In an effort to firmly root the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man in the pseudo-reality created by Stan Lee and other, less-hyped creators half a century ago, the film features a classic Spider-Man villain as its primary antagonist. Namely, Dr. Curt Connors, aka The Lizard.
Comic book geeks will recall the backstory of the character as a pretty simple riff on the Jekyll and Hyde story. Man loses arm, man seeks to regain arm through science, science goes awry, man is cursed to periodically transform into a slathering, vicious beast. Pretty simple. The good news, if the newly-released video blog embedded below is any indication, is that the film doesn’t really screw with that classic origin tale too much.
Granted, in this version Connors is a geneticist working for Norman Osbourne’s Oscorp corporation, but otherwise it’s basically the same story that the comics told. The one big deviation from Marvel canon is that the film’s version of Connors was apparently a close friend/colleague of Peter Parker’s father. As a result, Dr. Connors and Spider-Man’s alter ego are at least acquaintances prior to Connors’ reptilian rampage.
As far as Hollywood meddling, this is probably the best we could hope for. It’s not 100-percent accurate to the source material, but at worst, this just means that the interactions between Spider-Man and The Lizard will have a bit more pathos than they did when the duo threw down back in the ’60s.
That is, of course, assuming the film doesn’t veer wildly off of established characterization. Then again, there are really only so many ways to portray an 8-foot-tall lizard in a lab coat, so consider this video blog a reassuring bit of viral marketing.
