Spider-Man 2 vs. Into the Spider-Verse | Movie Death Match

26:10They are all part of the world building. Nothing is wasted in this movie and it is probably the best, or at least to me feels like the most accurate Peter Parker that we actually really get to see because we'll get into it, I'm sure, but Toby, as much as I love Spider-Man 2, leaves a bit to be desired, right? And so there is just magic in this movie from minute one. I mean, even early in the movie, when you find out that the Chris Pine, Peter Parker has died, and the idea of like New York City finding out that their hero has died was like, oh my God, like that hit me so hard. It even hits me hard now on rewatch, you know?

26:49We interrupt this broadcast for a special report. Sad news tonight. The hero known as Spider-Man has died after injuries related to another powerful earthquake in Brooklyn. Multiple sources are confirming that Peter Parker, a 26-year-old grad student in the car. I'm not scared. Operating as Spider-Man. We all have powers of one kind or another. But in our own way, we are all Spider-Man. And we're all counting on you. I think they're counting on me. Probably not you specifically. I think it's a metaphor. Even when it is something that somebody might call an Easter egg, you realize later on second watch, third watch, fourth watch, it has purpose.

27:38There is just nothing wasted. And yet it is thrilling. It is sweet. It is super funny. It makes you cry. I think I remember when we talked about this on Pop Culture Happy Hour, I think I had counted that I had cried three times or something like that. There is nothing unsatisfying about this movie in any way. And they don't do that by abandoning anything about Spider-Man. They do that by completely mining everything that has always made Spider-Man awesome. I mean, everything about it is just so fun. Agreed. I don't know about anyone else here, but when Peter tells Miles, he's proud of him. Oh, my God.

28:15Miles? Spider-Man? Wow, Miles! You're doing it on command. It's about time, right? I love you. I am so proud of you. I don't know about you, but I might have, I mean, just hearing Spider-Man, can you imagine Spider-Man telling you he's proud of you? Yeah. Would there be anyone better to tell you they're proud of you? I guess maybe a parent, I suppose. But right below that on the list for me would be Spider-Man. I mean, that's a good one. I think a lot of Spider-Man fans would feel that way. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of talk of it, at least initially, you know, comics were power fantasies aimed at primarily children who didn't have any agency yet or felt weak or felt bad.

28:56But yeah, just imagining, I mean, we were all adults when this film came out, but I can imagine being a viewer of Miles's age or younger. And yeah, that moment with, I hadn't even thought about that. But yeah, that must be very, very powerful. I mean, I think that is part of it, too, is like it takes me back to feeling that age, right? Even more than the other movies make me feel, you know, the age that Peter Parker is supposed to be in them. So, I mean, it just it just really has something special. What can you do? Buckle up, guys. This is going to take a while.

29:32All right. Never mind.

29:36The washer won't start and the laundry's already piled to the ceiling. Hopping on grandappliance.com. Great idea. I heard they have next day delivery. Uh-huh. I'm seeing that too. And they have a bunch of GE options in stock. Oh, that's great. We've always had good luck with GE appliances. This one looks perfect. Scheduling for tomorrow. Gosh, Grand really makes it easy. Another crisis averted by the team at Grand Appliance. Visit grandappliance.com today. Grand Appliance. Appliance experts since 1930. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I also led the team that created MTV, and my co-founders and I are celebrating MTV's 45th anniversary this month.

30:17On my podcast, Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, you'll hear the untold origin story from the people who built MTV from the ground up. I want my MTV! Those are powerful words. My. Something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word. Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y 'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports.

30:54Because let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalenka. Shout-outs to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi.

31:27You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened, we're interested in why everyone's talking about it. because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

31:44Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made?

32:16Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song ability. Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia Ayo Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

32:53All right, so we have our opening statements. We'll get into our first one, round one, the movies and their time. In this opening round, we'll discuss how these movies were received when they were new. Spider-Man 2 was 2004's second highest grossing film in the United States, significantly behind that year's champ, Shrek 2. Of course. Just ahead of The Passion of the Christ. Sharp. Another... What a time to be alive. Yeah, you know, it was a great time for IP. Another guy who loves being tortured on screen, you know. That's true. Who directed The Passion of the Christ? I don't know. Never mind.

33:24Never mind. I don't know. We already named Bryan Singer on this. Let's not make it any worse. Rushed into theaters just 26 months after Raimi's first Spider-Man. Spider-Man 2 got even stronger reviews than its precursor. John Dykstra, who had won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects on the original 1977 Star Wars, collected his second Oscar for the visual effects on the Spider sequel. He will believe a Spider-Man can fly or at least swing great distances. Meanwhile, by the time Into the Spider-Verse bowed in 2018, we were fully a decade into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We had already had a half dozen live-action Spider-Man features in the 21st century, not counting MCU movies like Captain America Civil War and Avengers Infinity War, where the Tom Holland Spider-Man is a significant supporting player.

34:11At this point, the MCU is the biggest thing in movies, but even the Sony Spider-Man movies regarded as disappointments, like Raimi's Spider-Man 3 or outright failures like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the Andrew Garfield, Mark Webb one, they were all huge moneymakers, even the ones we don't like. Far outgrossing, even good contemporaneous superhero movies like the Fox X-Men series or Batman Begins. You know, the Batman doesn't catch up to Spidey commercially until The Dark Knight. And then at the beginning of the year where Into the Spider-Verse will come at the end, we have Black Panther, which comes out in February, makes a billion dollars, proving that the demand for a Black Marvel superhero was there in force.

34:55It's interesting to me that Spider-Man 2 was an instant smash and Into the Spider-Verse was more of a grower. It grossed less than half what another Spider-Man adjacent movie, Venom, did, released just two months earlier. I mean, I mean, it does win an Oscar. It does win Best Animated Feature. And by the time the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, finally comes along, it more than doubles the domestic box office of the first one, which would tell us that audiences did catch up with it and embrace it. Well, nobody really wanted it into the Spider-Verse. I mean, that was the thing. Like, I remember seeing the trailers and people being like, why is this coming out?

35:31I mean, you rightly named that Tom Holland had taken over the role in the MCU. But I mean, it really was back to back to back, right? Like, he makes his first appearance in Civil War. That's 2016. Then they put out Homecoming. That's 2017. so it's like there's been all this waiting for him to actually join the MCU being Marvel's biggest character and then on top of that you have the fatigue of the fact that you did have the Andrew Garfield movies not that long before which felt already like so fast on top of the Raimi movies especially by like Hollywood standards and then here comes this animated movie that I mean we all know how amazing it ends up looking, but I really do remember the trailers and being like, what, what is this?

36:16Who asked for this? What's going on? That seemed to be the prevailing opinion at the time. Yeah. I remember being baffled, you know, like I had heard that there was an animated Spider-Man movie coming from the Cloudy with the Chance of Meatballs guys. So it's a comedy, which I mean, yes, and everything else. And then it came out and just knocked people's socks off. So you want to learn to be Spider-Man. Can you teach me? Yes, I can. Time to swing. Good, you're doing it. Double tap to release and whip it out again. Okay. Whip and release. You're a natural. Whip. Woo! Ah! Well, let's start by getting into these two screenplays specifically.

36:59In Spider-Man 2, original Spider-Man screenwriter David Koepp from, you know, Jurassic Park and Mission Impossible, all these huge 90s movies, Disclosure Day this year. He does not return. Sony hires Michael Chabon, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for his magnificent novel, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, which is in part about a comic book artist. And I see this now as being very similar to when Mario Puzo was hired to write the screenplay for Superman in the 70s, where he's this hot literary figure who turns in this bloated draft that Richard Donner said was completely unusable.

37:32There's not a trace of it in the movie. And by most accounts, nothing that Chabon wrote ended up in Spider-Man 2 either. The Spider-Man 2 shooting script is credited to Alvin Sargent, who is an old hand. He had won two screenwriting Oscars for Julia and Ordinary People. He was 77 years old when this movie came out. So not the guy who you'd expect to crack Spider-Man, right? This is the guy who really understands Peter Parker and his problems. And I think that had they been subtitling the Spider-Man movies then the way they are now, this one probably would have been called Spider-Man No More. We even quote the John Romita Sr.

