spider-Man in order to sell the formula, and that whole “atoning for getting Uncle Ben killed” thing overrides the financial considerations.
mostly you wonder what Parker and Strange see in either of them
It’s the boobies.
both have our heroes working for old white men who complain a lot and don’t like our heroes very much.
That’s way too realistic for a comic book movie.
KRAD: You do so much complaining about how hideous Strange’s costume is–but don’t give us a screencap of it to wallow in ourselves? Shame on you!
Well, I’ve never seen that Spider Man movie, but I watched the Doctor Strange one on youtube a couple years ago, I enjoyed it. It was kind of relaxed and I thought the pace was fine, the lead was charismatic enough to carry the film to the end. I mean, I would give it maybe a 6/10 but not an aggravated 6. Never watching it did I feel like they missed a bunch of opportunities or anything and that it could have been 10 if only…
Nope, maybe I gave it some leeway for being an “old” movie, but to me it’s a solid 6, the highest I can imagine it being. I would also, strangely (heh), give Dr. Strange MCU version a 6, but it could have been an 8, so it’s a more annoyed 6.
Like others on this thread, I admit to a fondness for the ‘Dr Strange’ movie. It seemed to me quite Ditkoesque, which is right for Strange rather than Parker. For the period it’s not at all bad. At least it isn’t plagued with stunt casting…
I missed both of these, as I was out to sea for most of those two years. You have confirmed my suspicions that I didn’t miss much…
Except that’s even worse! A short-term sealant/adhesive would have tons of applications, including the law enforcement application (detaining criminal suspects) that Peter uses it for himself! EMTs and combat medics could use it to keep a patient still for transport or (assuming it met FDA approval) as a liquid bandage (which is an actual thing, you know)! It could be used in construction and assembly jobs to secure joints and components until permanent fasteners/adhesives/joins could be completed! A million American households and garages would love to have something like that for various household and handyman tasks–it could be sold under a commercial name like HANDIHELPER[TM] or WORKMAN’S BUDDY[TM] or THIRDHAND HELPER[TM] or something better because those names kinda suck but they get the idea across! (I would have LOVED having something like this in a spraycan the time I replaced the garbage disposal in our kitchen.)
(You know, what it reminds me of is when a scientist at 3M failed to invent another long-term adhesive and ended up with this slightly-sticky material that was tacky enough to hold a small piece of paper to something but not nearly strong enough to permanently stick it to anything. Which, of course, is what led to the development of Post-It notes, which is now worth gazigilions of megabucks.)
Honestly, this is one of those comic-book absurdities that I just sort of smile and nod over (like Clark Kent’s glasses, or Bruce Wayne not being completely crippled), but it’s also why I was another one of those who thought the organic webshooters in the Raimi spidermovies were perfectly A-OK.
@6 I don’t know about “every adaptation” (I haven’t read any of the recent comics, nor have I seen the animated version), but presumably the reason the movies had Peter Parker in high school is because they were all retelling his origin story, and that’s how he originally started out.
@krad: Watch out, you wrote “Captain American”.
I can’t get past Nicholas Hammond’s haircut.
Holy crap, Strange’s origin is stupid, with that ring and his parents, etc.
@2 – Greg: The Morgan costume is much better, yes, looks more like something he’d wear.
@@.-@ – random22: I feel like building the shooters and creating the web formula is useful to show that Peter is a genius. Like Chris said.
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett – great summing of Parker’s life as an adult in the comics, and I couldn’t agree more with those who miss an older Parker. Particularly liked him as a high school teacher, and I wouldn’t want to see him on screen in a “Kraven’s Last Hunt” where he’s sixteen or what have you.
@15/eric: But the organic webshooters are absurd in their own way — namely, why the hell are they in his wrists, of all places? A spider’s spinnerets aren’t in its forelimbs, but in a part of the body that would be incredibly inconvenient and embarrassing for Peter Parker. It’s deeply contrived that his organic webshooters just happen to manifest in exactly the same places where his comics counterpart chose to wear his artificial webshooters.
