The point is they had enough in terms of reference points of "been done--they tried that in that thing with the thing--we can avoid this". The gap between Superman 1978 and Spider-Man 2002, is 25 years. The gap between Action Comics#1 (1938) and AF#15 (1962) is also 25 years.
Raimi's films are a blend of realism and fantasy, which allows him to tap into a wide audience and juxtapose a range of tones. So it's between extremes of the purely fantastic and style-for-style's-sake and the drab realism of the X-Men movie that came out two years back. On one hand it's got a certain old-fashioned charm and cheese to it, on the other hand it's also incredibly violent. Like the final battle between Goblin and Spider-Man where they beat each to a bloody pulp is closer to the 80s (MacFarlane-Larsen) than anything before. Dafoe's Norman Osborn by the way still holds the record for most number of on-screen deaths for any Spider-Man villain.
Him not having "specific recollection of it" wouldn't discount the possibility that Andru influenced him. Film scholars and others have long been able to point out that culture has so much ephemeral content (and comics did count as that in the 60s and 70s, the period of Raimi's childhood and teenage days) that it's hard for any film-maker, especially those working in popular genres, to fully be aware of all that influences them.
And Raimi was definitely a casual comics reader. Not the one who collects stuff, who picks up on trivia, or writes letters. But the one who reads what he likes, picks and chooses. In interviews aside from Stan Lee, he hardly ever references any writer or artist specifically.
Raimi certainly knew Gerry Conway's run for instance. Like an interview from when the first movie came out:
Did the story get changed a few times?
RAIMI:
Absolutely. David Koepp who had wrote the first script had a piece with the two villains being Elektro and the Sandman, I think they were leftovers from James Cameron’s treatment – which I like to call a ‘scriptment’. It was an 80-page treatment with these characters, but the thing is these characters weren’t my favorite. My favorite was actually the death of Gwen Stacey. Thing is, I didn’t particularly like the Gwen Stacey character, I liked the element of it, but liked Mary Jane Watson and The Green Goblin. I also tried to put Doctor Octavious in there, but we couldn’t do it justice. Having multiple-storyline arcs just didn’t work, so we decided to stick on just having the one villain and make it a deeper story.
http://www.bookofthedead.ws/hosted/m...0MovieHole.htm
The truth is they drew on a range of references across all of Spider-Man's publication history. Fabien Nicieza mentioned that he got an assignment to read every single Spider-Man comic, all titles, in publication for the Spider-Man production team, simply so he could provide references and summaries for different runs and what distinguished each decade visually and aesthetically. The first Spider-Man movie draws influences from across all Spider-Man titles and not just one specific period. I mean practically ever comic book movie is like that of course. You can't do 1:1 any single period or any single run. Certainly not with that much money where producers will want you to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
That's accurate. Yet that doesn't discount what I said. I meant to say that Ditko evoked NYC more subtly. And even with Ditko, not all his references are NYC. That same book you mention talks about the fact that Ditko modeled Peter's high school architecture on his Pennsylvania alma mater. Ditko's run felt gritty, as did Kirby's, in comparison to what DC did at the time, yeah, but that doesn't mean that artists after him didn't bring something new and different either.
Go back to the '60s -- read Kirby/Lee/Ditko and you'll find that their portrayal of background is based more on their memories of the 20s and 30s, i.e pre-war rather than the contemporary world of the 60s as it was happening. Ditko modeled Peter's high school on his high school in Pennsylvania which he attended in the early 40s. Kirby's portrayal of Ben Grimm and his Lower East Side world was also a nostalgia for his own youth as a street kid during the 20s and 30s. There was a heavy element of nostalgia to Marvel in that period. As opposed to DC, where Siegel and Shuster's 1938 Superman was a New Dealer, and definitely a product of that specific period of FDR's second term. Batman who fought gangsters and whose iconography was based on movies that were still recent and fresh in everyone's memories. The fact is that Joe Simon-Jack Kirby's Captain America which Kirby co-created as a young artist before World War II is far more contemporary and of its spirit than the stuff he did in the '60s, which was based on decades of experience, starts and stops, failures and successes, and a certain distance.
The fact that '60s Marvel caught the zeitgeist of the youth of that time, does not mean that it's actually reflective of that, or made by people who were tied to that. I mean nostalgia was a huge part of the 60s. Alan Moore pointed that out in his
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1969 where he had older characters talk about the youth scene, and one of them talks about how modern and advanced these kids are, and another said, "No they're just nostalgic for their childhood".