38:07panel from The Amazing Spider-Man number 50 in the shot where Peter hangs it up. We see him walking down the alley and in the foreground, his discarded Spider-Man costume is in the trash can. So given all that, Matt, did Alvin Sargent, again, a man who belongs more to J. Jonah Jameson's generation than to Peter's, did he write the best Spider-Man screenplay? I mean, a case could and perhaps will right now be made that he did. He and all those names you mentioned. I think David Koepp did work on this movie at some point also. And Alfred Goff and Miles Miller from Smallville, I know, worked on it, too.

38:43I'm sure there's probably other people whose names have never been revealed who worked on it. These movies, there's always a million people. Carrie Fisher. It was Carrie Fisher. Yeah, maybe. Who knows? But I do think it is a very well-written movie. I think that it's a movie that stands up to rewatching. And one of the things you notice when you rewatch it is just how lovely all the various elements of it play together. The structure of it and the way that so much of the movie is built around that central dilemma between Peter Parker and Spider-Man. That the internal struggle is just everything in the movie is kind of built off of that architecture in a lovely way, including the way that they use Dr.

39:31Octopus, making him kind of both a mentor and a villain, making him a figure that Peter Parker in the beginning of the movie can really look up to. He has a life that you think Peter would aspire to have. He's a successful scientist. He's brilliant. He's got a beautiful and supportive wife who's like hanging out with him in his lab, pouring him tea and joking around. And it looks like he's got a pretty cushy setup. Yeah. And what does he say to him in that scene? He tells him. Parker, now I remember you. You're Connor's student. Tells me you're brilliant. He also tells me you're lazy. I'm trying to do better.

40:14Well, being brilliant is not enough, young man. You have to work hard. Intelligence is not a privilege. It's a gift. And you use it for the good of mankind. Which is another way of saying with great power comes great responsibility. And a moment later, he starts talking about his work as a scientist, and he's talking about harmonic convergence. and what you have in that scene are harmonic convergences between Dr. Octopus's philosophy and the philosophy that Spider-Man and Peter Parker live by. And little notes like that are sprinkled throughout the film. And you don't have to be paying attention, but if you are paying attention, you catch that stuff.

40:53There's lines like, I think it's Asif Manvi is the boss at the pizza place. And when he's yelling at Peter Parker, he says, to you, Parker, a promise means nothing. And the entire film is built around the promise. he makes to a dead Uncle Ben saying that, you know, that he will kind of carry on and be Spider-Man to prove that he's grown and that with great power must come great responsibility. And then the whole element of Mary Jane's subplot in this film and her part of the story, she's appearing on Broadway in The Importance of Being Earnest, a play about double lives, the scene that we see her in in the film Spider-Man 2.

41:34She's in a play. This is a film. It's very confusing. But the line that's said in the scene where Peter finally shows up to watch her is, I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. So, again, you're underlining all of the themes of the movie in this scene that also involves, you know, all of the stuff involving the play. There's all kinds of wackiness. and Sam Raimi comedy built into that, Bruce Campbell playing the guy who refuses to let Peter into the theater late. But again, harmonic convergences and resonances with the theme and even just the name of the play, the importance of being earnest.

42:17That is like another way of talking about why this movie is good. It is earnest. It believes in Spider-Man. This is not a movie that is, it's not like the current Marvel product, which is so snarky and ironic. And characters are always like deflating big emotional moments, saying something cute and quippy. And this movie has lots of comedy in it, but it believes so sincerely and so intensely in the Spider-Man character and him being a force for good and these ideas being valuable. and I think there was a period I can remember kind of right before the Tom Holland movies or maybe at the very beginning of them where the the the Raimi Spider-Man movies kind of fell out of popularity a little bit they were starting to seem kind of dated Spider-Man 3 wasn't great and people would say oh those movies they're old-fashioned and I feel like now people again have kind of come around to them and I think a big reason why there's a few reasons but I do think this is one of them, is that it has this kind of timeless love of Spider-Man and it's not cute about it.

43:30It's just so you can really feel that Sam Raimi believes this mishigas about this kid wearing a Spider-Man mask. He loves it. He believes in it. And I think a lot of the credit should go to the screenplay by Alvin Sargent and whoever else worked by the scenes, kind of crafting that and really helping that really come through the film, not just in the direction, but in the writing, the dialogue, the structure. Well, it's an excellent point about harmonic convergence and the scene about going to see the Oscar Wilde play. The one in Into the Spider-Verse where Miles' parents take him to see Spider-Man turn off the dark, really, to me, it was beautiful.

44:09It was a little too much. And thank God that Miles' mom is an ER nurse. All right, Daisy, where are you on Spider-Man 2 story-wise? I mean, I don't have anything to say in objection to any of those points about Spider-Man 2. I think that's all absolutely true. I think that's part of what makes that movie really lovely. I mean, I have such a visceral memory of how much I enjoyed seeing it when I saw it, like how thrilling it was. And that was after really liking the first one and just immediately being like, wow, like I didn't think you could make a sequel that was like so much stronger. I mean, it really was great.

44:48I love all of the things that Matt is rightly describing about Spider-Man 2, for sure. Getting into the screenplay of Into the Spider-Verse, where this is credited to Phil Lord and Bob Prischetti. So one of the producers, one of the three directors, but who knows? I mean, most comic book movies are more acts of synthesis than pure adaptation, right? Where we're choosing elements from different eras of the character and combining them in a new way. You and I spoke briefly about Supergirl, the current Supergirl, right? Which is the rare adaptation of a specific limited comic book series from just a few years ago, right?

45:27Which is quite unusual. But Into the Spider-Verse goes beyond even that. So, I mean, we're meeting the Miles Morales iteration of Spider-Man created in 2011 by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sarah Pacelli. So at the point this movie comes out, this character has only been in the comics for seven years, which is fairly unusual. Every other superhero movie we'd seen was about someone who had been around for decades. So we don't only get the familiar superhero origin story arc where Miles is acquiring superpowers, finding a mentor figure in the form of Jake Johnson's wonderful, depressed, divorced, out of shape Peter Parker from yet another dimension.

46:06Yes. And they're constantly commenting on his gut. Rude. And on top of all that, he has to discover that he lives in a multiverse and that there are variants of everyone he knows, all the heroes and villains of his own world. And this movie is still under two hours long. Like this is an astonishing feat of economy. I forget that all the time. And I'm shocked every time I go to watch it that it is. So for all that, is this the best written Spider-Man movie into the Spider-Verse? I do think it is quite the feat. And there is just something amazing about, as you said, it's under two hours. There is a density there that somehow manages to not be overwhelming.

46:50It manages to really just actually bring you in. Right. I think they do an incredible job of weaving in the backstory. And instead of it being something that could be off-putting because you feel like, oh, I don't know this, they approach it in a way where they're like, look, even if you don't actually know the specifics of Spider-Man, let's be real. If you've been alive, you've probably seen something. And they give you just enough of those references to kind of pull you in and bring you along. It is inviting instead of feeling like homework. and then on top of that i mean for a movie and i mean i do think this is part of the screenplay this is part of what works but for a movie that is telling you so much this movie is a mastery of showing and not telling like everything is building upon itself right it's an origin story but it doesn't feel like it's dwelling in that even as you're completely aware the entire time that you're in an origin story i mean that was one of the major conversations around comics movies for a while was like, okay, well, they're going to bring out a new character.

47:50That first movie is going to have to be an origin story. Are we all going to suffer through the origin story? And even though this is an origin story and that is referenced in the movie itself, it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel weighty in that way of like, well, first I just got to get through this like information. I got to get this backstory so that later there can actually be a story that has heart and stakes and all of that good stuff. No, it's all here. I also think that the The characterization of, you know, Miles is supposed to be in junior high and he feels like a very believable, very smart, capable New York junior high kid.

48:25That's weird. My pants shrink. I think I hit puberty. And I mean, they make jokes about puberty, but the actual like big feelings and the fact that he's reacting to so many things doesn't just feel like it's something that is happening because he's in a movie and they need him to react to them. They feel very true to being 13, 14 years old. Wait, why is the voice in my head so loud? What? Oh, are you okay? What? Why am I so sweaty? Why are you so sweaty? It's a puberty thing. I don't know why I said that. I'm not going through puberty. I did, but I'm done. I'm a man. I mean, it really is just beautifully woven, and you have multiple characters going through really satisfying character arcs that all feel very true for where they are in their lives, for where they are in this adventure, and for, you know, if you are a fan of Spider-Man, whether it's from the Raimi movies or whether it's from reading the comics for years or even if it's from seeing Turn Off the Dark, which weirdly, the whole second act of that show relied on you having seen the first two Raimi movies.

