Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
There has been a lot of buzz and controversy surrounding the release of the non-MCU animated project, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man on Disney Plus, especially in the wake of trying to potentially live up to X-Men 97.
But reviews are in and so far, the show appears to be stellar. That’s judging by a current perfect 100% critic score, and an also-solid 81% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It should be said that this is a low number of critic reviews in, just ten so far. But while it may drop, that’s an incredibly strong start for a project many were skeptical of, myself included.
A perfect 100% would be the highest-rated Marvel project in history though no, it probably won’t stay there. Also on top are Black Panther (96%), Avengers: Endgame (94%) and Iron Man (94%) for movies, and X-Men 97 (99%), Ms. Marvel (98%) and Agents of SHIELD (96%) for shows. My guess it drops below all of those eventually, but yes, very strong start.
Spider-Man
For a long while now, the animation style of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man has been critiqued with its low framerate (it seriously feels like about 15 fps at best) and it’s generally odd look. But I can attest that even though yes, there probably were about a dozen different ways this could have been animated better, you do get used to it pretty quickly and the show is compelling enough to eventually ignore it altogether. The action is solid.
The show made headlines as recently as yesterday when the show’s Spider-Man voice actor Hudson Thames said that his “biggest fear was that [the show]
was gonna be annoying and woke,” which drew criticism from progressives and caused some head-scratching from anti-woke folks given that “race swapping” for characters like Norman and Harry Osborne had been considered “woke” by them for a while. It’s certainly an odd quote and for some, it has put them off the show entirely just a day before release.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will run for ten episodes total, and there are two out today to get a taste of it. The airing schedule is odd. It will be three at a time for two weeks, then two at a time for the finale. Not sure what Disney’s rush is, but that’s what’s happening.
The first episode is compelling and features a near-instant cameo from a big Marvel name. The show seems like it’s going to thread other Marvel characters into the story more than many recent Spider-Man projects. The overall vibe I’m getting from this is DC’s My Adventures with Superman, which has better animation, but I can feel a lot of similarities in terms of the adaptation of the characters.
We’ll see how high these review scores remain, and what audiences think as more people watch. Stay tuned.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.