Warning: This article contains spoilers for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man episodes 1-2, “Amazing Fantasy” and “The Parker Luck.” The sky’s the limit for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Jeff Trammell, showrunner and creator of the Marvel Animation series, teases there are even more Marvel character cameos that true believers will recognize following Wednesday’s star-studded season premiere. Putting a twist on the usual Spider-Man origin story, the Disney+ show started with high school freshman Peter Parker (Hudson Thames) being bitten by a spider during a battle between Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes) and a symbiotic alien (Kellen Goff) when a magical portal opened in the sky over Midtown High.
Trailers have already given away that a black-suited Daredevil (voiced by Daredevil: Born Again actor Charlie Cox) will raise hell in the series, which features classic Spider-villains like Doctor Octopus (Hugh Dancy) and the Scorpion (Jonathan Medina).
Trammell told Marvel.com that he thought certain characters would be “off-limits” due to the rights issues surrounding certain members of Spider-Man’s rogue’s gallery and other Marvel characters, only to learn that Marvel Animation imposed no such limitations.
“What do you mean I can use Charlie Cox’s Daredevil in this show! I didn’t expect you to say yes!,” Trammell said.
Peter’s best friend Nico Minoru (Grace Song) — a member of the teen team the Runaways in the comics — also features in the two-episode premiere along with Pearl Pangan (Cathy Ang) and Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Byrd), Peter’s classmates whose respective counterparts are the superhero Wave and the supervillain Tombstone.
“I love the Runaways, and being able to pull Nico into this world, it’s a fun experiment,” the animation veteran added. “Nico has so much history in the comics already, and she and Peter have interacted in various incarnations but always tangentially. So having them on the same page growing up together, seeing how she supports Peter and he supports her, it’s such a fun dynamic.” (As Trammell exclusively told ComicBook, that role almost went to a different superhero: Jessica Jones, who canonically attended Midtown High with Peter in the main Marvel Universe.)
When the science whiz accepts an Oscorp internship offered by industrialist and billionaire benefactor Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo), the handful of interns accepted into the “outreach” program are all versions of the superheroes Amadeus Cho/Brawn (Aleks Le), Jeanne Foucault/Finesse (Anjali Kuanpaneni), and Asha (Erica Luttrell). Norman, of course, is Spider-Man’s archenemy the Green Goblin in the classic comic books, but he’s not the only one of the Oscorp adults with a villainous counterpart.
Dr. Carla Connors (Zehra Fazal) — a gender-swapped Curt Connors — and Dr. Bentley Wittman (Paul F. Tompkins) are the alter-egos of the Spider-Man villain the Lizard and the Fantastic Four villain the Wizard, although it remains to be seen whether they’re destined to become supervillains in this alternate reality branching out from the mainstream MCU.
The first two episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man are now streaming on Disney+, with multiple new episodes dropping weekly on Wednesdays through Feb. 19.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man episodes 1-2, “Amazing Fantasy” and “The Parker Luck.” The sky’s the limit for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Jeff Trammell, showrunner and creator of the Marvel Animation series, teases there are even more Marvel character cameos that true believers will recognize following Wednesday’s star-studded season premiere. Read More