A Trippy Trip into Pop Culture Multiverses

This weekend Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse goes all meta and attempts to humorously and seamlessly tie together all of the different iterations of Spider-Man that Marvel and the seemingly endless amounts of movie adaptations of the crime-fighting teen arachnid have put forth in the world — from Peter Porker (aka Spider-Ham) to Gwen Stacy (aka Spider-Woman/Spider Gwen) to Spider-Man Noir (aka hard to even explain). It somehow effortlessly pulls off this feat in addition to intuitively explaining wtf a multiverse is well enough that a child could understand it. In fairness, though, on the last count at least, there have been a few other great TV shows and movies — from Rick and Morty to Fringe to Sliders — that also have created parallel universes that both create great dramatic tension (or in the case of Rick and Morty, humor) and connect together logically.