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Spider-Man Saved Katy Perry and Me



No surprise. The new Spider-Man movie was number-one at the box office this past weekend. With a flash of heat that’s finally hitting the whole continent, a lot of people are escaping to the air conditioned comfort of the theatres. And for all those who couldn’t get in to see Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone swing from atop Manhattan’s favourite landmarks with Denis Leary taking pot shots at Peter Parker’s masked alter ego, they went to see the Katy Perry movie instead.

Fine. Perry’s movie, like Justin Bieber’s before her, will be a hit. I have no problem with that. But I think it’s mainly because of Spider-Man.

Spider-Man was always been a favourite of mine. I seem to remember him being my first superhero. Batman was a close second. Superman just pissed me off. Flash was cool. Sub Mariner was better than Aqua Man. Green Lantern and Green Arrow shared a loft in the village. And Wonder Woman was Linda Carter and that’s a story about a whole other stage of my development.

But there was always Spider-Man. History aside, in my world Spiderman was a cartoon before it was a comic. I was a child of the seventies and the eighties born in the sixties. I was raised by a mother and a father (before the inevitable divorce) and a big-brown boxed Zenith floor-model tube-driven television that you had to get up and walk over to if you wanted to change the channel. And it my simulation wood-grain surrogate that taught me about prehistoric families, pseudo rock bands named after primates, and a web-slinging wall-crawling reluctant do-gooder who was an under-achieving over-achiever with the ability to create chemical spider’s silk and sew a mighty fine blue and red outfit.

Though I might not have realized it at the time, I guess I always liked the fact that Spider-Man was vulnerable. Sure, he was amazing. But he wasn’t invincible like Iron Man.

See, in my mind, like Batman, Spider Man was just a man. Superman took his new-home-planet-given abilities for granted. Thanks to Al Gore’s out of control sun, Clark Kent had the ability to literally do anything. He could reverse time by flying backwards around the planet. He could throw a baseball around the world (though there was no clinical proof that he could get it passport stamped like Bugs Bunny). He could open a jar of garlic dill pickles without having to resort to prying it open with a spoon, tapping the lid with a knife or running hot water over the top. Super. But not amazing.

Spider-Man was more like you and me. He was a guy with a special set of skills just trying to figure out what his abilities and limitations were. Every day there was a new discovery. In the meantime, he had classes to attend, a part time job to manage and a love life to try to bring to life. That’s a lot of pressure to put on one little superhero-guy.

So that’s why I believe that Spider-Man deserves to have the number-one movie in North America. Hell, that’s why I think North America deserves to have Spider-Man as their number-one movie. And he’s there to remind us that we might not always be super – but at the very least, we can all have moments when we are amazing.


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