49:34They did not explain very much. It was not a good show. This actually manages to get all of that in there. And then, like you said, Like, it's never boring. You laugh, you cry, you really are taken on this adventure. And it's all under two hours. I mean, how could it not be the greatest script and actually achieve all of that? Yeah, I mean, I came into this without any prior relation. I mean, I was aware that there was a new version of Spider-Man in the comics, but I hadn't, you know, unlike Peter Parker, I was introduced to Miles Morales by this movie. And my classical conception of Spider-Man was so much what Matt was describing, the guy who's poor.

50:11You know, he's in a terrible apartment. You know, Aunt May needs her medicine. You know, he's unlucky in love. And to see that, you know, Miles is he has two loving parents. He's in this magnet school. You know, he has a lot of self-confidence. I was like, wait, I don't know about this. You know, can so the fact that the movie does find a way to still make him a vulnerable figure and an underdog pretty quickly is remarkable. and even though we do pick up this multiversal idea in the live action Spider-Man movies a few years later with Far From Home I feel like the closer live action analog to this is Deadpool and Wolverine right which I mean was a massive hit and a lot of people like it and a lot of people find it insufferable right because it's so self-impressed and so self-referential and how is this not that you know like even people who aren't wild about into the spider verse the objection i hear more is it's just sensory overload it's too much to take in no one says like it's too impressed with itself it's too winky winky it has that you know just that that ryan reynolds quality that i'm sure that's a screen persona that reynolds has decided to cultivate and lean into and but this doesn't have any any of that this is for such a self-aware movie, it is still tremendously emotional.

51:28And I don't know how they pulled that off. Yeah. I mean, I think to even speak to Matt's point about Spider-Man 2 and like you can feel that there is a love for Spider-Man and the character in the movie. I think that similarly, Into the Spider-Verse has a love for not only the individual character of Spider-Man, but what Spider-Man has meant to people and why and why for so long and how that character is different than those other big heroes that come from these different, unrelatable backgrounds, right? It really is celebrating that and not just in the sense of like, yes, diversity, because it was 2018.

52:04And yes, we were like a year and a half into Trump's first presidency, even though when they started making the movie, that is probably not where they thought we'd be. It doesn't feel like those things are done to be shoehorned. It feels like it is done with the eye towards like, Like, wow, this is one of the things that really became special about this character over time. And we're going to lean into celebrating that. And I think that when you come to something with that desire to actually like celebrate it and share it, as opposed to just making people feel like I see you because you like did the homework.

52:37Like, you know, like that's a whole different way of opening things up to people. So you can't help but feel that it is welcoming. I mean, as foolish as it would be to compliment Into the Spider-Verse, given my role here today, I do think that the, Chris, the answer to your question is like Deadpool and Wolverine is just using the multiverse as an excuse to throw these two actors together, throw a lot of jokes together, Easter eggs for the sake of Easter eggs. Like it is really just the shameless excuse to create this movie in the first place. And what Into the Spider-Verse does so well is that it uses I mean, the multiverse here is an essential element of what this film is about and what it is saying.

53:24Another thing that makes Spider-Man such a I think a reason that he does resonate in every form with people is, again, getting back to how frankly miserable he is as a person. And part of that is his loneliness. He is a lonely character. And I think a lot of certainly not me. I would have never felt this way as a 13 year old boy, but would have been like feeling lonely and feeling like nobody understands you. And you're a weirdo. You're a nerd. You're a dweeb. You're different. And, you know, that you're just lonely. And one of the beautiful things about Into the Spider-Verse is it uses that as kind of one of the most important themes of the movie.

54:05Over and over when the characters, the Spider-Men slash women slash hams introduce themselves, you know, they're always saying, I'm the one and the only Spider-Man. That's how it begins. For the last however many years, I was the one and the only Spider-Man. And then when Miles first meets the Peter Parker, the Chris Pine Spider-Man, the thing that he says to him is, I thought I was the only one. You're like me. I thought I was the only one. You're like me. I don't want to be. I don't think you have a choice, kiddo. And that is the thing that every lonely comic book nerd, certainly not me, but others, I suppose, I guess.

54:46I'm not speaking from personal experience. But that is the thing that every comic book nerd thinks when they're or thought. Me. Me. When I was in high school and comic books were not popular and they were not big movies. and reading a comic book was, you know, I might as well have put a big kick me sign around my chest if I was to be seen reading one. I hid it from the world. Nobody knew it was my secret shame. And then one day a new kid moved to school, my junior of high school, and he liked comics and he brought one to school. And I was like, you should put that away. You don't understand what you're.

55:23And he's like, I don't care. I like comics. And I thought to myself, I thought I was the only one. You're like me. And so this sense of community, this sense of building an identity around beliefs and ideas and a love of Spider-Man is what the movie is ultimately about. And so the fact that how do you achieve that? Well, through the multiverse, by introducing all these other people who share this common beliefs and love. And that's why people love and admire Spider-Verse, and at best they think Deadpool and Wolverine is an acceptable time waster and at worst they think it is insufferable and annoying and smug.

56:05Yeah. I watched Deadpool and Wolverine on a plane and I still was like, I'd maybe like that time back, even if it meant sitting on this plane for a little longer. I recall you being higher on Deadpool 2 than I was, but... Yeah, I was. I mean, I didn't think it was breaking any new ground, but I appreciated its commitment to its own bit. I do appreciate commitment to the bit, but the bit has to be more than just making the money. But yeah, I mean, just agree with everything Matt was just saying. I mean, like that, that is it, right? Like it is about being welcoming. It is about saying like, yeah, you're a part of it.

56:40Like you can be a part of this so easily. And that's part of what's beautiful about it. Well, as we come to the end of round one, I am going to score this one for Matt solely, not solely, but largely because of the phrase harmonic convergence, both about the way that Doc Ock's comments to Peter Parker present the theme of the movie without making it super obvious that they're speaking the theme of the movie, also echoed in the Oscar Wilde on Broadway scene. And then what you're saying now, this was actually a note you cited, Matt, from Into the Spider-Verse, where one Spider-Man tells another, I'm proud of you.

57:16So take that away. I knew I shouldn't have said that. It's really just a point for Matt. It's less a point for Spider-Man too. That's very, very gracious of you.

57:35The washer won't start and the laundry's already piled to the ceiling. Hopping on grandappliance.com. Great idea. I heard they have next day delivery. Uh-huh. I'm seeing that too. And they have a bunch of GE options in stock. Oh, that's great. We've always had good luck with GE appliances. This one looks perfect. Scheduling for tomorrow. Gosh, Grand really makes it easy. Another crisis averted by the team at Grand Appliance. Visit GrandAppliance.com today. Grand Appliance, appliance experts since 1930. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I also led the team that created MTV. and my co-founders and I are celebrating MTV's 45th anniversary this month.

58:17On my podcast, Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, you'll hear the untold origin story from the people who built MTV from the ground up. I want my MTV! Those are powerful words, my. Something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word. Listen to Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y 'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports.

58:53Because let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalenka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi.

59:26You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

59:43Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made?

1:00:16Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia A-O Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00:52As we move into round two, the movies in our time, where we consider what these films have come to represent in the time since they were new. And there's some overlap with the screenplay category here, but I really want to dig into how each of these films stands in as a representation of Peter Parker or Peter Parker and Miles Morales. And we've talked about this a little bit already, but it is very difficult to think of another fictional character where the screen interpretations have followed as hard upon, or even in the case of Spider-Verse and Tom Holland, overlapped with one another. So we just have a lot of examples, a lot of things that we can line up next to each other and try to assess which one is the most successful translation from one medium to another.

1:01:39And the way I want to go into this is, Matt, I think you said timeless. You said there was a period where the Raimi movies had fallen a little bit out of favor. And I see that like they do feel unmoored in time to me and not just because Spider-Man 3 comes out two months before the first iPhone. I looked this up. You know, it doesn't have as pronounced an anachronistic quality as like the Donner Superman where the Daily Planet scenes might as well be his girl Friday or in like the Burton Batman where it's like it's 1989, but it's also 1939 and people are wearing fedoras on the sidewalk. But there is a like without making it a big design element, it does not feel like it's commenting specifically on 2004.

