I’ll probably be called insensitive for this but seriously some kids need a big-time reality check, especially when it comes to allowing a deadly insect such as a black widow spider to bite them in the hopes that it will turn them into Spider-Man or some approximation of the character. As Jon Fuge of MovieWeb states the boys are aged 8, 10, and 12, which apparently still allows the idea that ‘everything is real for kids’ to be used as a defense. In this case however it might be advisable to realize that each boy is old enough to comprehend what a dangerous animal is and why it’s not a good idea to poke at it with a stick. Barring that, it might have been a good idea to teach the boys that Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider, not a garden variety type that could possibly kill them if their luck ran out. Too many people are quick to say that things such as this are not a child’s fault, that their lack of experience is to blame and that they’ll hopefully learn from this encounter. That last part is hopefully true since the boys are lucky to be breathing even if bites from a black widow aren’t always bound to be fatal. The pain they were in will hopefully serve as a good memory of what happens when a creature with such a bad reputation is needlessly provoked.
This is usually when a lot of people would break into the old diatribe of ‘back in my day’ and go on to describe how they wouldn’t play with this or provoke that or that they had enough sense not to do something stupid that the kids of today have done. Don’t let anyone fool you, a lot of us did stupid things back in the day, and so did our parents and grandparents, but when it came to fantasy characters and cartoons a lot of us also only had to take one hard knock, if that, to realize that we couldn’t act the same way as our favorite characters and just bounce back. Plus, if a real-life Spider-Man were to ever emerge from the masses, Kevin Carr from Film School Rejects paints a pretty vivid and grisly picture of what that character might look like when all the fantasy is stripped away and common sense is used when applying how a man and a spider would possibly combine. The resulting form sounds like it would be an insanely agonizing transformation, not at all like the sleep-inducing sickness that came over Peter Parker in the original movie.
Thankfully the boys were said to have recovered and were able to go home eventually, but the lesson here is an obvious one, don’t mess around with things that can kill you or cause intense pain, especially since the likelihood of Peter Parker surviving a spider bite, a radioactive one no less, would probably be less than a one percent chance at best and even if he did live, without the writers he’d be one seriously messed-up individual. The whole idea behind Spider-Man is that he would get to retain his human form and appearance when he changed, but would gain the powers that have helped define him for so long. When one really thinks about the radical change to his physiology though it becomes a little more problematic than all that since he was contaminated by a radioactive substance that basically changed his insides just enough that he became walking hotbed of radiation. This idea was brought forth and talked about by Annalee Newitz of Wired quite a while back and considering the nature of how Mary Jane Watson was killed in this version of Spider-Man, basically being riddled with cancer after having done the do with her hubby for so long, it’s fair to say that a lot of people would like to forget this story. After all, if anyone remembers the Spider-Man comics from the 90s, Peter and MJ were usually suggested to be getting busy fairly often as the artists would draw them just out of sight, their legs up in the air as MJ would be giggling or something similar. Oh yes, comics have gone there more than once.
But this would be a great time for the mother of the three boys to remind them over and over that while Spider-Man is a cool and very popular hero, trying to be like him is only going to lead to injury and possible death depending on what they’re trying to do. Hopefully no one in the world has attempted to bathe turtles in radioactive goop yet, or done anything else crazy to try and gain super powers. It’s a fun fantasy and the stories are great, but reality is always set and ready to Gibbs slap us if we reach too far.
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