Also, how much of his body’s nutrients and moisture is he expending when he sprays these webs out of his wrists? Look at the huge amount of webbing he expelled in something like the elevated train sequence in Spider-Man 2. How did he secrete it so quickly? How did he secrete so much without passing out from dehydration or nutrient loss? It doesn’t make any biological sense. Okay, a lot of things about Spider-Man don’t make biological sense, but in this case, it’s easier to believe he can produce that amount of webbing if he has it in highly pressurized cartridges like CO2 cannisters, cartridges that he keeps on his belt and swaps out when he runs low. (Plus he can do other cool things with web cartridges, like throw them in a fireplace and use their eventual explosion as a distraction, or release their contents all at once in an explosion of immobilizing goo. I had fun coming up with clever things for Spidey to do with his webshooters and cartridges when I wrote my novel Drowned in Thunder.)
Oh, and while we’re at it, what about the really high pressures he’d need to generate to spray webfluid over a great distance without it just being uselessly blown around by the wind? Spider spinnerets don’t spray webbing out at pressure — spiders pull it out with their hind limbs and smooth the strands into shape. Like the wrist positioning, this is something that makes more sense for an artificial construct than a spider-based organic mutation.
@16/Matthew: Civil War and Homecoming didn’t retell Spidey’s origin, but they’ve made a huge deal out of keeping him in high school for a whole trilogy of solo movies, unlike the previous two film series where he graduated fairly quickly.
Jessica Walter…oh my goodness. :-o
@19 But magic biology is consistent with Marvel’s universe. It might be bullshit, but magic biology is consistent bullshit. That is one of the rules of writing, make your bullshit laws of your universe consistent?
Advanced technical genius in Marvel’s universe means one of two things though. Either supervillain (JJJ was right!) or billionaire crimefighter. Having Peter Parker be a kid genius but not either of those two things means their bullshit is out of whack with their other bullshit. That is why organic webshooters are the best option; bullshit, but consistent bullshit.
@21/random22: Not at all. For many fantasy writers (I think I learned it from Richard Matheson in particular), the rule for writing fantasy is to include one fanciful premise and make everything around it as naturalistic and believable as possible to facilitate suspension of disbelief. The fewer impossibilities and absurdities you have in a fantasy story, the better. And one cool thing about Marvel is that, despite all the absurd and impossible powers, Stan Lee and his collaborators were pretty good at concocting plausible-sounding explanations and making things seem scientific and reasonable. The mechanical webshooters are a brilliant piece of comics tech — pressurized cartridges, a synthetic fluid that expands and hardens in the air, a palm electrode that responds only to a specific kind of touch so it can’t be triggered accidentally, a nozzle that can be adjusted to different spray settings for different kinds of webbing… they’re really fantastically clever and well-thought-out pieces of gadgetry. In the ’80s, Peter even upgraded them with LEDs that lit up when his webfluid was running low, although later authors have tended to ignore this. And there are all the other clever bits of tech in his costume, like the Mylar lenses that hide his eyes but let him see out, the hidden utility belt for spare cartridges and spider-tracers and the like, the Spider-Beacon signal light on his buckle, etc. Lee, Ditko, Romita, etc. really thought the tech through.
Besides, the internal logic of the impossible premise in Spider-Man’s case is that his powers correspond to the abilities of spiders. They can stick to vertical or inverted surfaces, so he can too. They can (supposedly) lift many times their own weight, so he can too. They have great dexterity and balance, so he does too. They have acute senses that let them evade danger, so Spidey’s senses are heightened too. His powers have analogues in spider abilities, even though those abilities wouldn’t realistically translate to a being of human size and shape. But spiders do not have spinnerets in their forelimbs, they have them in their rear ends. And they don’t spray webbing out under pressure like a can of silly string, they draw it out manually like dental floss. So the way Spidey’s webshooters work is not directly analogous with spider abilities in the same way his other powers are. That’s part of my point — that it isn’t consistent with his other powers to make them organic. It violates the internal logic of the fiction.
“Advanced technical genius in Marvel’s universe means one of two things though. Either supervillain (JJJ was right!) or billionaire crimefighter.”
Not true. Marvel is rife with genius heroes, not all of whom are billionaires. Bruce Banner certainly isn’t a billionaire, nor is Hank McCoy. I think Hank Pym’s work was funded by his wealthy girlfriend/wife Janet Van Dyne. The “billionaire genius” thing is mostly just Reed Richards and Tony Stark. Although Peter Parker was a Stark-like billionaire in the comics only a few years ago.
@19/22 ChristopherLBennett:
I think it’s self-evident that Peter Parker’s organic web-goo comes from the same place as Robert Bruce Banner’s extra mass: an extradimensional space full of spiderweb and muscle.
