[COLUMN] Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Remixes the Marvel Hero for a New Era | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains very light spoilers for the first two episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, now streaming on Disney+.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man premiered this week on Disney+, a fresh and exciting take on the wall-crawling, web-slinging wonder that offers a bold reimagining of the Spider-Man mythos.

One of the biggest issues facing Marvel Studios has been an ageing fanbase. A young couple that went on their first date to see Iron Man could be taking their kids to see Deadpool & Wolverine. As the franchise goes on, its core audience ages out of the 18-34 demographic that is a key consumer of such media. As such, there is a tangible need to recruit a new and younger audience of fans to replace those that might be “ageing out” of their devotion to the brand.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) has made concessions to a younger audience, most notably in trying to cultivate a new and more diverse generation of characters within their films and shows: Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) in Ms. Marvel, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) in Hawkeye and so on. However, these characters have often struggled to find their own space as the franchise grows increasingly nostalgic.

This problem is not unique to the MCU. Disney has faced similar issues with its Star Wars franchise, struggling to reconcile its desperate attempts to pander to an older audience with the necessity of drawing in new viewers. The results are not encouraging. It’s telling that younger audiences didn’t seem to respond to the youth outreach of Skeleton Crew, a show that tried to appeal to a new generation of fans by simply offering hand-me-down nostalgia for 1980s kids’ fare.

Star Trek has faced similar issues. It is very telling that the first of the new wave of Star Trek shows to be cancelled rather than to end organically was Star Trek: Prodigy, the only new series that was consciously designed to welcome new and younger viewers into the framework of the larger Star Trek universe. If these brands are to continue in perpetuity – and it seems that they will, whether or not that is a good idea – they need to find a way to speak to younger viewers.

This is a large part of what makes Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man so appealing. It feels like a genuinely modern take on the classic Spider-Man mythology that is very interested in speaking directly to a younger audience without feeling the need to excessively pander to the expectations of older fans who insist that a particular property remain frozen in place. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a love letter to Spider-Man, but one written with modern audiences in mind.

To be fair, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man features its fair share of corporate synergy. The first episode features a guest appearance from Doctor Stephen Strange (Robert Atkin Downes), tying the master of the mystic arts to Peter Parker’s (Hudson Thames) origin story. While this could be read as an allusion to the deep connections between the two characters – most obviously the influence of artist Steve Ditko – it feels more like an allusion to Spider-Man: No Way Home.

In the first couple of episodes, there are allusions to Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the “Stark Arc Reactor.” A framed photograph of Norman Osborne (Colman Domingo) shaking hands with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) hangs in the hallowed halls of Oscorp. The trailers have already revealed that Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) will cameo, nicely prefiguring the launch of Daredevil: Born Again. There are much more pronounced points of intersection later in the season.

To give the show credit, it uses some of these elements in interesting and clever ways that exist in conversation with the larger body of Spider-Man media that Marvel Studios has produced over the past decade. Still, it can occasionally feel a little bit heavy-handed, as if the company is worried that audiences might somehow forget that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is tied to the most successful film franchise in the history of the world.

At its core, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man draws heavily from the classic Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita era of The Amazing Spider-Man. Boiling the show down to its essence, it is a teenage soap opera about the complicated interpersonal dynamics of high school and the challenges of navigating friendships at a point where a young person is deciding who they want to be. It is much more of a Spider-Man story than any of the recent live action trilogy.

There is a beautiful sequence in the premier, in which Spider-Man captures a thief who stole money from a pizzeria. He returns her and the money to the owner (Ogie Banks), but makes an impassioned plea that the owner understand the thief’s desperation and moment of weakness. It’s a sensitive and humane moment, one that understands the inherent humanity of Spider-Man in the context of a superhero genre that is increasingly detached from such concerns. It is pure Spider-Man.

Perhaps influenced by the success of the animated Spider-Verse movies, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man leans heavily into its comic book origins. The opening credits close with a single image, the title of the show and the credits for the writer and director, recalling a classic comic book title page. At various points, the screen breaks into panels, which allows for inventive compositions and playful transitions. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is not afraid to be a comic book show.

However, creator and head writer Jeff Trammell has worked hard to modernize that template, to find a way to make the classic Spider-Man story speak to a younger generation. This is obvious from the opening credits, which are set to “Neighbor Like Me” by The Math Club, featuring Relaye & Melo Makes Music. It is a hip-hop remix of the classic 1960s cartoon theme song, and it feels like a mission statement for the series as a whole.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man draws inspiration from a variety of sources. It is in conversation with versions of the character younger viewers will have encountered in other media. The cliffhanger ending of the first episode, in which Peter comes home to find a sports car parked outside, obviously riffs on the character’s introduction to the MCU in Captain America: Civil War, except this time the billionaire visiting him is Norman Osborn, not Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.).

When Peter swings through New York early in the second episode, it is animated in such a way as to evoke the beloved traversal mechanics of the recent Spider-Man games on the Playstation. As Peter swings through the city, his text messages are read aloud by the actors playing the characters, recalling the use of voicemails in those Spider-Man games to flesh out characters and motivations. There is an understanding of the context that younger viewers have for Spider-Man.

There are other modern touches. Lee and Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man was a product of its era. It reflected the culture and mood of its moment, which meant that it portrayed a very homogenous vision of New York City. In contrast, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man offers a much more diverse vision of the city. “I wanted to make sure New York felt inclusive and representative of present day New York,” explained Trammell. “We’re seeing all types of people, colors and creeds.”

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man gives Peter a more ethnically diverse pool of friends, one more reflective of contemporary New York. These are drawn from across Marvel continuity. Peter’s best friend is Nico Minoru (Grace Song), a character from the cult comic book Runaways. Peter’s crush is no longer Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane Watson, but Pearl Pangan (Cathy Ang), a Filipino character who made her first comic book appearance less than a decade ago.

The show also makes a choice to change the ethnicities of existing characters to better reflect contemporary New York City. Norman Osborn is reimagined as a Black man. Despite the casting of Oscar nominee Colman Domingo, who would be a casting coup in any role, the announcement prompted a sadly inevitable racist backlash. In an era where Disney seems to be aggressively retrenching any gesture towards inclusivity, it is a refreshing choice.

Indeed, it is almost surprising that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man chose to focus on Peter Parker instead of the Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), the younger and newer version of Spider-Man who stars in the Spider-Verse movies and was created by Brian Michael Bendis over a decade ago to better reflect a more diverse America. Then again, the same observation could be made about Jon Watts’ Spider-Man trilogy, which seems to merge Peter and Miles into a single character.

However, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man explores Peter’s place in this diverse New York. The show’s most interesting conceit is its reimagining of Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Byrd), the classic Spider-Man villain known as Tombstone. Lonnie is reimagined as Peter’s classmate, a star football player and Pearl’s boyfriend. The show consciously and cleverly parallels Lonnie and Peter’s journeys in a way that demonstrates a very strong and very clear social conscience.

Lonnie is friendly, charming and charismatic. However, he is also African American and poor. In the show’s first episode, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man follows Lonnie home, allowing the audience to understand that he lives a very different life than Peter. It also parallels their arcs. As Peter falls under the influence of billionaire industrialist Norman Osborn, Lonnie finds himself recruited by local gang leader Big Donovan (Leilani Barrett). It’s the same story, in a different register.

At a time when major studio franchises seem unsure who to talk to younger audiences, how to reconfigure iconic properties to resonate with younger generations, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is proof that there is life in these familiar icons yet, and that Spider-Man can be just as fresh now as he was when he was created over sixty years ago.