Spidey Loves Zeppelin: Tribute to a Dachshund

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody mourns his dog Zeppelin and watches the latest Spider-Man movie.

A year has gone by since my dog Zeppelin passed away, and I'm still hurting from the loss, which came as part of a series of devastating losses. My mom passed away, my father passed away, I had to leave my home, and Zeppelin passed away, all within a period of a year and a half. Losing so much can really break a person down.

I have written about Zeppelin here on Life Between Frames several times over the years, most prominently when I wrote about the Spider-Man films. I always associated Zeppelin with Spider-Man because I got him on the day I went to see Sam Raimi's Spider-Man in the theatre for the second time back in 2002. Zeppelin was born on February 6, 2002, so he was around three months old at that time. He passed away on August 1, 2018, and as heartbroken as I am that he isn't around anymore, I'm also happy that I got to spend over sixteen years with him, and that for most of those sixteen years he was a very healthy dog. He didn't begin having health issues until about the last year and a half of his life, when he developed a heart murmur. It never got too serious. The issue that brought the end, kidney failure, happened quickly. I'm glad he never had to deal with any prolonged illnesses.

Zeppelin was the first dog that was ever officially mine. My name on his papers, my contact information on the tag on his collar - the Harley Davidson collar he had for his entire life, which I would attach the retractable leash he had for his entire life to when we left the house. During our sixteen years, Zeppelin and I went on a lot of adventures. Our home was in Ohio, but for eight years we spent a month every summer staying with my paternal grandma in Indiana. For five of those years we were accompanied by Zeppelin's chihuahua sidekick Cheech. During our time there, I would take  the dogs outside every two hours to make sure there wouldn't be any accidents in the house, and I enjoyed spending part of every day walking around the yard with them. Grandma passed away in 2009, but Zeppelin's trips to Indiana would resume in 2012 when my father, who also lived out there, was diagnosed with a type of leukemia that would eventually take his life in 2017. While Cheech stayed with my mom, who had retired by that point, Zeppelin and I stayed in Indiana again, at first in my father's camper and then in our own park model on my father's property. That park model is now something else I have to get rid of, and I'm fine doing that since Zeppelin won't be staying there with me anymore. It was his place.

I would drive out to Indiana with Zeppelin riding in the passenger seat, the radio tuned to classic rock stations. There was a stretch of road where I couldn't find a good station, so that's when I would put on the soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Every time. Those are memories that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Indiana wasn't the only place Zeppelin would go to with me. We made a few trips to visit my sister in Tennessee, and that state is where he ended up living his final months. He and Cheech rode along with mom and I on a whirlwind round trip to New Jersey to see an outdoor screening of Kevin Smith's Clerks. They rode along on a trip to Pennsylvania, where we stopped at the Monroeville Mall, the place where George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead was filmed. Zeppelin and Cheech both peed in the grass there. In 2013, he accompanied me on an epic 9 day trip with my father, who drove truck for a living. That was the last road trip I ever took with my father, and it took us from Indiana through Chicago, up into Minnesota, down to North Carolina, and then back to Indiana. Zeppelin rode on my lap the entire way... except when we took nap breaks in the sleeper cab. We stayed in hotels every night, even when the only place that would allow pets was a hotel where our room was on the fourth floor. I had to carry Zeppelin down the hall, into the elevator, and through the lobby, then we had to go a block or two down the sidewalk to find a patch of grass.

Of course, most of the time we weren't on adventures. Most of the time we were just hanging out at home. The majority of the articles on this blog were written with Zeppelin sitting right next to me.

The point is, Zeppelin was my constant companion, always by my side except on the handful of occasions when I went out of the country in his last few years. The bond I had with that dog will never be replicated. I got him at a unique time in my life when I was able to spend all day every day with him for years. I never spent a full calendar day away from him until he was seven years old. I quickly became an overprotective parent to him because I was traumatized by the loss of our dog Katie, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer the day I got Zeppelin. I lost Katie, I needed to protect Zeppelin. Making it even easier to become extremely protective was the fact that he was the smartest, most attentive dog I have ever had. He observed everything, he listened, he learned how things worked. For example, he loved to sit in front of this electric heater I had, and he would watch closely when I grabbed the cord to plug it in because he knew the heat was coming. It was easy to teach him words and phrases. He knew my name, and if we were in different rooms and he was told to go to Cody, he would go join me. He was just as devoted to me as I was to him. One of my favorite things he would do is walk up to me when I was sitting down in my computer chair and just lightly tap my leg with his nose before he sat down beside me. A "I'm here, I love you" sort of gesture. He was my kid. My buddy.

