Spider-Man (1967 TV series)
First animated series based on the Spider-Man comics.
Spider-Man was the first animated TV show based on the Marvel comic by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. It ran on Saturday mornings from 1967 to 1970. The theme song, with its famous line about doing whatever a spider can, is widely remembered, and the series later inspired many internet memes.
Quick Facts
- Genre
- Superhero
- Action
- Adventure
- Runtime
- 25 minutes
- Based on
- Spider-Man
- Stan Lee
- Steve Ditko
- Voices
- Paul Soles
- Paul Kligman
- Peg Dixon
- Narrator
- Bernard Cowan
- Country
- Canada; United States
- Seasons
- 3
- Episodes
- 52 (77 segments)
Facts from the source article.
Production
The show's tight budget meant Spider-Man's costume only had webbing on his head, arms, and boots; the rest of the suit was plain, aside from the spiders on his chest and back. The series frequently reused stock animation, such as Spider-Man swinging across the New York skyline and Peter Parker removing his shirt to reveal his costume. Character movement was kept to a minimum. For the second and third seasons, Krantz Films, under Ralph Bakshi, produced the show on an even smaller budget.
This cost-cutting was most obvious in season three, where two episodes reused almost all the footage from two episodes of Rocket Robin Hood and remade earlier episodes with very few changes. Several stories from this period were written by science fiction and fantasy author Lin Carter. A costume error persisted through season one: the spider on Spider-Man's chest had only six legs. By season two, new drawings showed an eight-legged spider, but reused footage from season one kept the mistake alive.
The second and third seasons had a darker feel, with shadowy settings, psychedelic imagery, and moody music. Bakshi focused on Peter's life as a quiet college student, showing him failing to make the football team in "Criminals in the Clouds" and becoming a star pitcher in "Diamond Dust." His most steady love interest was Susan Shaw, who first appeared in "Criminals in the Clouds." Bakshi also presented the first television origin story for Spider-Man, "The Origin of Spider-Man," which used large portions of Stan Lee's dialogue from The Spectacular Spider-Man #1. The theme song was performed by the Billy Van Singers and the Laurie Bower Singers.
Broadcast schedule
The 1967 Spider-Man series first appeared on ABC on Saturday mornings, with its debut episode airing on September 9, 1967. For its first two seasons, it ran at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. ABC aired its final Saturday-morning episode on August 30, 1969, after 39 half-hour installments (many containing two stories). The show then took a break until March 22, 1970, when a third season began a six-month run on Sunday mornings at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, ending on September 6, 1970. During the 1970s, it was rerun in syndication across the U.S., often as part of local stations' after-school cartoon blocks. In Canada, CTV Network affiliates broadcast it on Saturday mornings and other slots through the 1970s and 1980s.
In Japan, TV Tokyo aired the series from July 23 to August 30, 1974, with an additional episode on October 10, 1974, and again from November 30, 1974, to March 29, 1975. Kei Tomiyama provided the Japanese voice. Another run on TV Tokyo began in June 1986 and ended in November of that year, with Hideyuki Tanaka as the voice actor. Around 2003, Toshiyuki Morikawa voiced the role for a broadcast on Sky PerfecTV!.
The series reached international markets in 1977. Spanish and Italian versions used a different theme song, and the Italian broadcast superimposed the title "L'uomo Ragno" in large yellow type over the opening shots. In 2002, Disney's ABC Family aired a "Spidey-Mania" marathon over Memorial Day weekend to promote the first Spider-Man film, and again in 2004 for the sequel. The series appeared on Canada's Teletoon Retro in September 2008, and a French-language dub aired on Radio-Canada's Saturday mornings into the mid-2000s. Episodes were once posted on Marvel's website but were later removed.
Distribution and rights
In July 1995, News Corporation and 20th Century Fox gained control of the series along with Marvel’s other animated properties, moving them to the Fox Children’s Network. The following year, Saban Entertainment combined with that network to create Fox Kids Worldwide, which handed Saban the rights to distribute Marvel’s cartoon library. Fox and Saban put the show out on VHS in 1998. Their ownership ended in October 2001, when Disney bought Saban Entertainment and Fox Kids Worldwide; Disney later acquired Marvel in 2009.
That same 2001 sale included Fox Family Channel, which became ABC Family. In 1998, Marvel sold the film rights for the Spider-Man franchise to Sony, granting Sony exclusive live-action television and film rights to over 900 Spider-Man characters, including some invented for this 1967 cartoon. Buena Vista International Television announced in November 2002 that it would restore the whole series in high definition by rescanning the original negatives.
Various episodes came out on VHS in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. On June 29, 2004, Buena Vista Home Entertainment issued a six-disc DVD box set called Spider-Man: The ’67 Collection, featuring all 52 episodes uncut and fully restored. That set is now out of print. In 2008 and 2009, Morningstar Entertainment released some episodes on DVD in Canada, using transfers from VHS and Betamax copies that resulted in poor video and audio quality.
In popular culture
During the Spider-Verse comics storyline, a variation of the TV show's universe appears with the designation of Earth-67. The Spider-Man from the 1967 animated series, voiced by Jorma Taccone, makes cameo appearances in the animated Spider-Verse feature films. In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miguel O'Hara / Spider-Man 2099 goes to Earth-67 and encounters the local Spider-Man using footage from the episode 'Double Identity.' In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales easily avoids him due to his slow and stilted animation.
A scene from 'Double Identity' featuring two Spider-Men pointing at each other has become a popular internet meme, referenced in the post-credit scene of Into the Spider-Verse. The same meme was parodied in Spider-Man: No Way Home twice; Andrew Garfield suggested the first instance after the production team sought to reference the meme. On the first day of filming No Way Home, Garfield, Tobey Maguire, and Tom Holland recreated the meme during a photoshoot, and the image was released in February 2022.
The meme was parodied again in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, used in the game Marvel Strike Force, included as a victory emote in Spider-Man 2, and used in an episode of Spidey and His Amazing Friends.
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