Originally published at: A secret YouTube archive lets you compare disasters from the infamous SPIDER-MAN musical | Boing Boing
…
5 Likes
The idea always seemed ridiculous to me, but wow, I had no idea.
I wonder who the audience was for this…
3 Likes
Once you see it, you can’t un-see it, and therein lies the problem.
4 Likes
Obviously someone on Broadway saw Marvel adaptations raking in eleventy skillion dollars a year and said “ME WANTEE!”
I guess at least on paper the idea of a superhero musical should have had more mainstream popular appeal than a musical about the guy on the ten-dollar bill, but as with many such things it all comes down to execution.
7 Likes
Me no likey.
3 Likes
Oh, it was way before that. It started out as an idea back in 2002 and the creative team wasn’t fully assembled until 2005, all long before the current batch of Marvel movies. In all likelihood it was a desperate cash grab from Marvel as the company was in pretty dire financial straits at the turn of the century.
7 Likes
But after the first X-Men and Spider-Man movies had proven how popular and lucrative Marvel adaptations could be.
7 Likes
Successful Broadway musicals come in many forms, not all of them especially high-minded.
(It was nominated for ten Tony’s and won three!)
5 Likes
My favorite pop culture reference was the episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt when Titus auditioned for a part in the sequel. Part of the audition was to see if he could continue to perform after being hit by a falling Spider-Man.
9 Likes
That song was actually catchier than any of the ones in the clips I saw from the real musical.
3 Likes
I quite literally thought it was a dumbass idea just for Kimmy Schmidt.
Wow.
Today I Learned!
4 Likes
I’m half convinced that the silly joke musical Spider-Man Too: 2 Many Spider-Men from Kimmy Schmidt was the inspiration for the quite fun and non-terrible Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
6 Likes
They do pair well.
4 Likes
Not so. In 2009, Marvel Writer Dan Slott was asked to work on an Activision Spider-Man game called “Shattered Dimensions.” He copied what the game was doing and created Miles Morales, Spider-Noir and much of what appeared in “Into the Spider-verse.”
1 Like
Not sure what your source is on that but Wikipedia credits writers David Hine and Fabrice Sapolsky for creating the Spider-Man Noir character in 2009 (a year before that game came out) and writer Brian Michael Bendis for creating the Miles Morales character in 2011 (a year after that game came out). Morales is not one of the versions of Spider-Man who appears in “Shattered Dimensions.”
However Dan Slott did bring together many of the different Spider-Man characters together for the first time in the comics for his Spider-Verse storyline in 2014.
2 Likes
But somebody was buying tickets to these “previews.” Apparently not enough people, but still…
That one actually sounded (and was, according to friends who saw it), good, though. And it’s less ridiculous a premise, too.
1 Like
The game had various versions of Spider-Man. That’s were he got the idea for Morales. I wasn’t trying to imply the game created Miles and I was wrong about Noir.
Slott didn’t create any of the versions of Spider-Man you mentioned, he just wrote the Spider-Verse storyline in which they all teamed up for the first time.
There were already several different versions of Spider-Man spanning different comic book continuities (including Spider-Ham, Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Man 2099, Ultimate Spider-Man, etc.) long before Slott ever wrote the video game adaptation.
His Spider-Verse storyline was obviously a major inspiration for the movie though.
2 Likes
Miles Morales was created by Brian Michael Bendis in Ultimate Spider-Man in response to popular interest in Donald Glover being cast as Spider Man.
He’d been around for like 4 years before Slott wrote Spider-Verse.
4 Likes
