Italian Spiderman! Mistery, Parody, and Stereotypes

Antonio Enrico Buonocore (November 22, 2008)
An interview with Dario Russo, the Italian-Australian film student who invented the fortunate web series.


A few months ago i-Italy was one of the first webzines to discover 'Italian Spiderman'. A viral phenomenon that premiered on YouTube in May 2008 rapidly reaching millions of viewers, the project now consists of twelve YouTube installments chronicling the adventures of a plump moustached superhero as he battles with his enemies, as fearsome as they’re ridiculous, and routinely saves the world while propagating (with a healthy dose of irony added) many of the worst stereotypes trailing Italians. The principal character is in fact affected by incurable machismo: besides being recklessly rude to both friends and foes, he is also an unrepentant womanizer—and in one episode he readily punishes the woman he just saved, guilty of not being prompt enough to prepare a macchiato for him.


Af Laura Ruberto wrote in a comment to our previous article, besides the Italian angle, what is impressive in the Italian Spiderman is how the clips recreate the style of those earlier films—not just the costumes and music but even the camera movement and non-synchronized sound. But among the secrets of its success was the mystery that surrounded it; nobody knew what it was, but the buzz invaded the web. A parody of non-American b-movies of the 60s and 70s that misappropriated popular American superheroes, it was presented as a fake trailer for a non-existent film. A Wikipedia entry pretended it was a 1968 Italian action-adventure film which had been deemed "un-viewable" by Italian distributors and never released. The story has the only 35mm print of the film being lost at sea, but recovered in the present day, thereby allowing Alrugo Entertainment to release the film through YouTube...


Intrigued by the phenomenon and by the way it played with stereotypes about Italians, we set to reveal the mistery, and after long research we managed to reach its creator Dario Russo, an Italian-Australian film student. He considers Italian filmmaker Mario Bava (an eclectic director whose works span from thrillers to fantasy flicks) and 'Danger: Diabolik', the film version of a famous Italian comic, as two of his main sources of inspiration.


Episode 1 Episode 2

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