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`Spider-Man', the popular friendly neighbourhood hero of the cartoon world, is all set to hit city theatres soon.
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SECRET LIVES: Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker.
THE WORD is out. Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man will be visiting your city shortly at your theatres. Actor Tobey Maguire, 27 impersonates the web-swinging wall-crawler who is Tarzan, Batman, Superman, and a trapeze artiste rolled into one. Eighteen-year old Kirsten Dunst plays his girlfriend Mary Jane while Willem Dafoe is his foe Harry the Green Goblin. Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmons and old-timer Cliff Robertson play supporting roles in the latest movie outing of this favourite crime-fighter who was created in 1962 by scriptwriter Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko for Marvel comics.
According to the original storyline, Peter Parker, a wimpish but brilliant high school student at Mid Town High, is bitten by a radio-active spider and acquires tremendous strength in proportion to the strength of the spider along with its ability to climb sheer walls and perform all the other feats like a human arachnid. He also develops a mysterious spider-sense, which warns him of danger at hand. Astounded at his transformation, the teenaged hero makes a webbed-design costume for himself in red and blue with a mask. He fashions a web-shooter with a kind of liquid cement which is strong enough to sustain him as he swings from skyscraper to skyscraper and can also be woven into a net to tie up the baddies when Spidey gets through with them.
Tragedy strikes the orphaned lad when his Uncle Ben is shot dead by a prowler and he has to be looked after by his Aunt May. He helps fill the family kitty by moonlighting as a freelance photographer for the crusty J. Jonah Jameson, editor of the Daily Bugle who is firmly convinced that the swinging hero is a menace to society.
As a compensation for the travails of life, Peter enjoys the love of his schoolmate Betty Brant and when he grows up and enters university, he falls in love with the beautiful Mary Jane whom he eventually marries.
As befits an exotic hero, his foes are weird like the Green Goblin, Jigsaw, the Kingpin, Eye Patch, the Jester, the Lizard, Kraven the Hunter, and the Rhino.
Spidey has appeared in two animated television series and in two live-action movies Spider-Man (1977) in which wisecracking hero with an allergy which makes him sneeze at the most inopportune moments foils a villain (Thayer David) who hypnotises prominent citizens into committing crime after crime and Spider-Man Strikes Back (1978) in which Spidey tracks down another master criminal (Robert Alda) who has stolen an atomic bomb made by a group of students. Nicholas Hammond, one of the young actors from The Sound of Music plays the hero in both films and in the television series that followed.
Spidey has not only appeared in a host of Marvel comics but in three novels as well, `Mayhem in Manhattan' (1978) by Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, and `Crime Campaign' (1979) by Paul Kupperberg.
What makes Spider-Man so popular is that he represents a transformation, which every unheroic individual would wish to undergo without being an alien from Krypton like Superman or an angst-ridden neurotic crime-fighter like Batman. A handy radioactive spider's bite is all that is required to make a hero out of a wimp.
Spidey's sense of humour, his devotion to Aunt May, his optimistic outlook even when he doesn't earn enough money out of his photography to pay his way through college, and his compassion and understanding of others including his friend Harry, who, because of a mental kink is at times transformed into the criminal Green Goblin, makes him a lovable and real hero.
Above all, the most endearing quality is his modesty, a hero who doesn't take himself seriously.
ANAND KUMAR RAJU
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