It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film

and the ways it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps, here again with...

Genevieve Kosky, Tosh Robinson.

Scott Tobias.

In our last episode, we discussed Sam Ramey's 2004 film Spider-Man 2, a film about a young man, overwhelmed with

responsibilities, who undergoes a crisis of confidence. And oh, yeah, he's also Spider-Man. In this episode, we'll look at Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse, a remarkable new animated film written by Peter Lord and Roddy Rothman and directed by Rothman, Peter Ramsey, and Bob Percisgetti. There's a lot going on and into the Spider-Verse, and that's by design.

It begins as the origin story of Miles Morales, an alternate universe Spider-Man created by a writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sarah Pichelli in 2011. A Brooklyn teenager of Afro-Latino Parenthage, he's been a compelling character in comics ever since and help bring some much need of diversity to Marvel since its introduction.

He's as overwhelmed as Peter Parker

and often has a hard time balancing being a teenager ever since and helped bring some much needed diversity to Marvel since its introduction. He's as overwhelmed

as Peter Parker and often has a hard time balancing being a teenager with being a superhero, but he also

has his own distinct background and problems. It's not surprising that he's now being embraced by a wider

audience, finding him for the first time with this film. But Miles has only one part of the grand

Spider-Man story told in the film. It's also a Peter Parker story, one that finds an older disillusion down on his luck, Peter, playing a reluctant mentor to Miles after the Peter of Miles' universe dies. Peter's not the only visitor from another universe, however. The film also features the 30s come shoot Spider-Man noir, an alternate universe Gwen Stacy, who's become Spider-Woman

after the death of her BFF, Peter Parker, Peter Parker, the spectacular Spider-Ham, and Penny Parker,

a Japanese-American girl with a robotic spider sidekick. Fate forces them to band together to defeat a

common foe, actually a few common foes, keep the universe as we know it intact, and in the process

prove just how elastic the idea of Spider-Man is, and how variations on the same story have a character weighed down but not defeated by power and responsibility can resonate in any universe.

We'll talk about it more after the break.

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