The Many, MANY Intros Of Spider-Man> Swinging Into The 1980s

While I saw every other Spider-Man show in reruns (except for Spidey Super Stories) now we start getting to shows I watched at the time of airing…and one I only saw in reruns. That will make more sense in a moment.

Super Friends was one of my favorite Saturday Morning shows and why I was a DC person until they screwed it all up. Marvel didn’t really have a show that ran that long and I’m not sure they have yet. The success of that show may be why Spider-Man’s return to network TV was dubbed Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, and why the team called themselves the “Spider-Friends”. It wouldn’t be the first time Marvel had a little fun at DC’s expense. It’s why the comic universe (and not the MCU, you clods!) is called Earth-616, making fun of the main DC universe being known as Earth-1 in their numbering system before all the multiverse games over the decades.

It was also one of the first shows for the now Marvel owned “Marvel Productions”, formerly DePatie-Freleing  the studio co-founded by Friz Freleng. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned another Spider-Man cartoon was being released at the same time, but let’s start with the nostalgia.

While the “Amazing Friends” consisted of X-Man Bobby Drake, aka Iceman (who dates women in this show), and original character Firestar, who would precede the likes of Harley Quinn in making the leap from cartoon to comics, the show also featured guest appearances by other Marvel heroes and villains in addition to Spidey’s normal friends and enemies. Aunt May was also a regular character, and kind of took over caring for Ms. Lions, the girl dog so piss off Pet Avengers, though she’s technically Angelica’s dog when we see the origin of the team in a later season. The show aired for three seasons on NBC, paired up later on with the Incredible Hulk cartoon. Along with the failed X-Men pilot “Pryde Of The X-Men”, The Marvel Animated Universe fandom wiki suggests they form a sort of shared universe, and this show is why. To explain that we also need to bring up the OTHER animated Spider-Man from the same studio that aired in syndication.

This never aired in syndication around me to the best of my knowledge. I only learned of it years later when UPN used it to buff out their Sunday morning line-up, an attempt to not compete with Saturday Morning while forgetting why there were no kids shows on Sunday morning…something called church and family time. It was okay but it was strange seeing the same character model and animation for Peter Parker but not hearing Dan Gilvezan coming out of his voice box. Ted Schwartz was Peter on the syndicated show. While the two shows shared voice actors I think the only one who played the same role in both shows was William Woodson’s J. Jonah Jameson, who only made occasional appearances on Amazing Friends. Looking over the two voice lists, George DiCenzo did play Captain America on both but not too many others.

The whole shared universe idea comes from the fact that Amazing Friends would occasionally mention adventures Spider-Man was having in his other show, like the time he fought Magneto. That was interesting to learn when I finally caught the UPN show and noticed “hey, Amazing Friends flashed back to that”, but while the Fandom wiki says that Amazing Friends was a sequel it also notes that the episodes didn’t line up between events in both shows. Maybe Spidey was having adventures while Iceman and Firestar were visiting the X-Men and it’s actually a mix-and-match? That would make more sense. “Pryde” also have an Australian Wolverine for some reason and that did come from the Amazing Friends crossover. Hulk appeared in Amazing Friends but was the wandering hero from the live-action series, not the still on base scientist he was in the show, and had a different voice actor for Bruce Banner between the two.

As for the intros, the thing we’re here to discuss…Amazing Friends is clearly better. They both share a logo for the “Spider-Man” part but Amazing Friends not only has the better theme song but uses few if any clips while the logos are the only time the syndicated show uses rather obvious clips from the episodes. They’re used well, but I’ll always prefer original footage for intros. There is stock footage in Amazing Friends for the room turning into their headquarters, but the rest is all new even when depicting foes that show up in the series. Yes, that includes the city-sized monster if memory serves, but he wasn’t beaten that easily.

Next time will also be two intros as we crawl our way to the 1990s and the two Fox Kids shows.