Almost everyone knows the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon for two reasons: the “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does what a spider can!” theme song and the “Spider-Man pointing” meme, an all-purpose image from the 19th episode that has been used for everything from criticize politicians Unpleasant having fun with professional athletes. It has become so popular that a version of it appears at the end of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verseand in a “break the internet” bit of shameless PR, Marvel has recreated it with live-action Spidey performers Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland to plug in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Aside from that, the show is mostly remembered as… being bad. To be fair, there are better Spider-Man cartoons out there: the low-budget animation of the 1967 show can be clunky, the character models often look crooked, and every voice is played with Extreme Cartoon Energy. But there’s a lot more to the show than earworms and meme fame, and the new In the Spider-Verse follow-up, About the Spider-Verse, the memory reads. Like Spidey’s two big blockbusters from 1967 Spider-Man‘s three seasons show how a story told by the right team of artists can push an iconic character like Spider-Man through a full spectrum of comic book fantasy.
Much of the show’s first season owes much to the work of Spider-Man’s original co-creator team, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Stories from early episodes such as “Where Crawls the Lizard,” “Never Step on a Scorpion,” and “Captured by J. Jonah Jameson” are almost direct retellings of Awesome Spider-Man numbers 6, 20 and 25, respectively. Even when they deviate from it, the first season always aims to capture Lee’s bombastic plot beats and penchant for big emotional twists. When it comes to that particular era of Spider-Man, it’s probably the most comic book-accurate show we’ve ever gotten.
Image: Walt Disney video
Spider-Man debuted just five years after Peter Parker debuted in the pages of Marvel Comics, which probably helped keep most of the stories faithful. But movies like About the Spider-Verse suggest that there is more to the character than reaching certain points of creative predestination. It’s how Spider-Man’s incarnations are played and molded that lend them their staying power, and when 1967’s Spider-Man really deviates from Lee and Ditko’s work, it becomes special.
Marvel’s paperbacks weren’t sacred to the creative team at Grantray-Lawrence Animation and ABC, which originally aired the show. The cartoon scripts kind of obscure the misery Lee infused Spider-Man with (Peter Parker’s life sucks insanely in the early comics), but the show also helps us realize how a character like Spider-Man was so immediately ripe for Marvel’s become a character. pseudo-mascot and eventually dominate Hollywood. Tightening the framework and shaving the villains into maniacal broad strokes is a simple process here, as most of it boils down to cutting off moments of pathos.
While it would certainly make most of the characters feel a little holier (there’s no arguing that the comics’ tortured Norman Osborn is a more compelling character than this show’s one-note cackling Green Goblin), they’re instantly recognizable in their consistent grandeur. . This was a show aimed at younger viewers, and successful in that way – even today it would be a great gateway for kids to discover who Spider-Man is and why he was tailored to have a Spider-Verse one day .
The multiverse can feel like a money grab when so many blockbuster franchise engineers have hung onto it. But the concept of infinite worlds, each with their own systems of logic and defined aesthetics, but with a thematic throughline that immobilizes some things, like the appearance of a Spider-Person, is brimming with possibilities. A multiverse can be an ode to how we explore characters and how creators hold themselves back or go wild with unique interpretations. The 1967 Spider-Man cartoon would eventually achieve the latter, thanks to the guiding hand of animation iconoclast Ralph Bakshi.
Image: Walt Disney video
Before Bakshi directed cult movies like Fritz the cat, wizards and years 1978 Under the spell of the Ringhe was an animator and eventually director of cartoons like Deputy Dawg And Missile Robin Hood. ABC put Bakshi in control Spider-Man for the show’s second and third seasons, along with a reduced budget. His response: moody and surreal stories. His first appearance of the second season adapts Spider-Man’s origin story with a beautiful atmosphere, delving into the depths of Peter Parker’s tragedy in a way never present in the first season. Bakshi, who grew up poor in Brooklyn, clings to the young man’s eternal fear.
From there, Bakshi delved deeper into Peter Parker’s troubled personal life, even throwing him into surreal fantasy landscapes. Gone were the Rhino, Vulture and Doctor Octopus. Now Spider-Man faced evil wizards, molemen, ancient conquerors and aliens. He travels through time to 3,000,000 BC and travels around South America and Antarctica.
A longer runtime (the first season consisted of two stories per episode, while the second used only one story) allowed Bakshi and his team to come up with more detailed adventures for the beleaguered hero. The format of the first season is mostly “Villain shows up and does things and Spider-Man tries a few times to stop them,” but here there’s room to breathe and develop things like plot twists and supporting characters. Peter even tries dating a few times! (Very in vain, as a girlfriend turns out to be an alien posing as a human.)
Image: Walt Disney video
Bakshi’s lead makes for a pretty fun season, one that tests the limits of Spider-Man’s world and refrains from any revolving door villainy feeling that can come when you have a collection of recurring villains. And while the third and final season would see a more serious loss of quality (most episodes are at least partially constructed from previous footage due to the budget completely collapsing), Spider-Man‘s grittier moments still work as a tribute to the era of comics that propelled the character to superstardom And a ridiculous extension of his abilities.
About the Spider-Verse breaks conventions in the same way, albeit on a larger scale. But as bizarre as the 1967 series gets when set against the new movie, it feels like a definitive Spider-Man experience worth watching. As Spider-Verse shows us, all of the adaptations and their associated creative choices are valid, including one that promised to “do what a spider can do” in 1967 and tried to deliver.