Personally, I've always thought the organic webshooters were an idea that made perfect sense, and wondered why Stan and Steve didn't think of it.

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Shortly after the release of the movie I read an interview with Stan and he said they did. They rejected it because it would have made the character too creepy for a young audience. They didn't want to make him too much like a spider.

In addition to the reasons stated against organic webs, I also love the mechanical webshooters because they are the most obvious evidence of teenage Peter Parker's extraordinary intelligence, something absolutely essential to the character. The best superheroes aren't cyphers, after all, but carry forward even once empowered whatever was previously unique about them.

You have on many occasions made statements to the effect of "if you bring in reality, it's time to move on." So how can you get so caught up in the intricacies of web production, and it's physical implications, yet ignore nonsense like "spider sense"? Or for that matter how spider strength and speed would alter Parkers physical appearance, and musculature?

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Since JB has answered already, I will also give my 2 cents on this matter. If Spider-Man had been *created* with organic webshooters, maybe I would give it a pass. However, Raimi had the arrogance to change something that had worked fine for 40 years on the basis of "realism." Under those circumstances, then I believe it's fair to hold the person making the change to a pretty high standard.

It's like if I made a Superman film where Superman didn't fly naturally but because of his "magic" cape -- because I believed that was more "realistic." As arguably unrealistic as Superman's biological flying ability might be, it would be fair to tear me a new one for my completely absurd "change."

What's more annoying is that the webshooters weren't a necessary change. It didn't make the film move more quickly -- the time it took for his "shazam!" comic relief scene could have been used for a montage scene of him making the webshooters. And since this is already a comic book movie, I doubt that viwers would not accept the conceit that Parker = genius = inventor of something that no one else has made.

I mean, Batman is hardly "realistic" and the explanation for his skills and his arsenal (he's smart, in good shape, and rich) was always enough in most media adaptations of the character.

This took me back immediately to Stan's stories of what a hard sell Spider-Man was -- not to the public, but to the Powers that Were at Marvel. Spider-Man has been a part of our culture and conscience now for almost fifty years (!!) and we forget sometimes that for most people spiders are, in Shooter's word, "icky". Most people simply don't like spiders, and back in 1962 it was something of an odd choice for Stan to make as the basis for a superhero.

(And, as noted several times, Raimi has no problem at all with Parker making a costume that costs the studio $100,000 a pop! As a sixteen year old movie fan that's something Raimi would have wished he could make, so that okay!)

I like the organic webslinging take.  I do see JB's point about where would Spidey store the raw components to generate his webbing.  I say, carbon nanotubes -- please don't laugh!  If NASA has considered using them to build a space platform attached to a tether of nanotubes, it's not that far fetched.  Spidey's body could've just developed an efficient way to make these when he was bitten -- just sayin'! 

Until then, the guys who created the character probably got it right.

John Byrne wrote: ...Getting the abilities of a spider as a result of being bitten by one -- radioactive or genetically engineered* -- is about as far from "reality" as one can get... ...* A change the movie made that actually worked...

And that change wasn't the filmmaker's original idea, either. They took it from "Ultimate Spider-Man," which was first published about a couple of years before the film was released. 

Complete agreement, there. Some serious "DC-itis" slipped into Spider-Man along the way. "Hey, look! My webbing can do something it couldn't do last issue!" In this case, it turned Spider-Man into Green Lantern.