It’s not a good place.
(Stephen Strange went there once.)
(Once.)
(Never again.)
(::shudder::)
Anyway, the point is, people often claim that organic webshooters are more plausible than mechanical ones — because it isn’t necessary to justify how a broke 15-year-old kid could a) invent them and b) not make a fortune from them — but my position is that organic webshooters are also highly implausible, just in different ways. So it’s not actually an improvement, it’s just trading one category of unlikelihood for another. And to me, the mechanical webshooters are less implausible, because if you stipulate that he could have the resources to make them, their functioning seems to make a lot of sense. All their components have analogues in real technology, even if Spidey’s are amazingly miniaturized and versatile, and even if they somehow fit under a tight costume without creating any bulges. (Although the Nicholas Hammond Spidey had only one bulky webshooter that was worn outside his sleeve. The Japanese Spider-Man had an even bulkier wrist device that he used to summon the flying race car that transported him to his giant robot, and no, I am not making any of that up.)
The main implausibility, frankly, is wind. I’ve been in Manhattan enough times to know that the odds of shooting a strand of lightweight webbing hundreds of feet between the tops of skyscrapers and not having it blown off in a random direction are minuscule. But that’s a problem with both kinds of webshooter, and at least the mechanical kind can handwave it by postulating a high enough firing pressure. (That was actually a gag they used in Marvel’s Spider-Man just recently — Spidey was still new at using his webshooters, and the wind blew his webbing away when he set the pressure too low.)
I won’t dispute that the organic webshooters are a different kind of implausible. I just find it a preferable kind of implausible.
The first thing Peter Parker does in Amazing Fantasy #15 after being bitten by a radioactive spider and realizing he has spider powers is… sign up for a wrestling match where he can win a hundred bucks if he stays in the ring for three minutes with “Crusher” Hogan. (This is the equivalent of around $800 in 2017 dollars.) This establishes a theme that runs through all of the early Spider-Man adventures: Peter Parker is flat broke. Flat broke despite having this formula for an amazing adhesive that could easily make him a billionaire (for reference, this is happening in the same era (AF #15 came out in 1962) as the invention of Liquid Paper (1956) and Post-It Notes (1968); it’s not like Stan Lee could have been oblivious to companies like 3M and DuPont (corporate motto 1935-1982: “Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry”) introducing mundane miracles).
This is the part I find amusing/ironic/mildly implausible/poking my suspension of disbelief/etc.. It’s not a great big deal, it’s just kind of silly. Bruce Banner (or Hank Pym) adding and subtracting mass in physics-violating ways, I don’t bat an eye. Tony Stark zips around on some kind of magnetic repulsors without pulping himself when he comes to a sudden stop, sure, why not? Kurt Wagner can bampf, Scott Summers has eyebeams, Logan is capable of moving his wrists, Reed Richards arms never turns into a saggy mess the way the Stretch Armstrong action figure I had when I was a kid did–enh, these things happen in superhero comics. Peter Parker has a bunch of billion dollar ideas for a spray-on adhesive and pressurized applicator but he still has to beg J. Jonah Jameson for work? Now that’s absurd!
Is that irrational and stupid of me? Probably. But that’s being a comics fan for you.
@25/eric: “I won’t dispute that the organic webshooters are a different kind of implausible. I just find it a preferable kind of implausible.”
And I think the opposite. Organic webshooters are boring. Peter — and the writers — can basically only do one thing with them. Mechanical webshooters are much cooler because they’re clever, detailed gadgets and there’s so much more that can be done with them in a story. Not only do they have a number of different settings and options, not only can you come up with clever things to do with the webfluid cartridges when Spidey needs to think outside the box, but the mechanics of Spidey running out of fluid at the worst possible moment and having to swap cartridges, or remembering that he forgot to fill new cartridges or whip up new fluid, are a perennial source of complication and suspense. Or there have been cases where superstrong bad guys crushed his webshooters and he had to do without them. And then there was the time he had to smuggle them through airport security and… well. Making them devices creates far more story opportunities, and to me as both a writer and a long-term reader, that’s objectively better.
