I have about one of these a day - little things i notice and my mind starts to wander from one idea to the next, and things just don't add up. Here is yesterday's example.
I got the old spider-man cartoon theme song stuck in my head, which particularly sucked because i don't remember all the words exactly. Anyway that got me thinking about the old spider-man comics, and specifically his "web-shooters". Where the hell did these huge bulky things go when he put on his costume, because his arms were as sleek as, well spider legs i guess. And the little button on his palm that activates it, how the hell does he keep it from going off when he's doing that gymnastic-going-around-and-around-the-flag-pole-sticking-out-of-the-side-of-a-building thing. And how does he control the damn thing? Is it like a mouse - a single click for a stream, a double click for a web, a triple click for the cocoon... a twenty-three click for the parachute (try it, it's funny). No sense. Now i encounter plenty of things daily that don't make sense, but what makes this one special is that Stan Lee had it so that Peter Parker gets his strength, agility, his wall crawling, even his freakin' 'spider-sense' from an irradiated spider. Well why not the freakin' web shooting too! Oh, no. He makes Parker a freakin' genius chemist, in high school mind you, that develops a web fluid that has a thousand applications. Which leads me to my next point, what the hell is PP doing scraping by as a freelance photographer when he's a freakin' genius chemist, in high school mind you. All he had to do was develop something even one percent as useful as the web fluid and he be set for life. Absolutely no sense.
Now, before anyone tells me that this is just a comic book, first let me say that, while this does chaffe something fierce intellectually, it is all in good fun, and i believe that anything can benefit from logical consistency. Ultimately i suppose this is a moot point since his origins have been changed with the modern movie, making his powers much more satisfying to my rigorous tastes, i guess i just like pointing these things out.
...able to leap to broad conclusion in a single bound. :)
I believe they get around the whole super chemist thing by having PP reason to himself that he figured the spider part of him gave him an intuitive knowledge of the correct mix of ingredients.
Posted by: Hot Rod | April 18, 2006 at 11:17 PM