Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, TV | Tagged: your friendly neighborhood spider-man

Spider-Man Composers on Forging "Your Friendly Neighborhood" Score

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Composers Zach Robinson and Leo Birenberg spoke with Bleeding Cool about what was involved in helping bring the hit Marvel Animation series to life.

Composers Zach Robinson and Leo Birenberg are always looking to innovate to create that standout sound for your beloved IPs whenever they get the opportunity. Whether it's for Netflix's Cobra Kai, Roku's Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Peacock's Twisted Metal, or their own projects, there's no challenge too great that they won't set aside to stand out. One of their latest projects is the Disney+ original animated series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man from showrunners Mel Zwyer and creator Jeff Trammell, which is the retelling of the Marvel fan favorite with Peter Parker front and center in an MCU alternate timeline with Hudson Thames reprising his role from What If…? as the title character and alter ego. Robinson spoke to Bleeding Cool about the goals they wanted to establish, why it's important to retain iconography to integrate the original 1969 animated series theme, working with Zwyer and Trammell, and their influences.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Composers on Forging Their Own Musical Identity

Bleeding Cool: What was the starting point for you and Leo [Birenberg] when it came to developing the theme, and what were the goals you wanted to establish when you got brought on board for 'Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man?'

There is a whole group of Spider-Man music that we are all familiar with, the canon of great composers who've written Spider-Man, and we wanted to do our own thing. We didn't listen to a lot of other Spider-Man scores at all. Writing an iconic theme to set this show apart is pretty daunting, and it took a bit together; we had a few early drafts that weren't quite working. Once we hit the one that we had, we were super stoked about it and ended up working out.

When we started seeing Spider-Man in live action again with the Sam Raimi films that referenced the theme of the 1969 animated series, it seemed more prominent in the MCU. Was it something that you wanted to mull over to integrate, or was it something that was like, "You know what? This is something we must have in our theme."

Probably the latter. A lot of people are familiar with the Marvel sound, right? Our challenge was "How do we live within the Marvel sound," which is important to the creators, company, and to the identity of the properties, but what can we do to differentiate our score within the MCU to make it feel like ours, yours, or anyone new to Spider-Man? I don't know if that answered your question or not, but it is something we knew the task was going to be hard and it took a lot of conversation.
Jeff [Trammell], our showrunner, is awesome. That guy knows more about the character than any person I've ever seen. He has Spider-Man tattoos and wears related T-shirts to work every day. If there is anyone who knows about the web crawler, it is him. When he accepted the theme and the sound of the show, we were happy with that.

What are Jeff and Mel like as creatives to work with?

Truly, some of the best people we've ever worked with. They are so enthusiastic about Spider-Man; Jeff and Mel are huge fans. They have a lot of creative ideas they relay to us, and we align a lot on all the stuff we enjoy as viewers and as consumers. We like a lot of the same movies, and watch some of the same anime, like that's something we connected on quickly. We get a lot of references; we're all like we're picking up what they're putting down and vice versa. Everything was so chill with them, honestly, like we'd show them music, and they would have their notes. There were never any fire drills or anything like that. In our job, something could go wrong at any minute, and there was nothing like that on the show. It was smooth sailing, and I would work with them until the end of time.

I saw that some of the musical influences for the series' score were anime and lo-fi hip-hop. Can you get a little bit into that?

There are two different aspects of the show. There's like the action aspect, there's the high-octane, high-energy world that Spider-Man lives in. There's fighting, action, and villains. That's the music we want to approach from an anime perspective. When we say, "anime perspective," we mean the music in anime is very inspiring to us. It's melodic and has high energy. The instrumentation is unique. There's a lot of like blending orchestra with electronics and with guitars, bass, and drums.

That's what we did on 'Cobra Kai,' and that's something we do quite well – making the score feel like it's not just a movie score. It can be like a song you listen to, and then the other side of that is the whole slice of life part of 'Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.' It's still everyday Peter Parker stuff, which we love. That's our favorite stuff. The lo-fi hip-hop aspect was something we felt like Peter Parker probably listens to on his computer. That's a part of his youthful energy, and it takes place in New York. There's that color of music aspect when we're having that as a setting. Blend the two, which is what we do best. 'Cobra Kai' had all these different sound worlds and 'The Weird Al Movie' did have a bunch of different sound worlds. We take it all, and we smash it together. Hopefully, it feels like this is like a "Zach and Leo" thing.

Season one of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, which also features the voices of Kari Wahlgren, Grace Song, Eugene Byrd, Zeno Robinson, Colman Domingo, Hugh Dancy, and Charlie Cox, is available to stream on Disney+.

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