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Movies & TV

Norm Wilner’s amazing #SpiderTweet

It was late on a Friday night and I was doing what most husbands do when their wives are out of town: writing parody lyrics for the old Spider-Man theme song.

It was just a throwaway joke, really. A silly little gag tossed out as a mental palate-cleanser between the documentaries I was watching that night. But people started batting it around, retweeting and liking it by the hundreds. An hour and a half later it was one of the three or four most popular tweets I’d ever posted the next morning, it had left all the others in the dust.

And it kept going. On Sunday afternoon, it looked as it if was slowing down, but then this happened:

Which led to this:

On Monday morning, Guillermo Del Toro boosted it again by replying to one of the replies:

It just wouldn’t die. As I write this, it’s cleared 3,000 retweets and 4,200 likes for a total of 283,436 “impressions” – which, if I understand that concept correctly, means more than a quarter of a million people have seen that tweet.

I’ve been on Twitter for almost six years. I’ve tweeted about film, food, politics and culture. Nothing – not my movie coverage, not the Rob Ford saga, not a twitter essay on the Jian Ghomeshi verdict – has been as wildly successful as one dopey Spider-Man joke.

I tell you, it’s enough to make one reconsider one’s life’s work.

Which, of course, led to this:

See what I’m saying? Everyone’s a comedian.

Follow Norm Wilner on Twitter here.

website@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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