Itay wrote a review of Spiderman (great fun movie, BTW – mediocre CGI, weak script, but Toby McGuire is a great Peter Parker, and Kristen Dunst looks very pretty when she’s smiling – she’s the sort of girl you want to see happy).
Anyway, this is a comment I just posted on his review, which I’m just echoing here:
The Green Goblin was far from the first foe Spiderman fought with: He tackled the Terrible Tinkerer, the Chameleon, The Vulture (one of my favorites, because of his wonderful simplicity – he’s just an old crook that can fly, and he’s very good at it), Doctor Octopus, The Lizard (the reference to “Doctor Connors fired me” in the movie foreshadows this gothic villain) and plenty of others before he ever met the Goblin.
Perhaps when Itay writes that the Goblin was Spiderman’s firest foe, he was thinking about the Ultimate Spiderman series, but that’s a very recent development, and it’s simply reflecting (like the movie) the Goblin’s long but sure rise to mega-villainhood.
What’s cool about the Goblin is how he was developed gradually, and how he took root in the Spiderman mythos: He started as an anonymous villain – that was his big gimmick, and unlike other villains, Stan Lee was careful to keep the Goblin’s real identity hidden from even the readers. This in turn allowed him to bring about the powerful revelation that the Goblin was really Norman Osborn, the father of Peter Parker (Spiderman)’s close friend, Harry.
And this set up a series of powerful soap-operatic revelations: how the Goblin discovered Spiderman’s secret identity, how the Goblin killed Peter Parker’s girlfriend, how he died while fighting Spiderman (a strong story that the movie also retells, in it’s own version), and how this filled the Goblin’s son, Harry Osborn, with a hatred for Spiderman which drove him to become the Goblin himself – the wonderful thing about the old Goblin was that he was a gimmick-based villain, and anyone could put on the costume, get on the glider, and start slinging thouse Pumpkin bombs around… in one later story, it was Harry’s psychiatrist who took up the Goblin identity, and in another, it was another of Parker’s friends, Ned Leeds (who changed the costume and called himself “the Hobgoblin”).
And there were others…
But eventually, the writers figured out they should just bring Norman Osborn back from the dead and get on with it.
