You know what I’m loving right now? I downloaded the old, old, OLD Spider-Man cartoon from 1967. I can’t even believe this is from 1967 considering I saw it as a kid and thought it was new then.
I am loving every moment of watching this old school cartoons. They bring back so many memories of the Spider-Man cartoon. Let’s recap what is so blissfully amazing about this series that (considering it’s from 1967) everyone reading this should know about (unless you are from out of North America originally as a child. Sorry Ferda!)
The Opening Sequence: Vero and I had a good laugh last night when the first thing that appears are the words IN COLOR! It didn’t even say it was Spider-Man we were watching. This reminds me of watching The Fugitive when it shifted from black and white to colour. Anyhow, clearly around 1967 colour television was a big thing.
The other great part about the opening sequence was the amazing theme song that after forty years, people can still hum the tune to! Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can! I’m telling you, there isn’t really a better theme song than this. It also points out that he has radioactive blood and likes to hang out in the chill of night, at the scene of a crime.
The Animation: If you watch enough episodes (heck, even if you watch three of them), you notice that the animations get recycled A LOT. Oh, there’s Spidey swinging across the city…there he is rappelling down his web to the street corner…there he is webbing a flagpole (which mysteriously has no flag on it) so he can swing from it….oh, there he’s running across the screen. It’s always the same and that’s what I love about the show. It’s funny to think about the old school cartoons and how they recycled the animation cels. “Wazzat? We need Spidey hanging upside down? No worries! I have that cel right here.”
I read on Wikipedia that the show had its funding severely cut in the second season to the point where they just substituted Spidey animations into an existing episode of Rocket Robin Hood. That is quite hilarious and I swear I have noticed this as a kid as Spidey was fighting the same villains that Rocket Rocket did in the past hour.
Upon thinking about it, a lot of the old cartoons I watched (Spidey, Rocket Robin, Hercules) all looked the same. After some digging I found out that some Canadian company called Krantz Films did a lot of the voice acting and animations for these shows!
The Characters: So far, most of the characters are bang on in relation to their comic book counterparts (which is not surprising considering Stan Lee and John Romita had an active advisory role in the creation of the series) but a few of them are a little off and I wonder why they took creative license to do so. Like The Lizard doesn’t end up having one arm missing. Or the identity of Mysterio is not Quentin Beck. Strange.
The Story: I would have to say that 50% of the story is usually Spidey swinging around the city, which is great. I wish I could write good television like that.
All in all, I had seen this series available on DVD a few years back and passed it up but I’m glad that I found it lurking on the Internet and I will enjoy having a good laugh at the show over the next little while. The beauty of it is that there were usually two episodes per half hour show so I can easily watch an episode over dinner.
I am thinking of having a Spider-Man party where we could have Spidey playing for the masses. Would that be of interest? Reliving the youth and all?