Return to the Spider-verse
Nov. 11th, 2020 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe time commitment to “watch a movie” wouldn’t seem to be excessive, but what with one thing and another it’s not easy for me to block out two hours or more. Perhaps this really is “just what others do, not what ‘has’ to be done,” but I can wonder about “a badly abraded attention span,” too. On the weekend, though, I did manage to open up at last my Blu-Ray of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, which I’d seen at the movies on noticing the enthusiasm of others for its animation and liked enough then.
If there was one thing I’d wondered about then, it was the movie’s lining up of “Spider-Men”; I did grapple with the thought of “recycling corporate intellectual property over and over and over again because it’s too much of a risk to try and sell anything new.” At the same time, though, I did worry this thought might be twisted into “resenting the mere thought of diversity.” In any case, I wasn’t “in desperate need of distraction from the real world” right then.
The animation might have been becoming more familiar, more “just computer animation” on the smaller screen, but I did get to consider the thought of “having picked up on the ‘original’ Spider-Man via cultural osmosis.” Years of preceding comic books with no easily available sources for them might have intimidated me in my youth even as I started off with Marvel’s old Star Wars comics and moved on to their Transformers comics; I had, however, been able to read the Spider-Man comic strip in my family’s newspaper (although part of the way through the 1980s it seemed to shift from “battling supervillians” to “addressing with-it topics” and come to seem less interesting) and had caught the original animated cartoon here and there in re-runs (and the current movie briefly acknowledged that). For that matter too, I’d read some of the “Spider-Ham” comic books back then, if enough to think a sort of “Carl Barks” character had been converted into sort of a “Tex Avery” character for the movie. I am conscious of the first live-action Spider-Man being pitted against Attack of the Clones eighteen years ago and my already-established bad habit of “resenting any ‘big special effects movie’ that seems to roll up uncritical praise” kicking in, which could have done its own part to hold me back from the omnipresent live-action superhero movies of recent years. It had taken this movie being produced in animation to make it stand out for me.
If there was one thing I’d wondered about then, it was the movie’s lining up of “Spider-Men”; I did grapple with the thought of “recycling corporate intellectual property over and over and over again because it’s too much of a risk to try and sell anything new.” At the same time, though, I did worry this thought might be twisted into “resenting the mere thought of diversity.” In any case, I wasn’t “in desperate need of distraction from the real world” right then.
The animation might have been becoming more familiar, more “just computer animation” on the smaller screen, but I did get to consider the thought of “having picked up on the ‘original’ Spider-Man via cultural osmosis.” Years of preceding comic books with no easily available sources for them might have intimidated me in my youth even as I started off with Marvel’s old Star Wars comics and moved on to their Transformers comics; I had, however, been able to read the Spider-Man comic strip in my family’s newspaper (although part of the way through the 1980s it seemed to shift from “battling supervillians” to “addressing with-it topics” and come to seem less interesting) and had caught the original animated cartoon here and there in re-runs (and the current movie briefly acknowledged that). For that matter too, I’d read some of the “Spider-Ham” comic books back then, if enough to think a sort of “Carl Barks” character had been converted into sort of a “Tex Avery” character for the movie. I am conscious of the first live-action Spider-Man being pitted against Attack of the Clones eighteen years ago and my already-established bad habit of “resenting any ‘big special effects movie’ that seems to roll up uncritical praise” kicking in, which could have done its own part to hold me back from the omnipresent live-action superhero movies of recent years. It had taken this movie being produced in animation to make it stand out for me.