They do know Spiderman's not real, don't they?

Within the past few weeks the Broadway production of Spiderman, Turn Off the Dark, has premiered. It's the most expensive production ever on Broadway at  a cost of $65 million, and music by U2's Bono and the Edge. Well, the other big news is that there have been myriad injuries, including one in which an actor is in serious condition at a New York hospital. From the highlights on TV they've shown characters, with wires attached, flying all over the theatre above the crowds. Seeing all this made me think about the Spiderman series of movies the past few years and how they were hailed for such an advance in special effects. Tobey McGuire, the actor who played Peter Parker/Spiderman in the movies, didn't have to do all the flying around with wires attached because of  CGI (computer generated imagery)-the same effects that were praised as so advanced. Tobey didn't do all that stuff because it's too dangerous. Flying within a hair's breadth of street traffic hanging on a web, climbing buildings, falling from several stories high. See, that stuff didn't really happen, but with the aid of the computer software it was made to look so realistic (not all that realistic in my opinion, but I've always had difficulty with the willing suspension of disbelief). I find CGI distracting, moreso than old effects like those used in the Sinbad movies of the 60s and 70s. When I saw the last entry in the Indiana Jones collection, I was irritated by how much the directors had relied on CGI, with the army ants, and the aliens. All this stuff done to look so real looked, ...well, fake. The earlier Indiana Jones movies, and Star Wars worked within the technological limitations of their time, and as a result look better. Now, we see so much CGI in movies it's really off putting, to the point that filmmakers actually use it to make human-like characters in the movies. I mean, it's one thing if it's Toy Story and it's a caricature or cartoon. However, when you look at Polar Express or Christmas Carol, 2 recent CGI animated films, it's creepy. Look into the soulless distant eyes of the characters-they aren't looking at each other like real people do. They look like the talking mannequins at Disney's "Carousel of Progress."

Anyway, that was a big digression. My real point is that the folks who did the Spiderman movies used CGI because the stuff that Spiderman does is too dangerous for humans to really do. He is super-human, right? Which means beyond human-beyond what a human can do. The problem is they now have actors trying to do what Spiderman does in the comic books, and what CGI does in the movies. It's a long way from Mary Martin suspended above the stage as Peter Pan.

Maybe, the producers of Broadway Spiderman are the kids who watched all the Roadrunner cartoons and didn't understand you can't really do that stuff?