‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’ Review: Disney+’s New Web-Slinging Adventure Offers Throwback Charm but Little Innovation
I’m far too young to make first-hand references to “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?),” but I like the sentiment of the World War I era banger, because it refers to something we ponder as viewers and critics.
After Disney+ and Star Wars proved the nuance and maturity possible in a series like Andor, how do you go back to shows that are just fun or cute or entertaining? It’s not a fair comparison! Andor was great, but Skeleton Crew mostly lived up to its own aspirations. Who’s to say that a serious-minded semi-Marxist critique of economic desperation and the rise of fascism in the Star Wars universe is somehow harder than transplanting the 1980s Amblin sensibility to the same universe? Or somehow better? It’s nice to have both, darn it.
Disney+’s new animated comedy, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, has to overcome being “the Farm” to at least two different versions of “Paree.” Do an animated Spider-Man-centric series in 2025 and you’re inevitably going to be compared to the Spider-Verse films, two of the most innovative pieces of pop art pastiche ever conceived. The Spider-Verse movies are brilliant and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is just fun — one an exercise in pushing the medium forward, the other a backward-looking piece of nostalgia.
Who’s to say that you can’t have both of those things? Not me! But once you accept Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man as purely Gen X/Millennial nostalgia-mining from Marvel Animation Studios, it’s hard not to compare it to last year’s X-Men ’97, which used the warm glow of retro animation to expose specific and pointed progressive themes that have always been part of the X-Men story.
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So Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man isn’t the Spider-Verse franchise and it also isn’t X-Men ’97. It’s bright, high-energy and inoffensively young-skewing, having a lot of fun with its buffed-up antique aesthetic and burying its few non-confrontational points about the responsibilities of power in an avalanche of easter eggs. It’s slight, but pleasantly so.
Created by Jeff Trammell, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is set in an animated world that’s selectively MCU-adjacent, establishing its position as tangential to canon in the very first scene. High school freshman Peter Parker (Hudson Thames) is going to his first day at school, driven by his recently widowed Aunt May (Kari Wahlgren). Before Peter can so much as walk through the door at ultra-selective Midtown High School, a portal opens and Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes) shows up, chasing down a vicious alien symbiote.
Chaos ensues and, in the process, Peter helps to defend new classmate Nico Minoru (Grace Song). He has no power, but he has heart. Then a radioactive spider crawls down through the portal and bites Peter on the back of the neck.
This is not necessarily the Peter Parker/Spider-Man origin story you know from the comics or various feature films, but elements of the world that Peter occupies have similarities. The Sokovia Accords exist in this world and created the rift between the Avengers featured in Captain America: Civil War, but while Tom Holland’s Spider-Man participated in the climactic airport showdown in that film, he was not a participant in a comparable showdown mentioned in this series. Perhaps that’s why it’s okay that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man includes Doctor Strange and Iron Man, but not voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch or Robert Downey Jr, but when Daredevil pops up for an amusing cameo, he’s voiced by Disney+/Netflix Daredevil star Charlie Cox. Your head might hurt if you try to understand all the pieces that overlap versus those that diverge, or you can just keep repeating “multiverse” to yourself and move on.
Trust me, it’s healthier the latter way.
So anyway, rather than wasting an episode or two on Peter Parker trying out makeshift suits or learning to master his goo and whatnot, things pick up three months later with Peter in the earliest stages of super-heroism. At thee same time, he’s managing his friendship with Nico, his crush on classmate Pearl Pangan (Cathy Ang) and, in what seems like a stroke of luck, landing a robotics internship with Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo), under the snide watch of Paul F. Tompkins’s Bentley Wittman. It isn’t luck.
Soon, Peter finds himself caught in the middle of an elaborate technologically enhanced gang war, in which participants include Mac Gargan (Jonathan Medina) and Osbourn’s former colleague Otto Octavius (Hugh Dancy).
The ensemble also includes Pearl’s boyfriend Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Byrd), captain of their high school football team; Norman’s social media influencer son Harry Osborn (Zeno Robinson); and more.
So it’s here that even the most casual of Spider-Man fans are all, “I know who Otto Octavius and Norman Osborn are going to become!” And more passionate fans are doing the same thing for Bentley Wittman and Mac Gargan and Lonnie Lincoln, while if I were to mention that other characters this season include Amadeus Cho and Jeanne Foucault and villains like Butane and Speed Demon, the heads of dedicated Spider-Man fans might explode.
Throw in the fact that Nico Minoru is a queer, Wiccan favorite from Runaways and you may be getting the point: For a show that initially eschews a lot of the bigger-name characters and villains from Spider-Man lore, almost every single person who appears in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will, or at some point has already, become a power-enhanced figure within the franchise. Were all of the characters here to suddenly transform into their various future alter egos post-haste, future seasons of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man would become utter chaos. And it is, honestly, a bit chaotic already, especially as the first season nears its end. A little tighter storytelling focus would benefit things going forward.
Using a 3D cel-shaded technique that allows it to echo vintage Steve Ditko-era Spider-Man, the series straddles vintage and contemporary well, almost achieving a Roy Lichtenstein pop art sensibility, only much more earnest. Action scenes utilize comic book panel framings and the primary color-dominated palette is the very opposite of the brooding, adult-skewing animé styling so frequently utilized in a nod to maturity and coolness. Instead, the style here aligns with the “Aw shucks,” well-meaning sincerity embodied by Peter Parker and by Thames’ vocal work.
This is a youthful, wide-eyed approach to Parker and to the story at large. Violence occasionally yields scratches and blood, but nothing here is gory, nor would the language cause awkwardness at family viewing parties. The series eschews any sort of sexuality, with even Nico’s desires getting toned down to the point of total chastity.
There is no pushing of any topical envelopes and in terms of bigger topical concerns, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man has almost none. The familiar theme song has been given a catchy, Kidz Bop-level hip-hop update courtesy of The Math Club, featuring Relaye & Melo Makes Music, and the song has a lyric calling the main character “a hero not a vigilante.” That’s as close as Trammell and company come to having an angle. The series takes the indelible line about the great responsibility that comes with great power and uses it to compare Spider-Man’s idealistic Boy Scout altruism to the goals of other characters who are good guys in their own minds, if not within the moral rubric of the show. The complexity of the show is low and, with Uncle Ben dying off-screen before the events of the series, the stakes are low.
Compared to the Spider-Verse movies, there’s no wonderment at the visual ingenuity, and compared to X-Men ’97, there’s no ambitious subtext to be elevated to the surface. There’s no hint of Paree there at all, but the quaint throwback charms of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man have their own modest appeal.