And Marvel’s writers seemed to think so too. When the Raimi movies were coming out, they did a really bad storyline in the comics where Peter was cocooned and mutated by some insect-queen villain and came out with organic webshooters (as well as the ability to communicate with insects, which makes no sense since spiders are arachnids, dammit), and this new development was almost completely ignored after it happened. No writer really did anything with it, only a couple mentioned it even once afterward (including the writer who did that storyline in the first place), and mostly they just told stories that were agnostic on the source of Spidey’s webbing. (The insect-talking power was forgotten within about two issues.) And then, not long thereafter, they did a different storyline called “The Other” where Peter went through another gross cocoon transformation that had him come out with new powers, and the previous gross cocoon transformation was never even mentioned. This time he came out with giant venomous spikes that shot out of his wrists when he was angry, because that’s totally a thing that spiders have, right? Anyway, both transformations were forgotten when they did their marriage-erasing reality reboot a year or so after that, and Spidey ended up with mechanical webshooters once more.
Oh, and one more plausibility point in favor of mechanical shooters: As shown in close-up, they have nozzles that extend through slits in the gloves of Spidey’s costume. The organic shooters are just puckers on his wrists, so how does the webbing get out through the costume? And how does he aim it forward when it would logically shoot upward if his arms were in the classic “THWIP” position?
I go with organic webshooters as more plausible (of course, neither sort are remotely plausible).
Radiation turned him into a magical spider man, who can do the things we associate with spiders.
That’s one counter-factual assumption, which we are allowed.
That he turns into a magical spider man, and is also a super-genius who can make machines that can – equally impossibly – do other things associated with spiders… that’s a second counterfactual, which is one too many.
@27/Gerry_Quinn: You’ve got it backward. Peter Parker was established as a science whiz and an honor student before he was bitten by a spider. That’s why he was bitten in the first place — because he eagerly attended a science demonstration on radioactivity. He would never have become Spider-Man if he hadn’t been a science geek first. So those aren’t two separate things. His greatest and most important power has always been his mind. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand the character at all.
Indeed, that’s the biggest problem with the organic webshooters. They diminish the importance of Peter’s intelligence, and that alters the character in a major way. That’s what really matters here — not abstract concerns of plausibility, but character, the most fundamental and important part of fiction. Peter’s powers are useful, yes, but it’s his inventiveness that makes him a great superhero. In the comics, especially the early Stan Lee-written comics, Spidey frequently prevailed by outsmarting his opponents or by inventing some new device or chemical formula that could overcome their powers — e.g. inventing a way to dissolve the Rhino’s impenetrable skin or invert the Vulture’s magnetic levitation. The fact that Peter Parker is an inventor is absolutely integral to his character — especially in recent years in the comics, with his time spent at Horizon Labs (where his boss believed that he provided Spider-Man with his gear) and subsequently Parker Industries. And before that when he was Tony Stark’s protege as an Avenger. You see that in the current movies too — what leads Tony to recruit and mentor Peter is not that he has spider powers, but that he’s a fellow inventor and innovator, a younger version of himself.
The fact that he could invent webshooters in his bedroom is important because it’s the thing that demonstrated to the audience right off the bat just how extraordinarily clever this kid was. The implausible part isn’t that he had the knowledge, merely that he had the money and resources to do it and that he didn’t patent it to get rich. But those are the kinds of minor breaks from reality you accept in superhero stories. Heck, the fact that the Maguire version of Spidey was able to put together that really fancy, intricate, expensively made costume somehow is just as great an implausibility in its way. At least the Garfield movie put some effort into showing how he assembled the costume, and of course the current one just got his from Stark.
I just finished re-reading Spidey’s first two stories. You know, in his first appearance, he doesn’t actually explain the web shooters at all: they’re just something he has in his bedroom because reasons, which he says he can modify for wrist usage (because more reasons).
Demonstrating his intelligence in his second story (The Amazing Spider-Man #1), he tells the guy paying him for television appearances to make the check out to “Spider-Man” because he’s not giving out his real name. He then takes this check to a bank. This may astonish you, but in a surprising concession to reality for a Silver Age comic book story, the bank teller refuses to cash the check without a valid form of ID. I know, right? I’m not sure whether this corroborates the case for or against organic webshooters: on the one hand, it’s not so clear Peter has the wherewithal to invent something like that (although at that point in the story, it’s not impossible he found them in Reed Richards’ trash); on the other hand, maybe a dope who’s a bit naive about how checks work is exactly the guy who fails to patent his amazing synthetic spider silk.
