Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Trailer Gets Unexpected Criticism
Marvel left a 2024 parting gift the day before New Year’s Eve, and it pretty much sums up their output over the past few years. It also hilariously seems to have pissed off almost everyone. Their latest offering was a trailer for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, the upcoming Disney+ animated series following the early years of everyone’s favorite webslinger (by which I mean Peter Parker) learning to be Spider-Man and meeting… versions… of his supporting cast and rogues gallery. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man premieres on Disney+ on January 29, 2025. You can watch the trailer below:
This show looks like it gets nothing right. The dialogue is horrendous (“Parker, out!” made my eyes roll like roller skate wheels), the animation sucks, the rap version of the old Spider-Man theme ruins a beloved piece of superhero music, Spidey’s personality is so awkward it’s off-putting, and they appear to be recycling the Tony-Stark-as-mentor plot from the MCU films with Norman Osbourne. And, of course, there’s the woke DEI stuff, changing the Osbournes’ race and seemingly making Harry Osbourne a trans-something, or whatever variety of the ever-increasing alphabet soup they want to call it. That’s what’s getting the most attention because people are so sick and tired of this that every new instance of it feels like a sledgehammer to a different toe. This show is coming out at the exact wrong time, when the public’s distaste for woke garbage appears to be registering with Hollywood, and I think Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will be another casualty of the audience reaching their cringe limit. Marvel must be thanking their lucky stars that they decided this show wasn’t MCU canon (not that they care much about that anymore anyway). But what’s really funny is that the Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man trailer isn’t just getting pushback from the anti-woke side of the argument. Here’s Beau DeMayo, the fired showrunner of X-Men ‘97, with his take on race-swapping the Green Goblin:
Here let me rephrase
Hey @MarvelStudios please stop race-swapping white villains to black people. It reads “funny.”
Kang. High Evolutionary. Norman Osborn. Electro. Mordo.
— Beau DeMayo (@BeauDemayo) December 30, 2024
That is hilarious. I’m aware that DeMayo is only saying this about villains because he thinks it implies that black people are inherently sinister, and he seems fine with race-swapping white heroes. But I don’t care if it’s limiting and hypocritical; it’s yet another salvo against woke-ifying entertainment. I’m sure the Marvel and Disney folks were patting themselves on the back by making Norman Osbourne black, but they’re getting a very public insinuation of racism over it. And on a certain level, that’s fair; if you’re changing a character’s race, you’re obviously making some kind of statement, especially in animation, where the “we’re just looking for the best actor” canard doesn’t fly. Roscoe Lee Brown voiced the Kingpin on Spider-Man in the 90s, and he was outstanding; nobody cared that a black actor was voicing a white character because he was perfect. The same goes for the great James Avery voicing the Shredder, a Japanese character, on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the people behind Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man made a conscious choice to depict Norman Osbourne as black, and if they won’t come right out and say, “We did it because we wanted to make the show more diverse” or some other excuse, the only assumption we can make is that they thought being black would enhance Norman’s villainy.
Do I think that’s why they made Norman Osbourne black in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man? Of course not; they did it because they love to virtue signal via race-swapping. But the blowback on it from their own side (keeping in mind Beau DeMayo has sour grapes with Marvel) is delicious because of how phony their self-righteousness is. And that’s the trap you fall into when you ally yourself with the woke brigade: everything offends them, and nothing is ever good enough for them, so you will inevitably become a target of their ire no matter how much you try to placate them. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man looks like a complete train wreck independent of the woke stuff (which is not limited to the Osbournes; did you notice Peter Parker seems to be the only white guy in New York City outside of a couple of villains?), and another instance of a great Spider-Man title wasted on an awful Spider-Man production, but if Beau DeMayo’s sentiment gains any traction, it’ll be fun to watch them not even be able to take any smug satisfaction in their obnoxious messaging.
Let us know what you think of the trailer for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in the comments!
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