The Spider-Man 2 Superbowl trailer.

As I roamed the historic pitch of Bramall Lane football ground today, showing the players how to do the Cruyff Turn, people often said to me, "Steve, you're clearly quite the sports maestro. Did you see the Superbowl the other night?"

"What?" I said. "Those little black round things you could get in the 1970s and you'd throw them at the floor and they'd bounce right up and hit the ceiling?"

"Not the superball, you brain-dead dolt!" they cried. "The Superbowl! It's the hip new thing among all the kids - thirteen hours of rugby interrupted by Bruno Mars."

Reader, I must confess, tempting as that sounds, I hadn't seen it. But, thanks to the Bronze Age Babies, I am now aware that, somewhere during it, they showed a trailer for the new Spider-Man 2 movie.

This of course gives me a chance to inspect it with the critical gaze that has oft-times awed the world into slack-jawed wonder.

The first thing I have to say is it's extremely long. I sort of feel like I've now seen the whole film.

The other obvious thing that strikes me is I'm not sure why the Rhino looks like a robot or why they need three villains in one tale. I'm hoping they're pulling a fast one and that the reason it's called Enemies Unite is because it sees Spidey having to team up with the trio of villains to face a bigger threat, which would at least add a surprise twist to the reasons for the movie's seeming overpopulation.

It does look better than a previous trailer I saw which made the film seem like some sort of computer game. This time, there's plenty of the kind of characterisation we all associate with Spidey - and, with its electrification antics, it certainly looks exciting.

But does Electro really get his powers from falling in a vat of eels?

Emma Stone still looks very nice as Gwen Stacy, Andrew Garfield still looks like Andy Murray, and Aunt May looks a lot more sprightly than she really should do. These, to my mind, are good things. Harry Osborn looks a bit weird but I'm hoping that's because he's going through his druggie phase and is meant to look like that.

Emma Stone by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, USA
(Emma StoneUploaded by maybeMaybeMaybe)
 [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, here's a random picture of Emma Stone, posted for no good reason other than that pictures of attractive women seem to lure more people to this blog than do pictures of 1970s comics.

What that fact says about the state of this world, I can only surmise.

She certainly looks very happy in the picture. I can only assume that someone's just started to demonstrate the magic of the superball to her. Look at it, Emma! See how it bounces!

PS. Thanks to Dougie for giving my post about The Horrific World of Monsters a plug on his Materioptikon site.

And here's that very post I once wrote about that very book.

This is my post about the death of Gwen Stacy.

And these are all my posts about Spider-Man.

Here's an eBook I once wrote. It's fab. Both the people who've ever read it have said so.