When watching the first official trailer for 2012’s ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’, one of the first things that caught this fanboy’s attention was that Peter Parker was shooting webs from what appeared to be his old-school web-shooters. I was never happy that ‘Spider-Man’s previous film incarnation from director Sam Raimi in 2002 had Peter Parker mutate to develop organic webs that fired from his wrists. Some of my fondest childhood memories of Spider-Man involve Pete running out of web fluid at the most inopportune times, so I was overjoyed to see them being used in the new film.
In a recent interview with Hero Complex, director Marc Webb talks about his decision to return to traditional mechanical web-slinging.
“I had a meeting with Stan Lee and we talked about the web-shooters. … I was curious about the incarnation of them [because] of course in the previous films [they went away from them] and we wanted to reestablish ourselves. That was one thing but the other thing was the fact that the web-shooters were able to dramatize Peter’s intellect and I thought that was really cool. … It was in the comics and we have a different design but it’s a cool element to have. It’s not something we over-use or over-exploit. To me, it’s something I remember from when I was a kid and thinking ‘It would be cool if I could build those.’”
Webb says that his team’s idea was to make the new Spider-Man costume design, including the web-shooters, into a reflection of the nerdy but different Peter Parker.
“With the costume and the web-shooters we wanted to emphasize that these are things that Peter Parker made and that he is special himself even if he feels like he’s an outsider.”
Me? I just hope that Spidey runs out of fluid and goes into a free-fall during at least one scene of the movie, because if that happens, my inner 10-year-old is going to be grinning from ear to ear.
‘The Amazing Spider-Man’, directed by Marc Webb, is set to swing into theaters on July 3, 2012 with stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Martin Sheen, and Sally Field.
