ReMix:Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage "Chaos on Screen" 2:23

Happy birthday and excelsior(!) to Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee! Having been a proud comic book nerd since 11, when the opportunity presents itself, I've gotta show some love to the creation of Lee and Steve Ditko. To celebrate the occasion, we've got a rocked out ReMix made in the mighty Marvel manner by Brazilian newcomer Rekkinom from the SNES (& Genesis) cult classic Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage! This cutscene theme is part of his 7-track EP, Maximum Carnage: Songs from the 16-bit Game, and Rekkinom explained that he was a huge fan of the beat-'em-up back in the day:

"I would like to send a cover song from Spider-Man's Maximum Carnage for your evaluation. I loved this soundtrack since the first time I played the game in the 90's. In 2009, I uploaded a video to YouTube playing 4 songs from the soundtrack and it had good acceptance from the gaming community at the time. On December 2021, I decided to record a brand new version of the soundtrack, and selected this song to send you for evaluation. Thank you very much."

I also grew up with this one, and the Chris Jojo & Green Jellÿ soundtrack is full of strong themes, so I was totally simpatico with Rekkinom's stated desire to arrange it! Because the source tune was so short, some judges argued that the arrangement needed to do more, but this track (as well as Rekkinom's EP) are a very viable example of how you can cover a theme's melody but still meaningfully personalize the presentation. The guitars were meaty, the drums and cymbals filled things out nicely, and Rekkinom didn't need radioactive spider blood to get the source tune bassline sounding smooth or his original soloing at :54 sounding strong. Judge Chimpazilla nicely summarized several of the positive traits that won the day:

"I've listened to this quite a few times now and I like the arrangement. It's a cool atmospheric track with minimal melodic content. The bassline plays verbatim throughout the track but what's on top of it keeps changing and keeping the mix fresh, although some variation in the bass writing for a section, or some sort of soft breakdown, would have been nice. The Spider-Man Intro Theme fits very nicely into this arrangement. The mixing could be a little cleaner but there's nothing egregiously wrong here. The autopanning of the sustained guitar is a nice reference to the autopanning bass in Story Interlude (which makes me dizzy!). The final ending of the track is a fadeout, not my favorite type of outro, but it works well enough here since everything else has dropped out. Great guitar performances throughout the piece. I like it."

Maybe I'm biased because I loved the vibe of the source tune, but I'm 1000% cool with this bassline being ever-present, especially with such a minimal theme. Building on top on the bassline with original writing's not a bad approach here, and it was good idea to let the lead guitars take over the source theme after :51 to vary up the presentation of the melody. We've got the mid-90's Spider-Man cartoon theme brought in for a cameo from 1:13-1:32, but it's a limited usage, so it doesn't tank this vis-a-vis our Submission Standards for having too much non-VGM arrangement in there. Dug the dropoff by Rekkinom at 1:49 to begin winding down the track down and gradually simplify the texture, making the close's mood more reminiscent of the original theme.

This is on the short side of arrangements here, but you're arguably not going to get more length out of a concept like this without just (cohesively) adding in completely original sections. The textures never stay in one place, so even though the structure has the source tune as the foundation, the track doesn't plod by sounding overly repetitive or static with the sound combinations or energy level. Solid work by Rekkinom, and you absolutely should listen through his full Maximum Carnage EP for rocked out expansive versions of a soundtrack that deserves more love. If you're a fellow fan of this game, face it, tiger, you just hit the jackpot! :-)