Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a new animated series on Disney+ that attempts to offer a fresh take on Peter Parker’s journey as he navigates high school life and his responsibilities as Spider-Man. With Norman Osborn as his mentor, the series explores Peter’s struggles with balancing friendships, school, and crime-fighting.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (S1: E1&2) Review

There are only so many reasons to reboot an IP, and all of them are money. The question becomes, do those who are attempting to make said money care enough about the property to gamble it on creativity, and, if so, how far are they willing to go?

These first two episodes are very much an introduction to the characters and everyday struggles in which Peter finds himself. As such, despite its adequate animation style and above-average vocal performances, each one is little more than the same teenage drama/subplots that we’ve seen time and time again, once more regurgitated on screen, only this time it’s interspersed with incredibly lackluster action scenes. So far, there’s little to suggest that the showrunners have any genuinely “new ideas” other than swapping the races and genders of some legacy characters.

With only two episodes in the can, it’s not possible to say with 100% certainty that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a creatively bankrupt retread of an IP that has been mined to exhaustion. Nor would it be fair, this early into the game, to say that the showrunners have substituted all sense of creativity for gender and race-swapping legacy characters. However, with the only truly new elements added to the story thus far being Spider-Man’s nitrous-boosted spiderwebbing, his hockey jersey, and Norman Osborn discovering his secret early on, it’s difficult not to see this as the case.

The voice talent is sufficient, and the pacing is fine. However, at this time, the story is fairly lacking, with far too much time spent on Peter’s social life, contrasted with some incredibly short and unimaginative action sequences.

Furthermore, the animation is a bit of a mixed bag. The 2D broad-lined character style is clearly meant to emulate many modern comic books. It is serviceable, if generic, while the 3D street-swinging sequences look cheap. They feature buildings that look incredibly repetitive and an uncanny perspective that jars the eye.

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