The Many, MANY Intros Of Spider-Man: I Want My MTV

As Sam Rami was successfully dropping his take on Spider-Man and showing that a fairly adapted comic story could work in movies (frankly, he took more from Ultimate Spider-Man, and the organic “webshooters” still make no sense), MTV saw a way to cash in. By this point “Music Television” was no longer about music, so they could show anything. Reality shows and teen drama like the re-imagined Teen Wolf seems to be all they’re known for now, and their take on Spider-Man, known as Spider-Man: The New Animated Series to set it apart from the Fox Kids show, was their way of doing it.

The show itself comes from Mainframe Entertainment, the folks behind the 1990s Transformers cartoons and Reboot. However, MTV wanted to get as many celebrity voices as they could. So you had Neil Patrick Harris doing a fair job as Peter, singer Lisa Loeb doing a surprising turn as Mary Jane, and Ian Ziering showing his voice acting is better than his live-action (he did a better job as Nick Tatopoulos in Godzilla: The Animated Series if you ask me) as Harry Osborn. Guest voices would also feature a lot of celebs, but my favorite Peter, Rino Romano, did cameo now and then as a food cart vendor. Even Christopher Daniel Barnes got in there, and it would have been a nice nod to get other previous Peters in there at some point. Maybe if it had made season two?

Beats me, we’re here for the intro. From the start you see that this show had a slightly different art style from other Mainframe shows.

It’s a very short intro, very frantic, using mostly clips but some original animation, like the character credits. It’s rare to see an animated work have credits like a live-action show, though it’s only the three main characters without the actors’ names. The show was a bit more fast paced, but could slow down a bit for the character moments. Taking cues from Rami’s film, which you could tell from the sliver outlines in the costume if you watch it more than once or pause it in the right spots, the show would attempt to come up with Marvel characters if they existed in the Ramiverse, though the Lizard would be a huge departure from Rami’s Curt Connors, who never became the Lizard. Keith Carradine was JJ, which is odd when you had Ed Asner, the best JJ on TV, playing another homage cameo. Kingpin is based on the Daredevil movie version, but they also had Michael Clarke Dugan do an excellent job as Wilson Fisk.

Why did the show get one season? MTV took so long getting the show on the air that it didn’t fit in with their current offerings, though again, this is close to what MTV would do later with Teen Wolf. The character moments focused more on Peter, MJ, and Harry. Harry started having doubts about his hated of Spider-Man due his father’s death, something taken from the Rami film. Peter was afraid of letting Mary Jane into his world…yet for some reason got involved with a girl named Indy who actually DID die to her connection to Spider-Man, an intern at a video news service who saw him as her in to a proper reporter gig. There’s even an indication that Peter and Indy spent the night together, because this was for the MTV audience and not for kids like most of the other animated Spidey shows. Indy was a nice character and I liked her, but it’s confusing that Peter had no trouble letting Indy into his life while keeping MJ, who if they were following the movie was a girl Peter pined over for years, at arms length. It was a strange sort of teen drama, but I rather enjoyed it.

After yesterday’s post I needed something a bit light and the next intro may or may not take more time than I thought, so we’ll stop here. That means two more installments to go, as next time we get Spectacular.