I saw Spider-Man for the second time the day I got Zeppelin. I gave him the middle name Maguire because of that. He was in the car with grandma one time when she picked me up from the theatre after one of my viewings of Spider-Man 2. When he had a health scare in 2013, I mentioned it in my Spider-Man 3 write-up. I saw The Amazing Spider-Man at the drive-in, with Zeppelin in the car with me. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was the only time I waited for DVD to see a live action Spider-Man movie, but that meant Zeppelin was again beside me when I watched it for the first time, in the park model. Spider-Man: Homecoming was another drive-in viewing with Zeppelin in the car, as well as his second chihuahua cohort Mr. Jeeves. Going to the drive-in is something Zeppelin and I would do frequently.

After a lifetime of being associated with Spider-Man in my mind, it's a strange coincidence that Zeppelin passed away on August 1st, which I learned that day is Spider-Man Day. I watched Sam Raimi's Spider-Man again that day. Bookending my life with Zeppelin with viewings of that movie.

Spider-Man: Far from Home was the first live action Spider-Man movie to be released after Zeppelin passed away (I'm talking solo Spider-Man movies; Spidey was in Avengers: Endgame earlier this year), and I was there to see it opening weekend. With Zeppelin on my mind.

SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019)

It's interesting that Spider-Man: Far from Home ended up being the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be released after Avengers: Endgame, making it a movie that has to directly deal with the aftermath of Endgame even though it's not one made solely by Marvel Studios and released through their home base of Disney. It's a collaboration with Sony, released by Sony. That's certainly a sign of how much Marvel values the Spider-Man character, that they would let his movie carry this extra importance even though it's released through another studio. They won't even make another solo Hulk movie because it would have to be released through Universal.

A major element from Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame that Far from Home has to be dealt with is the fact that Thanos wiped out half of all life in the universe with a snap of his fingers in Infinity War, an event that Marvel was calling "the decimation", but then all of that life was brought back by the Avengers five years later. Since everyone came back just fine after being gone for years, the event is now called "the blip". And the opening scene of Far from Home gives an idea of what happened when people were snapped back through some humorous moments in a news video put together by students at the high school attended by Spider-Man's alter ego Peter Parker (Tom Holland). If there are movie-goers out there who only see Spider-Man movies and neglect the rest of the MCU, they're going to need somebody to explain all this stuff to them. The same goes for an end credits scene that requires knowledge of Captain Marvel.

Conveniently for the Spider-Man films, Peter Parker and all of the major characters surrounding him were people who "blipped". His best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), his love interest Michelle "MJ" Jones (Zendaya), the bullying Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori), classmate Betty Brant (Angourie Rice), even Peter's Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), all of them turned to dust and then returned five years later.

Peter is dealing with loss in this film, the death of his superhero mentor Tony "Iron Man" Stark, and along the way he finds out Tony left something for him: a pair of sunglasses that allows him to access some major Stark equipment, including a drone-deploying satellite. The AI within the sunglasses is called EDITH, which is a self-aggrandizing joke from Tony, as it stands for Even Dead I'm The Hero... which isn't quite accurate. As it turns out, even dead Tony is still creating threats the heroes in these films have to face.

But while Peter is hurting over the loss of Tony and struggling with the idea that people want him to step up and become "the next Tony Stark", he also has hope for the future - specifically, he's aiming to tell MJ how he feels about her while they're on an international class trip. The John Hughes films of the '80s are a major influence on these Spider-Man movies, and it's just as apparent in Far from Home as it was in Homecoming. This movie is like if the Hughes-scripted European Vacation was mashed up with his teenage movies and turned into a superhero story. It handles the typical teenager situations very well and there's some great comedic banter between the characters, then large scale action sequences break out.

The chaperones on this trip are Martin Starr and J.B. Smoove as teachers Roger Harrington and Julius Dell, both of whom provide some good laughs along the way.

Marvel Studios and director Jon Watts are endeavoring to make sure their Spider-Man movies stand apart from Spider-Man movies that came before. That's why we didn't see the origin of Holland's Spider-Man, why MJ is named Michelle instead of Mary Jane, why we didn't see what happened to Peter's Uncle Ben again (Ben only gets a nod through initials on a suitcase in this film), etc. They don't want to repeat villains, so that means Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Venom, Sandman, The Lizard, Electro, and Rhino were off the table when Spider-Man: Homecoming was being developed. We got The Vulture, with Michael Keaton delivering an excellent performance in the role. For the flashiest threat in this film, screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers dug deep into the Marvel archives, pulling out a quartet of beings called the Elementals.

