What happens to Spiderman's webs once he's done with them?

July 6, 2004 1:51 PM

What happens to Spiderman's webs once he's done with them? Do they just stay there and get dusty? Do you think they'd interfere with helicopter blades?
posted by small_ruminant to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

They dissolve after about an hour.
posted by Karmakaze at 2:12 PM on July 6, 2004

I seem to recall somewhere, that his webs are biodegradable and dissolve within an hour. Maybe it's longer. (His clothes that he secures underneath a building would fall if he was away for awhile, no?)

Additionally, when it rains, you'd imagine that they'd dissolve faster.
posted by filmgeek at 2:28 PM on July 6, 2004

What Karmakaze said. While the movie Spidey seems to shoot the webs right out of his arm instead of using a little gadget, the goo is apparently formulated the same as in the comic books.
posted by nickmark at 2:28 PM on July 6, 2004

Which is strange, because in the comic there were two kinds of webbing, the first was not as strong as the current one. He developed the second one to take care of Venom I believe... meh, nitpicking on a Tuesday afternoon.
posted by Derek at 2:39 PM on July 6, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks! Glad I asked.
posted by small_ruminant at 2:44 PM on July 6, 2004

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Spoiler Alert -- If you haven't seen the movie stop reading now
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As long as we're discussing it. I never read the comic books, but could Spider-Man plow through all those railroad tracks without totally breaking off his legs? Could he actually stop a moving train going that fast?

I can suspend disbelief to a point and say OK, he has the proportional strength and agility of a spider, but when exactly did he become Superman?
posted by willnot at 7:30 PM on July 6, 2004

Why didn't the falling from over 10 stories down when he was stressed out like twice in the movie and the holding up a wall to save Mary Jane at the end not bother you? lol
posted by banished at 8:02 PM on July 6, 2004

Apparently he can press about 10 tons.

I don't know if that means he could have done it or not.
posted by Pockets at 12:27 AM on July 7, 2004

Here's another question: since he now shoots the webs out of glands in his wrists - rather than mechanical gadgets - all those webs are biological material. Now it appears, in this movie and even more so in the first, that he shoots about 150 pounds of the stuff. Where does it all come from? How much does he have to eat? Wouldn't he get skinnier as he swung along? This is bothering me.
posted by ChasFile at 7:26 AM on July 7, 2004

Also, wasn't "Got gettem, tiger!" the lamest thing you've ever heard in your life? I say that to friends as a joke, you know, like calling someone who just dropped something "slick," or someone driving too slow "Speedracer." Or "captain," or "sportsfan," or "killer," or "youngblood," etc etc. I mean, was she mocking him? That's the way it sounded.
posted by ChasFile at 7:31 AM on July 7, 2004

ChasFile: It's a comic book movie. Don't think too hard about this stuff. Oh, and Mary Jane calls him "Tiger" in the comic books.
posted by Grod at 8:41 AM on July 7, 2004

Yeah -- I took "Go get 'em, Tiger" as a nod to the comic MJ, and as such kind of appreciated it. It's nowhere near the worst dialog in the film, after all...
posted by nickmark at 9:25 AM on July 7, 2004