The Many, MANY Intros Of Spider-Man> Still The Most Famous

At first I was wondering “did I do the Disney Junior Spider-Man intro like I did for Batwheels and the Batman intros?” followed by “wait, did I ever cover the many Spider-Man intros?”. A quick check told me I didn’t. Guess what the next intro series is featuring.

I didn’t catch the airing of the original Spider-Man cartoon in 1967 because I wasn’t born until 1973. However, there were reruns of this show in syndication until at least the 1980s. I didn’t even get the syndicated 1981 cartoon in my area. They just kept running the original. This would be Spidey’s first appearance outside of the comics since his debut in 1962, in the final issue of Amazing Fantasy. Stan Lee’s boss didn’t want to do the comic because the idea of a teenager who wasn’t a sidekick and got his powers from a creepy thing like a spider wouldn’t work. Since it was the last issue of their horror anthology, Stan slipped it in, and suddenly it was a great idea because readers wanted more. Months later Amazing Spider-Man #1 hit stands and Peter Parker has been a success ever since.

The first cartoon aired on ABC for three seasons, created by Grantray-Lawrence Animation. The theme song has never really gone away, homaged in movies and even reworked in some later shows and video games. What makes it work so well?

For one thing, it’s catch as heck! The song tells you everything you need to know about Spider-Man: radioactive blood, swings from a thread, gets no reward, though it does miss Jameson trashing his reputation at every point possible. In fact none of the cast shows up, nor do we get to see Peter unmasked. It’s just Spider-Man, and that’s okay. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the animators must have thought doing the entire web pattern would be hard to do to get the shows out on time, though later shows didn’t seem to have a problem with it. So for this only the mask, gloves, and boots have it. The webbing on the “shirt” is missing.

It was also the first time Spider-Man was seen outside of the comics and while Ralph Bakshi would rip off one of his other shows, Rocket Robin Hood, for stories when he took over in later seasons, they were a huge improvement over The Marvel Super Heroes, which used barely animated images and stories from the comic. It was the first motion comic, but this was more like a regular cartoon show.

There isn’t much else to say. It shows Spider-Man in action to a theme song that gets stuck in your head and tells you everything except the part with the supervillains. It’s a really good intro, and we’ll hear the theme again before this is over. So why is this the only one remembered? Was it that good or were the rest that bad? That’s what we’ll explore in this series. We wouldn’t get a Spider-Man cartoon again until the 1980s…but the 1970s did give us three different live-action experiences. We’ll look at them next time, including the one that’s become internet famous.