1:02:24You know, it feels like this is a an adult who is expressing his fondness for the initial Lee Ditko era of this character from almost 40 years ago. Do you see that as a strength? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the movie has aged really well. One of the things I am curious about is how well will Into the Spider-Verse age? I mean, I think it still plays wonderfully right now. It is also, I would think, undeniably a cooler movie than Spider-Man 2. But cool does not always age well. Sometimes cool in one era can curdle over time. And I do wonder in 20 years, how will it look? I don't know. It's an interesting thing to think about.

1:03:11It feels like Spider-Man 2 and really all the Raimi Spider-Man movies have already kind of gone through a cycle of them looking very kind of old fashioned and hokey. And that I feel like as people have seemingly gotten a little tired of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you know, I still enjoy a lot of their movies. But the complaints that I hear from people who are not pathetic nerds like me are often that the movies all feel the same. They have this same kind of arch tone. And so the more that you hear that complaint, the more that the Raimi Spider-Man movies, they kind of hit better because it's like you can they almost seem like an alternative to that.

1:03:46They come from a time before people felt like they needed to be making quips about how silly everything is. Or is that really what you're going to wear? Is that really your costume? Like that, those kind of remarks. it would have been interesting if they were made just a few years later to your point chris and spider-man had a iphone or something you know there are scenes involving pay phones in this movie and i suppose in some ways that dates them but i don't know i think that honestly the first spider-man movie is much more dated and kind of time stamped it still has a timeless quality but But it is more time stamped than Spider-Man 2.

1:04:24The soundtrack is incredibly like Nickelback heavy. It really is. And, you know, and some of the costuming feels very, you know, like do the women all need to have bare midriffs and tight shirts? And it feels much more like in that movie because it was the first because, as we said, Sam Raimi was a guy whose biggest movie was like a 50 million dollar film. he didn't have the juice to do whatever he wanted. And there were some things like the soundtrack, like Kirsten Dunst's attire, where clearly the producers or the studio were like, this needs to be cool. Again, this is a movie for kids. We got to make this thing cool.

1:05:06And you can see the first movie was so successful that on Spider-Man 2, they were like, you can do whatever you want. And the costuming has not dated. The music is much more kind of focused on the score. And it just it has a much more of a pleasantly timeless quality. All of this stuff in The Daily Bugle with J. Jonah Jameson, that could, you know, it's his Girl Friday. You know, it's it's something out of a totally different era, but in a good way. It doesn't feel like it's tied to 2004 or anything. It just it feels like a distilled essence of Spider-Man, you know, brought to the screen in live action.

1:05:49And I think that is the thing that I love about it when I watch it today. Well, and I mean, to your point about how what's cool in one era will date that much faster. I mean, these movies, these first two Raimi movies are only coming out about a decade after the what becomes the image era, right, of Marvel, where Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and Eric Larson and all these guys. really I'm going to say a dreadful era of comics you know where everything was extreme and totally the muscles and the guns and the breasts and everything got I mean always exaggerated in comics but took on this really like ridiculous kind of abstracted quality and maybe this is part of what goes awry with Spider-Man 3 where apparently it's Avi Arad you know one of the producers who is pushing yeah right Venom had to be in the movie Sam Raimi doesn't care about Venom Right.

1:06:42He turns him into a total joke. It's part of the charm of the movie in a way is they forced him to use this character. And what does he do? You know, like Peter Parker is dancing around. Like, what does Venom do? It turns him into an obnoxious a-hole. Like, I do kind of admire the way he turned that demand into something. Like, he did it his way. Right. He could only do it as a Sam Raimi thing. No, I mean, I salute Raimi for that. And I just like it's still I don't understand how the Venom movies have been so successful. Yeah, they stink. Look, I will say this, though, for all the timeless quality of Spider-Man 2, this is a movie about the dangers of allowing artificial intelligence to make decisions for us in the form of Doc Ock's arms.

1:07:23It is a movie about a scientist being so confident that anything he creates will be beneficial for all mankind and thus does not stop even when confronted by obvious dangers of their work. So it is timeless, but it still plays pretty well in 2026. I think this is the moment where I can interject my point of comparison about Avi Arad's appearances on the behind the scenes material of these two movies. Like I watched the special features on Spider-Man 2 and he's, I don't know, he's in his 50s or maybe early 60s at that point. And he's just wearing like a normal like golf shirt and just looks like a man of his age.

1:07:56He's kind of like, well, you know, we couldn't do Doc Ock the first time. It was too complicated, but now we are doing Doc Ock. And then you watch him on the promotional stuff for Into the Spider-Verse 14 years later. So he's got another 14 years on him, but he is dressed like Miles Morales. He is wearing like a hoodie and a Spider-Man T-shirt and he's got like a Spider-Man beanie cap on his head. And it is like totally, hello, my fellow kids. It's like, you know, this is the Spider-Man for today. It's totally hip and contemporary. But it is, well, I mean, I laughed. I was amused. So maybe he wins.

1:08:32All right, Daisy, let's talk about that. I don't see anything dated now. I mean, admittedly, Into the Spider-Verse is only a third as old as Spider-Man 2 is. But I looked at it again the other night. It's seven and a half years later now. There wasn't anything about it that seemed a little naive or antiquated or whatever to me. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, we're only, yeah, like you said, seven and a half years out since the movie came out. So I mean, yeah, to be fair, not as much time has passed, even as it feels like so much more time has passed than that, just in life experience. but I was trying to pay particularly attention to aspects of this kind of how do they use technology in the movie you know how do they do certain things and I mean really like the biggest joke in terms of like tech that isn't like tech specifically for the movie is that they don't need to take a monitor with a desktop tower which actually is really funny and plays well and also was kind of an older reference by the time it even happened in 2018 yeah you know Miles has a phone but it is not something that is like overusing plot points.

1:09:39So, you know, as things continue to shift there, that's not necessarily going to be an issue. He's an artist who does use spray paint. He does tags on stickers that he sticks around town. That's been going on for decades at this point in terms of how kids tag up the city. So I do think that those aspects of the plot and that presentation of it will be great. The animation itself, as we've acknowledged, is like beautiful. and very inventive. And they are calling back to the way that comics were printed back in the day, but that's not all they're doing. I mean, they're also mixing in other aspects.

1:10:15So I think the fact that they'd mixed those, I mean, it was just mind-blowing to watch when it first came out. And when it was released, it was also released in 3D, which I tend to forget just because I kind of forget about this whole push that we had on 3D for a while. Really, it was a beautiful 3D experience, but it also still just looks great. And there are some shots where you see that, you know, dotted part more. There are some shots where you see kind of a fuzziness more. Like they lean into all of it and it's not only the one thing. I do think that as much as I love the art, if it had been more of one of those than the other and not so evenly and equally applied throughout the movie in multiple ways, that would be something I'd be worried about how it will age.

1:11:02but I don't think that that will age poorly, especially if I just think about it compared to like different animation, right? Like, yes, you know, we have computer animation now that looks different than hand-drawn animation, but the things that were the most stellar of their era, they might look a little older, but they usually still look really good. It's the stuff that they cheeked out on and didn't really take time that doesn't seem to age particularly well in animation. So I think visually, there's that. I think if anything, the story itself, again, is really welcoming of diversity in a way that feels really appropriate for 2018.

1:11:38But it's not ham-fisted, despite Spider-Pig being in the movie. That was not intended. I just realized it was happening as it happened. Do you float into the air when you smell a delicious pie? I do. But I think the thing about it, that aspect of the movie, that way, it's really just more the belief that they would put that much money and time and attention into making a movie with that much diversity, right? Like, the story itself is not the problem. The delivery of the characters, you know, it's not like Miles goes and meets Obama. You know, like, it's not that kind of thing. but there is this part that is kind of hard to believe i mean it's hard to believe that they kind of make anything good now with a big investment but the idea of something like that getting greenlit is probably the part that has aged the least believably right now yeah i mean i don't really know whether you know sony image animation image works or whatever correct sequence of those words is i don't know if that's a totally separate basically are these The people who said yes to this, the same people who said yes to Morbius and Kraven the Hunter.

