Good Thing, Bad Thing: Spiderman

Hello everyone, Kieran here, it’s time for another Good Thing, Bad Thing.

The Spectacular Spiderman (2008-2009)

In a nutshell: my favorite incarnation of Spiderman in any media, ever.  I like this better than any Spiderman show, movie, or comic, ever.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Yes, yes, yes. I know, the art is pretty terrible.  It’s what turns off most people at first.  It’s what turned me off at first.

Trust me, you get used to it pretty fast.  I actually think the art style works really well for most characters.  There are a few characters though, *cough* Doctor Octopus *cough*, that just don’t fit the art style.


My advice: Get over how the art looks and watch a few episodes.

So what does make this show good? 

Find out for yourself.

The characters in this show are fucking amazing.  Peter is actually funny, something almost no incarnation of Spiderman manages to get right.  
A lot of people liked how “The Amazing Spiderman” had Gwen Stacy as the love interest instead of Mary Jane, and this show has that too.  Oops, spoilers. Well, not really.  

And all of the characters feel like real people, and most of them have a surprising amount of depth.  Characters you see early on that you assume are just filler end up growing and changing over time.  I’ve never seen anyone give Flash Thompson real character development before.

Now, let’s talk about the villains.  

Most of Spiderman’s villains are usually kinda goofy, but this show actually formulated one long story to tie all of the villains together.  All of them make sense existing at the same time in this world, and best of all, they’re all set up ahead of time.
Every single villain is introduced before they become a villain, except for the Vulture since he’s the villain in the first episode.  But everyone else is introduced long before they become a supervillain, so you should watch it all in order. You get to meet Doc Ock before he becomes a villain, see him as a person, and watch as he becomes a monster, and the same goes for almost everyone.

They even make all the shitty villains no one likes really really interesting.  The Shocker, the most boring villain ever, is made into this really cool, cocky, Texan hitman who’s introduced a few episodes before he gets his suit/powers.
The main villain of most of the series is a very minor villain from the comics, who they made into one scary mutherfucker.
Okay fine, Mysterio is still kinda lame, but they did their best.

Everything about this show is done with such care.  The famous Venom story arc where Peter has the black suit before Eddie Brock does?  Yeah, that happens way before Venom starts being a villain.  

Planning.

Also, as a quick note, this show literally has some of the best storyboarded fight scenes I’ve never seen in animation.  Their interpretations for how these people powers, especially Peter’s, works is incredible.  The shitty art style makes it much easier to animate which leads to fucking ridiculously awesome action.

So you might be wondering, if this show is so great, why did it get cancelled? It was pretty popular, but the studio sold the tv show rights to Spiderman.

Rating: I’ve watched this show many times. I’m gonna watch it many, many more times.

I invite you to do the same.

Ultimate Spiderman (2012- )

In a nutshell: Spiderman+Scrubs+Anime+shitty writing=dogshit

It’s funny that this art style is much less cartoony than the art style of the Spectacular Spiderman, and yet this show feels infinitely more cartoony and infantile.

I......... I really don’t know what to say about this show.....
just...... why god?
why?

This show is so bad I don’t even want to talk about it.  

I’ve watched a number of episodes and I literally hate everything besides the art style.

I’m not saying I like the art style.  I really like Spiderman looks like when he’s in costume, (that picture I posted above) and some of the background stuff is nice to look at.  But do I like the art style overall? I really don’t.  

I find the character designs to be a little hollow, and lacking in any passion.  No one stands out very much.  

And that's also only the art style for about half of the show. This is what it looks like the other half.

So besides the design of Spiderman in costume, I actually think I have zero compliments for this piece of garbage.

If you still think I'm just a whiny bitch, just watch this clip:

This is seriously what every episode is like

It really does feel like Spiderman+Scrubs.  Literally, like every 4 seconds Peter will have these ridiculous daydreams that aren’t funny at all.  And most of these daydreams involve ridiculously cartoony animation that looks terrible.  And Peter will just as often do a soliloquy, that thing they do in plays where one character talks directly to the audience and everyone behind him is frozen in time.  It’s so distracting and unnecessary.
It’s like every few seconds when he has a daydream, the show suddenly turns into Adventuretime, except sucky.

Oh, by the way.  This show is really just an excuse to shoehorn in as many marvel characters as possible. which i don’t mind.  

But we aren’t introduced to them gradually, so we don’t care.  Spectacular Spiderman introduced characters to us before they became superheroes or supervillains, so we got a chance to get to know them and see them as people.  But this is just “Hey kids, look! Spiderman is fighting Doctor Doom, who you don’t know anything about,” and the whole point in them putting in more Marvel characters is to generate more publicity for a lot of their upcoming works.

Oh, and Spiderman is given tons of gadgets by Nick Fury.  He gets a web shooting motorcycle, and a suit of armor almost identical to the one that Iron Man has, and it even shoots lasers.

If I’m watching Spiderman, I want to see him spin webs, and jump and shit.  I don’t want Spiderman with a jetpack and lasers.
Also, the only reason Spiderman would need a motorcycle is to be able to sell toys of that motorcycle.

This is a piece of crap show made for the sole purpose of selling toys.  Everything’s just completely random and nothing means anything.

RATING: Fuck you Disney