In the comics, the Elementals are the flame-conjuring Hellfire, the water-controlling Hydron, the earth-manipulating Magnum, and the wind-blowing Zephyr. The cool thing about the concept of the Elementals is that these beings also relate to villains in Spider-Man's rogues gallery. Spidey has fought a fiery villain called Molten Man, the villainous Hydro-Man can turn himself into water, and of course Sandman turns himself into sand. Molten Man and Hydro-Man were never going to be the main bad guys in a Spider-Man movie and Sandman was already done, so it's kind of clever that Far from Home includes variations on the ideas of these characters in this way. So yes, there is sort of an appearance by Sandman in this movie, but it's not a criminal Sandman like the one we saw back in Spider-Man 3 and we don't see Spider-Man fight the dirty thing.

Clever though it is, Far from Home has a plot that I would not have been into if I didn't have the idea that there was more going on here than meets the eye. While on his class trip, Peter is contacted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), former director of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agency who has done a good job of putting his spy organization back together after S.H.I.E.L.D. crumbled in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Fury tells him that the Infinity Stone snaps that happened in the Avengers movies have opened a rift in the Multiverse, allowing the Elementals to enter Peter's dimension, Earth 616, from another, Earth 833. They have been followed through that rift by the heroic Mysterio, who was part of the last battalion trying to stop the Elementals, which initially formed in a black hole, from destroying his world.

The Sandman Elemental appeared in Mexico, and that's where Fury and right hand woman Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) first encountered Mysterio, as he arrived on the scene to defeat the Elemental. A battle with the wind Elemental Cyclone followed in Morocco, we don't see any of that. Peter gets pulled into the situation when the Hydro Man Elemental emerges from the canals of Venice, Italy, his class's first stop. The next Elemental to appear is the fire one, the Molten Man stand-in, and it's expected to show up in Prague. Fury wants Peter to be there to help deal with it as Spider-Man.

A Spider-Man movie just about Spidey fighting rampaging elements that have no personality is not something that I would have a lot of enthusiasm about. Throw Mysterio in the mix, though, and I become anxious to see how it's all going to play out. Mysterio, a.k.a. Quentin Beck, is played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Far from Home, a bit of casting that I love because Gyllenhaal came close to replacing Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man in Spider-Man 2 because Maguire had injured his back while filming Seabiscuit. (Which is why there's a back injury joke in Spider-Man 2, it's a nod to Maguire's real troubles.)

Gyllenhaal and Holland have some great scenes together, as Peter quickly starts to see Beck as a suitable successor to Tony Stark. As good as the Beck stuff is in the first half of the film, it gets even better in the second half.

Peter didn't want to be Spider-Man on his trip, he wanted to have some regular teenager time. He's also concerned that having Spider-Man show up in Venice or Prague while he also happens to be there will give away the fact that someone in his class is Spider-Man. After Fury manipulates the trip to force Peter to be in the right place at the right time, and after he has a chat with Beck, he agrees to help fight the fire monster in Prague. But Fury has to give him a different costume - a black stealth suit.

Later, during a sequence of events that take Peter into the Netherlands and then to London, where the largest Elemental of all rises at Tower Bridge, Peter catches a ride in a Stark jet piloted by Tony's friend and chauffeur Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), who may have something going on with Aunt May. During the ride to London, he uses Stark tech to make another, more recognizable new Spider-Man costume. Seeing how capable Peter is at using that technology confirms to Happy that Peter is "the next Tony Stark", so he puts on some Stark-appropriate music. AC/DC. And Peter's reaction to hearing "Back in Black" touched my heart in a way the filmmakers definitely were not intending. It's meant to be a laugh line, this teenage kid gets his classic rock bands mixed up. But when Peter says "I love Led Zeppelin!", it was a special moment to me.

There was Spider-Man himself, in the first live action Spider-Man movie to be released after my Spider-Man-associated dog Zeppelin passed away, saying he loves Zeppelin. The Far from Home filmmakers inadvertently gave me and my boy a meaningful shout-out.

Spider-Man: Far from Home is a fun movie with a very likeable cast, some cool action, and lots of great moments. After Homecoming left people wondering whether or not this version of Spider-Man even has the "spider sense" ability, I was glad to see that the spider sense - jokingly referred to as the "Peter tingle" - plays a major role in this one. But for me the most important part of it all was that one simple line about Led Zeppelin.

Words can't really convey how much Zeppelin meant to me. I had that dog from the time I was 18 until I was 34. That's quite a time in someone's life to be around for, and I had him for almost as long as I had lived before I met him. Zeppelin was my kid for almost half my life up to this point. I'll always think of him as "my boy". I've been missing him for the last year, and will continue to miss having him by my side.

Spider-Man loves Zeppelin, even if his Zeppelin is AC/DC. I love my Zeppelin, the dachshund. My boy.

R.I.P. Zeppelin

February 6, 2002 - August 1, 2018