1:12:47I don't know. I mean, here we are having, you know, again, it's 2026. Here we are having a conversation again about a movie like Supergirl and going like, oh, no, are they going to now stop making movies with women? Because like we're back in that. So, you know, I think the story itself is in its own way timeless. It may not be classic, but it is timeless. And I think that, yeah, the part that is the most jarring is just realizing that it wasn't that long ago that they were able to make something this fresh and beautiful and fun with a character that wasn't just a white guy right at the center.

1:13:20I love you, Miles. I know, Dad. See you Friday.

1:13:28You gotta say I love you back. Dad, are you serious? I want to hear it. You want to hear me say it? I love you, Dad. You're driving me off out of school? I love you, Dad. Look at this place. Dad, I love you.

1:13:40Dad, I love you. That's a copy. Tie your shoes, please. Well, we started to kind of segue naturally into this anyway, but the other subcategory that I had for round two was cinematography slash visual effects slash animation. Again, trying to compare apples and oranges here. But starting with Spider-Man 2, this movie looks good, right? The cinematographer is Bill Pope, who had worked on Darkman and Army of Darkness with Raimi. He just shot Stendhelm for him last year. He did Clueless. He did the first three Matrix movies. He did Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which is another comic book movie that has kind of an interesting comic book-y visual language.

1:14:20Doesn't push that to the extent that Spider-Verse does, but you certainly see the seeds of it there. And again, like the one Oscar that this movie got was for visual effects, which I think hold up really well right up until the very end. Like this extended shot of him, you know, swinging down the avenue towards danger with these pretty bad looking helicopters in the frame with him and some fire trucks and things. And, you know, I'm looking at that and thinking you could just film real helicopters and put Spider-Man in there, right? You don't have to digitally animate the whole thing, I don't think.

1:14:50But the thing that I really like among, again, these Oscar winning visual effects is apparently most of the time Doc Ock's tentacles are puppets. I mean, they have to be CGI in some scenes, but they were practical onset puppets for a lot of it. And again, as you pointed out, Matt, that does bring some visual continuity with the Evil Dead, these satanic tree branches whose POV were shown in these much less expensive but very inventive Sam Raimi movies. Why do you think this is the best visual representation of Spider-Man live action movie? Yeah, well, the live action is probably a good qualifier there because I think that animation certainly has an edge.

1:15:30It's a lot easier to represent Spider-Man's powers and everything he can do in animation, not just because you're drawing the characters, but also you can control the camera in such a more fluid way. And that's something you really, you know, like rewatching into the Spider-Verse this week. Just so awed by not just the movements and the fluidity of all the characters in scenes where there's like five Spider-Men all on the screen at the same time, but also how the camera dances with them at the same time, I think is really, really beautiful. But I do think Spider-Man 2 holds up very well visually, a movie that's 20 years old.

1:16:11I do think some of the visual effects show their age a little bit. You mentioned Bill Pope and the movie that some of the images like the CGI reminds me of. I always think of the Matrix Reloaded and the Burly Brawl. There's something about and it's Bill Pope. I don't know if it's him, it's the visual effects, if it's just the time period. Something about the like CGI human beings in both of those movies always they seem and look and feel very similar. Something about their proportions are a little off. They seem a little like a little squat, a little wide. Maybe they seem a little rubbery. They're just artificial in a way.

1:16:48They don't quite pass the visual test. That said, I do think this movie and the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie do not get enough credit for what they established in terms of the visual language of Spider-Man that continues to be copied in every single movie. and beyond the video games of the Spider-Man world are so indebted to the look and feel of those scenes, including the one you mentioned where Spider-Man is swinging through a wide avenue with buildings doing all these cool moves. I'm pretty sure it was the Spider-Man 2 video game that was tied to this movie. It was the first time the game was like an open world game where you could swing around as much as you want and you had objectives and places to go.

1:17:39But also part of the fun of the game was you could just swing around Manhattan and it looked as best as they could make it at the time. And it gave you that feeling of freedom and excitement and fluidity and movement and kinetic energy that the movies have, which you could never get in even the greatest Spider-Man comic by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and John Romita and whoever else. As beautiful as the artwork is, it is inherently a series of static panels and static images. And they can do some amazing and spectacular and web of things to mimic and get as close as they can to movement. They have tricks and brilliant tools that they use to do that.

1:18:25But they can never move. The movement happens in your mind. That's what the reader brings. And the first I mean, I can remember seeing as a huge Spider-Man dork sitting in the theater watching the first movie and just being kind of blown back in my chair that that's what Spider-Man looks like when he swings. And to this day, however many movies later, they're all kind of cribbing it. It looks cooler and into the Spider-Verse, but they are still kind of using the mechanics of it and the idea of it. But, you know, the end of Into the Spider-Verse ends with a final kind of monologue from Miles as he's swinging through New York.

1:19:07It looks amazing. It looks better than Spider-Man 2. But the idea of concluding a Spider-Man movie on that kind of an image and sequence comes from these movies. And that's how they all did it. And they're still doing it to this day. And it is kind of an if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of thing. And I think Into the Spider-Verse may be iterated on it in a way that, you know, because the tools are just that much better and it does look better now. I think you have to give a certain amount of credit to Spider-Man 1 and 2 for being so kind of groundbreaking in establishing this language that every single one of these movies since then has continued to use.

1:19:47Yeah, I'm sorry for interrupting, but this seems relevant. I'm seeing here that Elon Musk has posted on X that Grok will create a full length, historically accurate Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. Yeah, that's going to be great. That's going to be awesome. I can't wait. No more woke Spider-Man. Then I'll look even better. As long as it's still under two hours. So I did get to talk to when Into the Spider-Verse came out, I did an All Things Considered piece where it was the only time in my entire career where everyone that I asked to interview said yes. So I had this problem that I have never had before since of trying to fit all of these big wigs into a four minute radio piece.

1:20:23So, I mean, I had. That's the life. I actually listened the other night to this like 25 minute interview that I did with Brian Michael Bendis. That is like 10 seconds of the radio story. But I did have Peter Ramsey was explaining to me technically to the extent that, you know, a lay person like me can understand. I was like, why does this movie look so different? What is what is so unique about the visual palette, the animation of Into the Spider-Verse? Why does this not look like any other animated movie that I've seen? And one of the things that I'm sure this was much simplified, but for my benefit.

1:20:57But he said that at least sometimes they were animating 12 frames per second instead of 24. which sounds like that would be corner cutting, you know, cost cutting, less work. But I mean, it does have this incredible graphic effect. Another thing that's more amusing to me now than it was then, as they said, apparently motion blur was a standard part of the digital animation palette, and they just left that out. They didn't do that. So as with your parents' TV, when you turn off motion smoothing, Spider-Man cartoons look a lot better. All right. Right. Well, this feels like, you know, gilding a radioactive lily here.

1:21:32But so Daisy. Yes. Is this the best that Spider-Man has ever looked on screen? I mean, I think so. But you make some great points about the visuals. And I was already speaking about how I think the animation itself will hold up. But let's talk a little bit about the choices that were made instead. Right. Focus on that for right now. So as you're describing, they made very specific choices in terms of how they did the animation to make it. have a different look and feel it's very layered i think that that layeredness also really plays well to the idea of being in a multiverse to begin with right it makes that much more real and textured i mean if anything that's one of the that's honestly one of the big complaints about the fact that we are being beaten over the head with multiverse movies that show us different places that don't actually look that different from each other that's not even the focus of the movie, right?

1:22:23We're not really spending time in the other spider people's worlds, but when those worlds are colliding, the art of what that looks like really feels the most viscerally true to what it might be if all of these overlapping universes were just coming upon each other. And then we can think about the visual representation of the characters, right? The way they chose to draw them. And again, we have more than one Peter Parker in the movie to begin with. The first Peter Parker that we meet, we only meet him briefly, but it comes across that like, he's like a competent, confident Peter Parker who kind of seems to have it together.

1:23:01And so much of that just comes across in like in the way they draw him. And then when we finally meet our Peter B. Parker, who we spend the rest of the movie with, the Jake Johnson voice one, right? Like, they look like they could be brothers, but also you can see that he's had a rougher time of it. yeah right like that aspect of the visual storytelling is also just really beautifully thought out and executed so well and again like in terms of making it so that you don't have to understand everything i mean they don't go through the process in the movie of trying to explain to you that kingpin holds spider-man responsible for why he doesn't have his wife and son anymore they don't make an effort to explain that but visually you can tell that kingpin is not necessarily supposed to be a good guy.

