While many of the quippy jokes and tangential references in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse landed with moviegoers, one particular blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag managed to swing its way right over some viewers’ heads. In the spirit of explaining a joke, thus making its farcical nature all the more compelling, let’s break down why one of Spider-Verse’s jokes was kinda funny.
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Toward the beginning of the movie, Spider-Verse plays a montage detailing how Miles Morales has matured as Spider-Man since the events of Into The Spider-Verse. Like any iteration of the web-slinger, Miles has experienced the highest highs of cleaning villainy off of New York’s streets and the lowest lows of being at the center of a superhero scandal. Miles’ big scandal, which is presented in the style of a YouTuber apology video, was that he (as Spider-Man) had endorsed a baby powder brand.
To provide context for how bad Miles’ professional oopsie was, his apology video, titled “Spider-Man #2 regrets baby powder endorsement,” somehow sports a whopping 69 million dislikes, despite only having around 10.5 million views (which is still a lot of views, of course). It’s as if people came by the page in droves just to click the thumbs-down. But what exactly was it about Spider-Man’s baby powder endorsement that inspired so much online outrage?
Miles’ baby powder scandal might be referencing a real-world one
The ongoing theory among fans is that the joke is not so subtly referencing when pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson faced lawsuits from tens of thousands of plaintiffs alleging that asbestos in their baby powder caused ovarian cancer, with a court ruling in 2021 that it owed billions. This year, the company has set aside nearly $9 billion to settle the lawsuits, as reported by NPR.
