For the 1990s Fox Kids would take up the adventures of the wall-crawler, and it may be the best interpretation of Spider-Man, and certainly the last one to properly adapt the comics. If anything, Spider-Man: The Animated Series (titled on-screen as simply Spider-Man) did something that Batman: The Animated Series did with Mr. Freeze and alter the comics with Venom’s influence on Peter. I’ll do tomorrow what I should have done today and make the next Daily Video go into that with Casually Comics, because we’re here to discuss intros and only gloss over a review of the series it comes from.
One think you’ll notice immediately is that the theme song is a remake of the original 1970s theme song, which by then had become iconic enough to show up in the first Sam Rami movie. Thankfully the show came before the movie, but I believe this was near the time when James Cameron was attempting to make his Spider-Man movie, which for various reasons never came to pass. You can also partly blame this series for Toy Biz’s eventual takeover of Marvel Comics as they were already making the toys. Avi Arad, a man who claimed to be a huge Marvel fan as well as someone who understands toys, had a big part in this show, which is reflected in some of the new designs. Peter’s kind of buff…but oddly looks more like Nicholas Hammond from the live-action US series than the guy in the comics. Still, it’s really a good show and worth checking out. It’s not the only Fox Kids show featuring Spider-Man and we’ll get that one in here as well, but there’s a reason this show lasted five seasons.
Yep, it’s another animated intro using episode clips instead of original animation, except for the parts you THINK are original to the intro.
Arad was a toy man, remember. (Yes, yes, wrong comic book universe. Ha ha.) So the intro is using clips FROM THE COMMERCIALS FOR THE SPIDER-MAN TOYLINE to create “original” scenes. You can tell because of the Spider-Man shot that zooms into his face and the CG that’s somehow worse than what the show was using. 2D and 3D art rarely mix well.
As I said, the theme song was based on the original cartoon, though clearly a new guitar riff version with an electronic voice repeating the “radioactive spider-blood” line (the line in the actual intro, remember, was “he has radioactive blood”). It’s a pretty good theme song and would be kept throughout the series. The visual variations were limited, sometimes connected to the story arc and sometimes not. I’m going to link to a video that has almost the entire list (apparently one intro kept getting copyright strikes but he did post a link in the description to his Google Drive posting), but I want to focus on two in particular.
A shorter version of the intro was produced, finally dropping the toy ad footage except for one shot of Venom that was part of the logo card. It’s a welcome change and looks less weird. I don’t hate the intro overall. They choose some great clips and get you excited. However, I kind of like the one they didn’t use.
Assuming the Peter Gunn theme was a placeholder because they didn’t get the final theme song from Joe Perry of Aerosmith…wait, really? Explains the “Aerosmith” joke from the Venom episode. (Again, watch tomorrow’s Daily Video.) Shuki Levy might not have finished composing it yet. I don’t know. The final animation style doesn’t match the show, though the character models are close. It does just as good a job but with all original footage and some cool effects like the way it introduces Jolly Jonah. It’s a great proof of concept and if they redid it in the proper animation it would have looked amazing. You may notice a couple of clips for the final intro came from here as well, like Venom’s other image from the final logo reveal.
With Sony getting the movie rights, some bonehead made the decision to end the show on a cliffhanger, with Peter about to go through the multiverse with Madame Web to search for the missing Mary Jane. However, Fox Kids wasn’t ready to let the web-spinner go. And so a huge revamp in tone, art style, and theme would bring us Spider-Man Unlimited. Imagine wanting to see a new season of the already really good Spider-Man cartoon and seeing this:
You’re only accepting this as Spider-Man because he’s in his classic costume for a short time in the first episode and the part of the intro that recaps Peter’s origin before sending him off to furry world, this show’s take on Counter Earth. The costume change was forced on it, muck like Sony would also later do to Marvel Studios in exchange for allowing Spider-Man in the MCU despite the movie rights deal they had because Sony are a bunch of jerks. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Opinions may be divided on the “spider-spider-man” part but otherwise the intro is actually really good. It shows off some serious action and the new abilities of Peter’s nanobot suit (except for the sonics since that was exclusively to fight the symbiotes). I really like it.
The show itself was also good, but it was probably the wrong time to do a story with Spider-Man on an alternate world the way they did it. You can tell they were at least influenced by Batman Beyond, which had come out just early enough that year to be an influence on Spider-Man Unlimited. Plus, Rino Romano is my favorite Peter Parker voice actor. It was disappointing to see the whole cast change, but as much as I like Christopher Daniel Barnes’s portrayal of Peter, Romano just nailed every one-liner and deep thought moment. He would later get to jump to DC by playing Batman in The Batman but he’ll always be Spidey to me. HE should have played Miguel O’Hara in later incarnations but he did get a cameo as a hot dog vendor on campus in the MTV Spider-Man cartoon.
And what a surprise, because guess what next week’s intro is going to be? And that was one season so it should be a short one.
BW Media Spotlight 