1:23:48And the type of imposing figure that he is and why he is able to have the effect that he has on the characters in the movie is sold in part by how they choose to show him, right? Miles looks so realistic and not uncanny valley at all at the same time, right? Like, we are of a similar background. We are both Black and Puerto Rican. And when I look at just his face and the nose, the brows, all of it, like it feels so real in a way that's just beautiful. And so you see all of those details and they're just so fun and they are already in themselves doing a level of storytelling. You know, I said earlier that this movie has a lot to tell, but it actually it does.

1:24:35It shows so much. And the way that they chose to animate these characters, the way that they chose to tell the visual story of that also does such incredible work. And, you know, we have seen so many Peter Parkers. They make reference to all of these. And yet the version that I'm following in the movie, I also I believe it. I believe that he makes sense as a Peter Parker. Right. Like, so these things really sit with the character in a way that feels really, really lovely and true and doesn't just feel like they were drawn like, oh, you know, they should be this kind or that kind. I mean, look at what they do with Spider-Ham and Spider-Noir.

1:25:14I mean, Spider-Noir comes in and it does feel like an entirely different texture is happening. It suddenly feels like you are in a noir film. Penny Parker, I mean... The anime, yeah, version. The anime, and they went more specifically with an anime style, right? Like there were actually other Asian characters like Silk that they could have brought in, but they went with something that would diversify the type of animation that they were doing. So just at every stage, I felt like they stayed very true to what the core intention seemed to be. And that just works out in this really beautiful mosaic, but again, furthers the storytelling in itself while also being like just visually so pleasing.

1:25:54I mean, it's so, so fun to look at. My name is Penny Parker. I'm from New York in the year 3145. I have a psychic link with a spider who lives inside my father's robot. And we're best friends forever. It really does kind of confound the work of writing and talking about these movies because, you know, we keep falling back on these cliches to try to describe visuals that we just don't have very good language to describe specifically what we're seeing. But I mean, the difficulty of showing us five or six different spider variants in a frame and they're each drawn in their own style and somehow it still reads, you know, it doesn't just look like a mess that you can't even process.

1:26:33my favorite visual from this movie i think is is miles like ill-fitting store-bought spider-man costume you know where the the hood is just like draping off of him and it's like not quite fully zipped up in the back and there's like a price tag hanging off of it and that's contrasted with even the out of shape jake johnson spider-man who's half wearing sweatpants he still has half of a a proper spider-man costume i'm at some point after seeing this movie so many times i do have thoughts like it's probably really hard to draw someone in ill-fitting clothes like it's probably you know the way that superhero comics traditionally it just looks like a naked person who has a logo over their chest or something and some different bright colors to indicate that they're wearing clothes but that's probably really hard to draw right though like the drape of a shirt that that's two sizes too big for you well and there's also this very natural way that they even go into the initial art like the art from the comics itself right like you mentioned the artist Sarah Pacelli is the one who drew Spider-Man.

1:27:29I mean, they literally reenact the cover of that first book by her and Brian Michael Bendis. And it's beautiful. And it isn't something that, because of the way the story is being told, feels like they are now going, oh, hey, everybody, look at this. Here comes the cover. It is in and of itself a beautiful storytelling moment and feels completely like a natural transition from what has been happening in previous scenes. I mean, to be able to do that is just a level of mastery that is like so impressive. I just I love when somebody respects their medium and they just really went for it. Yeah. I mean, I think we kind of look for that now.

1:28:04We look for them to quote famous covers or famous panels visually in comic book movies. I mean, to the point that there's that montage in Deadpool and Wolverine where they do it several times in a row and it's like, okay, too many. This was funny, the first three or whatever. I mean, I remember the surprise of when we see the Kingpin in this movie, it's the Bill Sankiewicz painted Kingpin from a Daredevil graphic novel. It's not even, I mean, I know Kingpin is also a villain in Spider-Man comics, but that just made me think, oh God, like what else am I missing here? Since that's such a specific, I was like, there must be 10 other of these that I'm not picking up on because I haven't read as many comics in the last 15 years as I did, you know, between 1988 and 2010 or whenever.

1:28:52But I mean, I did like that feeling of there's more for you to catch up here. You know, you need to lean forward. You need to open your eyes wider. You do get the sense at the big final fight when I think it's Scorpion who says to Spider-Ham, like, what are you, some kind of silly cartoon? And Spider-Ham's response is, you got a problem with cartoons? I feel like he's maybe speaking for the people who made this movie and who believe that animation is a art form unto itself capable of much more than it is often given credit for or given the space to be. much like comics. I mean, so often comics are, you know, were but still are often kind of dismissed as juvenile and only superheroes and only this disposable thing for children when they are.

1:29:43That is what they very often are, but they are quite capable of so much more and have so much more potential that is often unexploited. And that is often true of animated movies as well. But one of the things that I think people, you know, really loved about Into the Spider-Verse is that it shows you just how much you can do with animation in terms of story, in terms of look. I mean, look, I have young kids. We watch a lot of Disney animated movies. A lot of them are wonderful. They all kind of look the same and they all kind of follow a lot of the same stuff. So just the fact that this movie, again, using the multiverse as a tool, is able to be like, because they're all from different universes, they're all going to be animated differently.

1:30:33It's such a beautiful use of animation that if it's not impossible in live action, it would be incredibly difficult, incredibly cost prohibitive. here it's just a seamless element and a tool of a broader project and i think daisy's talked about how there's so much show don't tell in this film and i think that is a perfect example of it is that you are using a fundamental aspect of this medium you could not you know spider-verse was a comic book there was a comic book called spider-verse in concept of lots of spider-men from other universes, it is like this. But in terms of story, it is nothing like this.

1:31:14The story of the original Spider-Verse was nothing like this movie. You could not tell this story this way in a comic book. It could only be done in animation. So you have to kind of give it its props for that. Right. We keep reading about how these have been like the Mad Max Fury Road of animated movies or something where animators are just dropping dead at their desks. I mean, I like I again, I have a very limited understanding of what the pipeline for animated movies is. And I mean, we know that that Pixar movies are years and years of development and revision. Right. But I mean, I wonder, like, is that the main reason for the delay?

1:31:51Is that just the fact that each character and each like has to have its own? there's no economy of scale right you can't apply this to the it's like you have to do as much work as you would for a full animated feature for just one small section of of the movie maybe well and there's something to be said i think for the fact that like they didn't have to do it the way they did it right like if i think about the rainy spider-man movies for example i mean there really was this thing of like can these comic book movies even work i think you're so right, Matt, about how you could see some of the stuff in the first one.

1:32:25He definitely had a lot more say in the second one in terms of making certain things happen. But like I was saying earlier, people weren't clamoring for an animated Spider-Man movie. People were not shaking the table going, we need this and you have to get it right. So for them to bring this level of care and attention to it, something that just wasn't necessarily even really wanted outside of seemingly Sony just expanding their Spider-Man footprint is pretty incredible. Yes. All right. Well, so we need to come to an end of round two here. And again, I'm just running up against the great difficulty of setting your comments in opposition to one another.

1:33:10But I'm going to score this round for Daisy, I think on the basis of what you said about just embracing the comic book-y aspects of this rather than shying away from them, I found very, very persuasive. So we have a dramatically convenient one-to-one. Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can. Spins a web, any size, catches seeds, just like flies. Look out, here comes the Spider-Man. Ugh, the washer won't start and the laundry's already piled to the ceiling. Hopping on grandappliance.com. Great idea. I heard they have next day delivery. Uh-huh. I'm seeing that too. And they have a bunch of GE options in stock.

1:33:54Oh, that's great. We've always had good luck with GE appliances. This one looks perfect. Scheduling for tomorrow. Gosh, Grand really makes it easy. Another crisis averted by the team at Grand Appliance. Visit grandappliance.com today. Grand Appliance. Appliance experts since 1930. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I also led the team that created MTV, and my co-founders and I are celebrating MTV's 45th anniversary this month. On my podcast, Math & Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, you'll hear the untold origin story from the people who built MTV from the ground up.

1:34:31I want my MTV! Those are powerful words. My. Something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word. Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y 'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports. Because let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii.

1:35:09My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalenka. Shout-outs to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened, we're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports.

