052 Spider-Man (THE MAKING OF)

Retro Grade Podcast

“OUT, AM I?“
On this week’s episode, we continue talking about Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film, released in 2002. In the first episode we focused on the story and on the style, how Sam Raimi went about filming the web swinger in his first Hollywood outing. Now, we go back to the very beginning of Spider-Man, back to when he was created in 1962. We go over his creation, and how he was result of a collaboration between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. We talk about his first comic book appearance in Marvel Comic’s Amazing Fantasy No.15 which led to his own series The Amazing Spider-Man. From there we talk about the various forms that Spider-Man took, from a 1977 television show on CBS to a Japanese revisioning of the character.

With Spider-Man’s popular continuing to grow, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood planned to capitalize on his popularity in 1985. But that would take multiple decades, with multiple production companies vying for the rights to the character, and everyone suing and countersuing in order to have a chance at making his big screen debut. Numerous directors’ names were thrown around, but ultimately Raimi got the job. We talk about all of that, and why we think he was the best one!

Afterwards, we go into the actually production, what went into the casting of the film, the hurdles Sam had to go through during that, the choice in trying to ground the film’s sillier ideas so they could mesh well with the real life setting of New York, including the Green Goblin’s costume and the use of the organic web shooters. We talk about how this film could have been rated R for some of the depictions of violence, and what the team did to avoid that. We cover the film’s marketing, and the ultimate U-turn the marketing team had to do in order to remove all images of the Twin Towers after the events of September 11th, 2001, and how real-life events have an effect of audiences interpretation of media, regardless of whether or not it chose to make a statement.

Lastly, we briefly talk about the newest Marvel film, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness since it’s Sam Raimi’s return to directing after a 9 year hiatus. We talk about the good, the bad, and the weird things we saw in the film and in a spoiler free discussion. So sit back and enjoy our final episode on the original Spider-Man film!
Music is from Triune Digital and audio clips pulled from movies we will be reviewing in other episodes.

Artwork by @jannelle_o