This Hoverboard is Giving Marvel Fans Green Goblin Vibes

A tweet that sees footage of a man on a Green Goblin-like hoverboard conjured some comparisons to [...]

By Cameron Bonomolo

A tweet that sees footage of a man on a Green Goblin-like hoverboard conjured some comparisons to the Spider-Man franchise.

"This dude is on his way to finally kill Spider-Man," Jay Kirell joked on Twitter, earning more than 1,400 'likes.'

The footage comes from a 2017 Portuguese soccer Cup Final, where a man delivered the game ball to a referee by way of a floating, propeller-powered Omni Hoverboard.

The device is similar to the goblin glider typically wielded by supervillain the Green Goblin, most famously in 2002's Spider-Man, where he was portrayed by Willem Dafoe.

While the soaring, bomb-shooting device was developed by Dafoe's big-brained scientist Norman Osborn as part of Oscorp's bid for a hefty government contract in Spider-Man, the actor told iofilm in 2002 it "was a big deal to learn how to fly the glider."

"A little more complicated than it looks 'cause the glider is usually used in lots of different ways — sometimes it's on the Gimble, sometimes in on the train, sometimes it's on the insert copy, sometimes it's on wires. And, of course, with all this effects stuff, the shooting ratio is huge. I mean, you can shoot for three days on the glider and you end up having a tiny little sequence in the movie. It's always like that, but particularly with effects work like this," Dafoe said.

Dafoe explained he "needed to practice that and had to get used to the suit," which was developed for his body.

"So it was a long process of fittings and designing the suit for my body which I had to get used to. I played around with the stunt guys in choreographing the fight and we played around with different types of movement," he said.

"We even worked with this guy Chuck Jeffries in doing some really specific physical stuff, which was very interesting but was too danced and too like a martial art. We needed something to contrast with Tobey's [Maguire, who played Spider-Man] movement that is acrobatic and more fluid. So we ended up with a pretty 'meat and potatoes' kick, punch, and stuff."

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