Spider-Man’s Thanksgiving parade balloon is back – here’s what’s up with his thighs

Spider-Man gets one more day this week — one more Turkey Day, at least, as the friendly neighborhood superhero returns to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. His balloon, which hasn’t been featured in the parade since 2014, has gotten a facelift — or maybe an everything lift? And that’s not a joke about helium.

The new 44-foot-tall helium balloon has switched from the wall-crawling pose of previous incarnations to a web-swinging one, and it boasts more detailed musculature than previous Spidey balloons, including really serious quads.

Will Coss, executive producer at Macy’s, tells Polygon he’s excited to have the iconic Spider-Man balloon back in the lineup, “bringing a whole new kind of energy and, uh, muscular dynamic to the parade this year. I have to say, I’m not sure if you’ve seen any of the renderings, or any of our test flights, but he is a pretty impressive balloon.”

Does this explain Spider-Man’s 10-year absence from the parade? Has he been at the gym? “We wanted to keep the fans on the edge of their seat for the last decade,” Coss jokes, “to return Spider-Man for a grand reveal.” Spider-Man himself — in balloon form, anyway — debuted in the parade in 1987, retired in 1998, then returned in 2009 with a new design, which was retired in 2014.

Coss shared that a number of factors play into retiring, returning, repairing, and redesigning Macy’s famous parade balloons. Despite yearly maintenance and careful checks, each balloon only has a lifespan of a few years. In the case of this year’s new Spider-Man balloon, Coss says, “We were fortunate enough to start these conversations with our friends on the Marvel side quite a bit ago, and it just took a little bit of time to key in on character and key in on the artistic approach.”

It’s not just the artistic rendering that matters in a successful balloon — comic book physics may be made up, but New York City weather is very real. Each balloon design goes through “slight adjustments that we make to each and every character that flies in the parade to ensure that all of our helium chambers have the appropriate amount of lift. And [to ensure] the character not only still has that immediate impact on the audience, but also is aerodynamic and can take wind and can take a variety of elements and still safely and securely make it down the parade route.”

Once designers had their end goal, the design process took months. “We started with a couple of sketches,” Coss shares, “and a couple of poses of a couple of different ways that we’d extend the arm, and the hand, and Was it going to be on the angle? The muscular tone within the thighs, we specifically spent a lot of time on.”

While those thighs might be the first thing you notice about the Spider-Man balloon, there’s also a subtler comic book influence in the new design. It’s the first Spider-Man parade balloon in Macy’s history to be based on the style of a specific Spider-Man artist: John Romita Sr.

Romita Sr. (not to be confused with his son, John Romita Jr., current artist on Amazing Spider-Man and a comics legend in his own right) was the first great Spider-Man artist to take on the character after Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko parted ways with Marvel and Stan Lee. Romita Sr. designed the first appearances of Mary Jane Watson, as well as villains like the Rhino and the Kingpin. With skills honed on DC comics’ teen romance titles, he helped usher Amazing Spider-Man into a more topical, soap-operatic era of storytelling.

When considering which version of Spider-Man to drill into for the new parade balloon, Coss says Romita was the clear choice. “It was John the whole way through. I think we knew early on that this was the approach, the style. Once we had an opportunity to confirm that we were going to be fortunate enough to have Spider-Man return to the parade, we keyed in on it early.”

Romita’s Spider-Man, with wider white eye spots and yes, more defined musculature, was a considered evolution from Ditko’s more squint-eyed, thin-line Spider-Man. Under Romita’s pencil, Spider-Man was never a big bruiser, but he was less of a skinny nerd and more of a lithe acrobat. That subtle distinction stuck, and became Spider-Man’s iconic look — iconic enough to inspire even balloon designers 60 years later.

NBC’s coverage of the 2024 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade begins at 8:30 a.m. in all time zones, and will be simulcast on Peacock starting at 8:30 a.m. EST.