I kinda like the ’77 Spider-Man costume; it looks like a frugal youth drew the lines with an El Marko rather than the whatever-that-was Maguire had.
I never saw the Dr. Strange movie, but Spider-Man definitely shows the serious flaws of every genre adaptatio through the 70s and into the 80s, at least- not getting the source material at all. Effects technology was not up to comics, so productions gave up and cheaped out, villains and supporting characters were marshmallowed if they were lucky, but there was maybe a wilful refusal to read some source material and know what made the lead character(s) tick. So comics fans were unimpressed, and any new audience was reinforced in their belief that this comic book stuff was a waste of time.
I’m glad Marvel finally figured this out. Maybe DC will, eventually. I have lost hope that J. J. Abrams will.
@29/eric: There are different areas of knowledge, and expertise in one doesn’t guarantee expertise in another. Peter Parker was a precocious kid who always loved science, so he’d spent years studying science and experimenting in his bedroom, so that was something he knew well. But he was also a 15-year-old kid with an allowance, and Uncle Ben and Aunt May had probably taken care of money matters for him, so he didn’t have experience with how checks worked. Heck, I was probably much the same way — at the age of 15, I could’ve rattled off a ton of information about astronomy and physics for you, but although I had a joint checking account with my father, I would’ve been pretty clueless about matters of money. Heck, I’m still pretty clueless about money. I’m better with abstract, conceptual things than I am with practical, everyday realities.
@30/sps49: Yeah, the ’77 Spidey costume was a pretty plausible translation of the comics costume to reality. It had the key features — the Mylar lenses (which seemed to be cannibalized from mirrored sunglasses, which is probably what Peter would’ve done), the webshooter (well, just the one), and the utility belt — just not as unrealistically miniaturized and flat underneath the costume as they were in the comics. It was certainly more faithful than the Doctor Strange and Captain America costumes from the same era. For some reason, in the early days, DC heroes had better luck getting their costumes adapted accurately for TV than Marvel heroes did.
@19: I stand corrected; I haven’t seen Civil War or Homecoming (not really interested in the former; definitely want to see the latter, but I’m waiting for the DVD. I assumed that, even if they didn’t tell his origin story per se, they still portrayed him as just starting out. I suppose whether it’s reasonable to keep him in high school for three consecutive movies depends on how much in-universe time those three movies span.
@29 – Having the bank not cash is check is not a surprising concesion to reality for a Silver Age comic, because Marvel’s whole thing was having heroes who had real, human problems.
Hey folks! Due to a variety of deadline and other circumstances, I’m not going to be able to do the Great Superhero Movie Rewatch this week. It’ll be back next week — possibly delayed due to Dragon Con (where I’ll be this weekend — here’s my schedule) — but it’ll be there!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Hey folks! My rewatch of the Reb Brown Captain America TV movies will go up on Friday, if all goes well. And it will just be those — I’ll save Howard the Duck for down the line.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I never saw the Dr Strange movie, nor was I aware of it until about 25-30 years ago, aparantly I wasn’t the only one…According to Stan Lee it originally aired against the Roots sequel mini series which naturally attracted much more attention, and Stan was largely didapounted as he was generally pleased with the results…As for Spoder Man, missed the pilot movie until it’s 1990’s airings on USA/Sci Fi, though I did watch the TV series, which I remember liking and being disappointed when it was cancelled (hey I was 9-10 years old at the time)…Reflecting back, and based on watching USA/Sci Fi airings and the Rhino Video releases, I could see it was flawed but had potential…Overall I think that the aspects that made Spider-Man popular didn’t translate well to the TV budgets and sensitivities of the day, I’m sure that a wise cracking Spidey rounding up his colorful Rogues Gallery as seen in the comics was deemed too reminicent of the Batman TV series, which they felt the need to avoid for several reasons…I also susepecr budgetary constraints is why the series never featured the likes of Mary Jane, Flash Thompson, the Osborne, etc (and limited appearances by Robbie and Aunt May) to avoid paying rights fees for the characters…Julie was a poor replacement for MJ/Gwen, though it’s easy too see that Rita and Captain Barbera were likely stand ins for Glory Grant and Captain Stacey..
CLB totally agree on the score…Got a bit of a reprise in Spider-Man 3 from what I recall, and one of those Sax pieces remains something of an ear worm for me till this day!