1:35:40Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:35:48Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made?

1:36:21Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia A-O Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:36:57As we proceed into round three, the movies for all time, where we consider how these movies echo through eternity. iconic moments. Let's tally up our iconic moments. I almost want to take the L train rescue from Spider-Man 2 off the board since we get that homaged so explicitly into the Spider-Verse, but I can't. So this is just a purely instinctive, subjective kind of throw them out. Matt, I say Spider-Man 2, what moments do you think of? I mean, it's funny. Yes, the train scene was very, that got a lot of attention at the time, And it is a really it's a great action sequence. And, you know, the ending where he's unmasked and the people on the subway kind of.

1:37:43We won't tell nobody, Mr. Right. You know, when we when I think Daisy was talking earlier about Spider-Man as this kind of living person in New York City, I really feel like while he's always been associated with New York, I feel like the Raimi movies and the way that they are kind of these post 9-11 narratives of resilience in New York City. and the way the average New Yorkers in those movies are always on Spider-Man's side, even when J. Jonah Jameson is screaming, he's a menace! The true New Yorkers never buy it, and they're always defending him against the bad guys in these movies, I think is a big reason why you see people dressing up in Spider-Man costumes at Nick's parades and things like that from now on.

1:38:24I don't think, without those movies and the way that New York is portrayed in them, I'm not sure he would be considered so quintessentially a New Yorker and this like person that people would be dressing up as if not. Maybe maybe they would. But that's something I've thought about when I saw Spider-Man hanging out at Nick's celebrations. On top of school buses. Yeah, exactly. And hanging off of lampposts and things. To me, though, I love there are so many wonderful little things in Spider-Man 2 are the things that I always think about. You know, there is a shot in this movie when Peter is thinking about going to see Mary Jane on Broadway and he opens the door to his closet and he has the suit and the Spider-Man suit hanging in the closet side by side.

1:39:16I mean, that is that one image is Spider-Man. You don't need anything else like that literally sums up the entire the drama, the melodrama. All of it is in that one shot. And I always like it always kind of makes me smile every time I see that image. It's literally a single image. It could be a panel in a comic. It's so great. I really like we haven't talked a ton about the Peter and Mary Jane scenes in Spider-Man 2. I really love the chemistry and the connection between Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. I know they were a couple in real life at some point around the making of the first movie. I know they were not together at the time of this movie.

1:40:02And I almost feel like it gives a little bit of like really pleasant friction to their connection in this film where you can tell they have a connection. but they also have a lot of like scenes where like she's like crapper get off the pot here what's going on here like she's annoyed with him and i love that aspect the line is do you love me matt it's not crapper get off the pot do you love me or not look i'm not i'm not paraphrasing i'm no stan lee i'm no uh i'm no alvin sergeant what can i say kiss me kiss you i need to know something just one kiss. I mean, when Stan Lee writes it, it's do you love me, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.

1:40:45Yeah. So I think of the first Raimi Spider-Man as like the really very Ditko-y Spider-Man. And I think of the second movie as the very John Romita Spider-Man. That's the one where the awkward teen emotions kind of flower into this big romance and melodrama. Mary Jane is now, you know, a beautiful leading lady on Broadway. And what is this dork doing kind of chasing her around? But it somehow works. So I love all of their scenes. I love the, you know, like the detail of her poster. I like her advertising poster is hanging all over New York so that wherever he goes, no matter what he does, he's always reminded of her.

1:41:28He can't escape this woman that he's tried to like block out. I can't be with her. I have to be Spider-Man. And everywhere he goes, it's like that naked gun line. You know, everywhere I look, something reminds me of her. And except in this movie, it's literal because her face is staring at him from every construction site and every billboard where there's the opening frame. I think it's the opening shot. Yeah. Yeah. A beautiful, lovely little touch. And then I guess the last thing I'll throw out as another thing that I just love that really marks it as a Sam Raimi-ish movie is I think Daisy was saying she doesn't love Tobey Maguire's.

1:42:03requires Peter Parker Spider-Man. And he certainly is not the funniest Spider-Man. He's not a great wisecracker. But I think Sam Raimi really played to his strengths in Spider-Man 2. And I think what he does is he makes the movie around him very funny. And he makes Peter and Toby the butt of every joke. Again, he's a sadist. He loves to torture him. But like you think of the scene where he's hired to take photographs of what turns out to be MJ getting engaged to J. Jonah Jameson's son. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want you all to know that the beautiful Miss Mary Jane Watson has just agreed to marry me.

1:42:46The astronaut. Yes, the world's youngest astronaut. Youngest astronaut. Spoiler alert, he also becomes a wolf man at one point in the comics. But really, that's not important right now. Real boring, real boring. Just typical astronaut stuff. Of course. I'm glad that that MJ just dumped him like the moment that Peter just expressed any any reciprocal interest at all, because that guy is come on. He's an empty spacesuit. But I love in that scene, he is, you know, oh, a tray of appetizers. And he reaches out to grab one. And someone always grabs the last one. And then a drink comes by on a tray. He's like, oh, a drink.

1:43:19But it's actually like the discarded drink and it's empty. And there are almost every scene has a moment where Peter is getting beat up, getting knocked down, falling flat on his face, looking like a fool. And I think that it is the perfect use of Tobey Maguire as this kind of awkward, somewhat stiff, but very sincere guy. That's how you kind of build a funny Spider-Man movie around him. Fighting with Bruce Campbell in the theater, another example we mentioned. Like all of those scenes, I think, work so well in a movie that at times is very touching and emotional. Like it is also so much funnier than the first Spider-Man movie.

1:44:00So, I mean, I could go I could literally just mention a thousand scenes, but I feel like I'm talking way too much. So I'm going to stop now. All right. Daisy, your iconic moments from Into the Spider-Verse. What do you got? We talked a lot about the visuals and I think, you know, again, moments like when Miles is fully, truly embracing himself and the beautiful animated shot that reenacts the cover of the first Miles Morales book. Things like that are incredibly memorable. But the other things that stick with me are things that just felt really true about the world, right? Like, I love that so many of the jokes feel really right for New York, right?

1:44:36There's the part where right after Miles has met Peter B. Parker for the first time and he's dragging him along, like, they land on the ground and everybody's just still kind of walking around them. And Miles is like, maybe it could go around. All right. Thanks, New York. Because they don't. Like, it's just like, it's such a great moment. And even that whole sequence where he's dragging him around, like, you know, it's the kind of joke that in an MCU movie would be played a little differently. Looks like a child dressed like Spider-Man dragging a homeless corpse behind a train. Then you're like, I believe that a New York cop would actually describe it that way.

1:45:13Like, that feels right, you know? So I love those aspects of the humor. And then, of course, you have just how fun those intros are, right? Every single time they introduce a character, every single one, you know, okay, for the last time. Let's do this one last time. And then they give you this amazing little bit of backstory that tells you so much, that also pays so much homage and manages to actually get you like caught up. And they're really smart with the pacing of them. Right. By the time we get to Spider-Ham and Spider-Noir and Penny Parker, you know, they're doing them across the frames at the same time with a different pace.

1:45:48Like it is both beautiful in its storytelling and incredibly memorable in terms of like, oh, what did I learn about that character? Like, who was this? You actually have something quick that you can refer back to that also uses the art of comic books in it. So, I mean, there's just so many incredibly fun moments in this movie. There's he took a bagel. It's so stupid. Like, there's just so many fantastic. That guy took a bagel. Like, there's so many fun moments like that in this movie. And I truly do think that, like, ultimately, because we are seeing kind of what Peter Parker would be like, you know, just if the story stopped for a minute and you just watched him really get beat up, it just feels like the truest Peter Parker to me.

1:46:32Right. Like he is a sad tech, but he's still really funny. But you could see how those jokes are kind of like a deflection and a defense mechanism. But his anxiety and his lack of confidence is real, even as his commitment is there. And so the way that they're able to play with that humor and then call back on those lines. Right. I mean, it is the way these things call back on each other. I mean, it's tight. It might as well be Shaun of the Dead or they're just like we basically told you everything that will happen. You did not realize that that's what we were doing. And now all of those things will happen in order.

