Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (Episode 1 & 2) : A hit or a meh!?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man boasts a promising start, but is also marred by a touch of averageness. With an unconventional aesthetic layout and a slight lack of novelty, the show, in our opinion, falls squarely in the middle of the yardstick.

The latest TV outing from the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ (MCU), produced by Marvel Studios Animation, was released some hours back, and all I can say for now is that it is either in a smash or a meh (I won’t call it a ‘miss’) region for now. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man begins with the lighter, carefree, teen mood similar to how it does in the MCU’s Spider-Man movies. Even though each character’s story arc is very distinct from the others, the characters occasionally use the same background music from the MCU, which makes it obvious that the events of this program take place on a different parallel universe. Two episodes of the show aired today, and going forward, one episode will be released every Wednesday. Let’s delve more into the show and its various essences.

About the show

The first episode of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man starts with a brief flashback sequence showcasing the tale of how Peter Parker got bit by a spider and became the friendly neighborhood superhero as the city admired him to be. Sometime later, he has established his name within his town and is at the verge of balancing his double life involving his school life, his friends (particularly the Wiccan Nico Minoru, who probably has a crush on him), his Aunt May, against all the baddies he would face in his day-to-day life. Peter Parker also has a crush for Pearl Pangan with whom he had history with but in a different unsynchronized fashion, but she doesn’t see him that way at all and is in a relationship with fellow student Lonnie Lincoln (who is the infamous supervillain Tombstone, in the comics).

In the second episode, Peter Parker would later, in his own apartment, meet the well-known industrialist, Norman Osborn, who provides a paid internship in his own multinational corporation, Oscorp. Norman apparently is impressed with Pete’s academic performance, and the offer he made for Pete was just too vast in terms of potential for the latter to refuse. Peter gets selected to be apprenticed under Dr. Carla Connors, who works in energy research (as anyone might notice, she is another variant of Dr. Curt Connors, a.k.a. The Lizard). Both Carla and Pete bond well, which even infuriates Dr. Bentley Wittman, who is actually in charge of the kids. This makes it even more difficult for Pete to handle his circle. The second episode ends with a suspenseful tail-end moment, trying to hook us up for the upcoming installments in the show.

Review

First of all, the voice artists did a great job with bringing out the necessary aura required for the characters. The actor who voices Spidey in particular reminds you of Tom Holland in most cases. Even Aunt May and her voice do the same thing (in fact, similar to the storyline in the MCU, she lives in an apartment building with Pete). All these could be another modus for making the alternative earth factor more obvious to the viewers, just like I mentioned before.

The animation style is also kind of interesting here. There is the essence of the X-Men ’97 series, which follows a ‘somewhat hybrid form of animation.’. But again, the swing scenes for me reminisced the 2003s animated series Spider-Man: The New Animated Series, starring Neil Patrick Harris as the web slinger. In fact, that show was built on CGI animation. Another trait of the animation type here was the fact that at times, characters moved as if they were constructed using stop-motion tools. Of course, the aim, as the creators once said, was to give Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man a ‘moving comic book-like outlook,’ and from the looks of it, they have succeeded well so far.

The tone is consistent and similar to how it’s portrayed in the MCU Spider-Man films, to the point of wondering whether this show takes place before the events of Captain America: Civil War (the movie that had the first onscreen appearance of Tom Holland as Spider-Man). But the creators themselves have made it all clear about their intent, and gladly we don’t need to bother ourselves thinking about that xD. In many ways, this series could entertain the many bunch of fans who love Tom as Spider-Man.

On the negative side, there isn’t much unique or immensely exhilarating here. Probably a lot of it might have been caused by the ‘supersaturation’ within the whole CBM genre itself. Apart from the animation and the new avatar of a novice Spider-Man, there isn’t much novelty enough. But again, the last episode that came out ended with a different tail end and is enough to bring some promising views for the show.

Personal Opinion

I admit that we are still a far cry from generating an actual opinion about Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, as we only got two episodes. But again, I’d wish they would add more interesting ‘WTF just happened’ (no, we are not talking about What The Fuss, btw😉) moments in the coming episodes. And by that, I’d say that the intensity should be something higher than what they did in the end of the second episode. There is potential for exploring the character arc here. I don’t know what kind of major ‘big action event’ they are planning for the end of the show, but I just hope that it’ll be anything that’s good enough to make this show a memorable event for the future generations to come. I’m saying this particularly because I’m perfectly aware of what happened with Agatha: All Along. While Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is undoubtedly a far more interesting watch than that, my over-apprehensive nature kind of makes me a bit worried because of the past.

Anyway, let’s hope for the best and encourage it more if they’d engage us in a much better fashion than they did so far.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is currently streaming on Disney + Hotstar