1:47:02I mean, a lot of that happens in Into the Spider-Verse. So I just think it's like incredibly moral, both in terms of its place and its characters and its visuals. And then when you tie them all together, the moments are just they really like pop and stick with you and make you want to make a reference. And then, of course, arguably, I think the greatest post-credits scene ever, which is the reenactment of a meme. like somehow they still manage to surprise you by bringing out the Spider-Man pointing at each other, which feels even better because you've just watched a multiverse based movie. Whoa.

1:47:37What the? I'm Spider-Man. I need you to come with me. Who the heck are you? I just told you that. Listen, listen, I'm from the future. How dare you point at me? You were pointing first. Rude to point. You're being very rude. You know, to pull that kind of internet humor in 2018 and for it to actually be appropriate and not just excessive is, that's cherry on top right now.

1:48:05I didn't want to come out of this missing 2018 Twitter, but now. There was a time where it was beautiful. All right. Very, very last point since this is a game of inches here. Matt, are you going to tell me that the Stan Lee cameo in Spider-Man 2 is better than the Stan Lee cameo in Into the Spider-Verse? No, that would be foolish to attempt such a thing. I mean, the Spider-Man 2 cameo is a blink and you miss it kind of thing. I mean, it was from before that was like a requirement, perhaps literally a contractual requirement. I'm not sure. I think so, yeah. So no. It's weird when they do it in the DC movies.

1:48:42It is weird. Or in a movie like he had nothing to do with like Big Hero 6 where it's like, you didn't create these characters. Do it here, Stan. No, the one in Into the Spider-Verse is vastly superior, especially because it kind of makes fun of Stan Lee a little bit, which is, I think, by that point was extremely appropriate to kind of poke fun at his huckster-y-ness by that point. I was all in favor of it. I really liked that scene. All right, Daisy. What? I don't know. Would you like to graciously suggest that no, no? Spider-Man took that guy's pizza. And is more the bullpen bulletin's excelsior essence of Stanley than telling him that the mask always fits?

1:49:26I would if it really felt like there was some fun little je ne sais quoi that we weren't quite grabbing onto. too. But besides the fact that I think, you know, like what Matt said about they show him as this little huckster also really feels right. I mean, it's just so funny. So he he both is delivering the heart message of the movie. Right. And at the same time, they're like kind of making reference to like, no refunds. Don't mess with this guy's money. Yeah. I'm going to miss him. Yeah. We were friends, you know. Can I return it if it doesn't fit? It always fits. Eventually. Again, these are some deft hands that made this movie.

1:50:06It really shows that. It both comes across as completely loving and also like, wink, wink. Like, hey, before this guy was the old guy that we all had to pay homage to, there was some stuff about him that people didn't always trust. Yeah, well, right. He took the checks and kind of kept his mouth shut. And Steve Ditko and for a long time, Jack Kirby famously did not. Exactly, yeah. And a movie filled with so much love to pull that off as well. Fantastic.

1:50:48Well, we've come to the judgment here, and this is a tough one. This is a real hand-ringing one, and I want to thank both advocates for the substance and passion of their scholarship. But to my great surprise, I think tonight the court is going to rule in favor of Matt because only because it is very difficult for me to imagine Into the Spider-Verse existing, as you said in your opening statement, Matt, without the foundation of this sort of very solid type A satisfying superhero movie. It is the best example of the simple version, right? And it probably underserves it to, because that appearance of simplicity is the result of so many good decisions and so much, so much hard work and a trial and error process in the form of the first film.

1:51:41I love Into the Spider-Verse. And again, like presumably the entire Raimi spider cycle is is part of the spider verse um but i did not think there was any possible way that given all those obstacles that uh spider-man 2 could triumph and and yet that is the court's ruling i thank you both you know i i've sometimes said that i believe the ipod is a more important invention than the iphone because we wouldn't have gotten there without it so i get it i completely understand in 2026 give me an ipod with no connectivity at all but i think it's very fair to say that Spider-Man 2, you know, is the great Peter Parker movie and it could not be improved upon.

1:52:22And Into the Spider-Verse is the great Miles Morales movie and it could not be improved upon. And we need them both. That's that's the way I feel. To me, there are always one A and one B. And when I said I could have argued the other side, I easily could have. I love both of these movies very much. There is no there's no loser here. There are only winners for us for having both of these incredible movies in our lives. And just rewatching them this week for this was like so delightful. I was just so happy rewatching Spider-Man. What a joy. I hope I feel half this good watching the new one. I don't know if I will, but I hope so.

1:53:02See, I thought you were spoiling it for us when you were talking about Gwen Stacy zombies. Oh, man. Night of the Living Ned. They should have taken that one. That would have been the way to go. You New York critics tend to see stuff before we do down here in the sticks. So I didn't know. Not this time. How much intel you actually had. Matt, give us the title of your imminent new book again and anything else you'd like to plug, please. Yeah, it's called Funny Business. It's got a long subtitle that honestly I sometimes mangle myself. So Funny Business. And it's all about the 2000s era of Hollywood comedies.

1:53:37the frat pack era, if you will, although the members of the frat pack hate that name. So don't say it out loud in their presence. They'll get angry. But that's what the book is about. It comes out on October 6th. You can pre-order it now. And yeah, I'm still working for Screen Crush, screencrush.com. And I do co-host the sister podcast to this one, FilmSpottingSVU. We restarted it earlier this year. It's me and Jordan Hoffman talking about streaming movies, and it's a lot of fun. I'm really enjoying it. We recorded an episode this morning. I have been talking all day. My voice is so tired. Will you ever be released from that bathroom?

1:54:22Yes, I've been sitting in this bathroom for eight hours today, and I just, I'm very tired. I prefer to think of us as the secretly evil uncle podcast of FilmSpotting SVU rather than the sister podcast. Daisy, what would you like to plug? Where can listeners find your work? Yeah. So I work at Slate where I'm working with two shows that I absolutely love. One is called I See Why Am I? And it's a show about the internet and internet culture. Our tagline used to be, we're very online, so you don't have to be. But honestly, who among us is not very online these days? So we've really been just trying to keep the internet fun because frankly, we do deserve it.

1:55:01And that is a good time. Definitely check that out. It comes out twice a week. And then I also work with the long running show Death, Sex and Money, which used to be part of WNYC and has since moved over to Slate. And so if you love interesting, strange, real stories from people going deep about their weirdest experiences and feelings, it is beautiful and fun. And we just did an episode called The Dog Detective. And we did another one earlier this year called Death, Snakes and Money. And it's for a show that talks about death and sex and money. It is just really fun. So those are beautiful podcasts that you can check out.

1:55:41And I am very proud to work on them behind the scenes. All right. Well, I will look for you at the brand new day screening, Shirley. Shirley? Yeah. Will you be coming in costume? You know, I always try to, but I have too much hair. It's not easy to get a mask on over that big mound of hair. It always fits eventually. It always fits. Eventually, but by the end of the movie, it's like I still got to see out of the eyes. Well, thank you both for being here. This has been so much fun. Any excuse to talk about these movies is welcome. I want to invite listeners to join us for our next movie death match when in advance of the September release of Don't Look Back in Anger, the documentary about Oasis's 2025 reunion tour, two of the greatest concert films in history, both from directors who would go on to become critical darlings, plug in.

1:56:27It is The Mandalorian and Grogu star Marty Scorsese and the band in The Last Waltz. How he shall forever be introduced. Versus Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. Someone will be limping around on Cripple Creek. Someone's house is getting burned down. It'll truly be a case of life during wartime on our next movie, Deathmatch. Movie Deathmatch is produced by Chris Klimek, who is me, and by Golden Joe Dessau. Without Golden Joe, the show wouldn't go. It is executive produced by Adam Kempinar and Sam Van Halgren. My quest to find rhyming nicknames for them both is ongoing.

1:57:19The washer won't start and the laundry's already piled to the ceiling. Hopping on grandappliance.com. Great idea. I heard they have next day delivery. Uh-huh. I'm seeing that too. And they have a bunch of GE options in stock. Oh, that's great. We've always had good luck with GE appliances. This one looks perfect. Scheduling for tomorrow. Gosh, Grand really makes it easy. Another crisis averted by the team at Grand Appliance. Visit GrandAppliance.com today. Grand Appliance. Appliance experts since 1930. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.

1:57:56We're launching Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song about it. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that.

1:58:29Listen to Podlandia A-O Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:58:52I've been obsessed with Kashawn Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? if he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men.

1:59:23Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.