Spider-Man (1967) Episode Twenty-One: The Origin of Spider-Man

The Origin of Spider-Man

First Aired: September 14th, 1968

Synopsis: At a high school, Peter Parker turns down joining a triple date in favour of seeing a radiation display. While he attends it, he is bitten by a spider which is irradiated by the radiation. Shortly afterwards, he discovers that it has given him powers including super strength, wall crawling, and spider-sense. Peter realises that with his powers, he can put on performances and make money to help out his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. To aid with this, he creates a costume and web shooters, as well as a name - Spider-Man.

Heading to a TV studio to audition, Spider-Man is told to stop a robber who gets past him, but refuses to do so, saying that he only looks out for himself. Spider-Man successfully auditions and gets a show at the studio. Several days later, when heading home as Peter Parker, he discovers that his uncle was shot by a burglar. Tracking down the burglar to the warehouse he's hiding in as Spider-Man, Peter discovers that the burglar is the same one he let go at the TV studio - if he had stopped him, Uncle Ben would be alive. And thus, he realises that with great power, there must also come great responsibility.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• This episode is based on Amazing Fantasy #15...as if you didn't know.
• It's not very often, but we get a narrator in a handful of scenes in this episode. Unless I missed something, I'm pretty sure that's a first for this show.
• Peter doesn't wear glasses pre-spider bite. While I'm sure that there are other adaptations where he doesn't, I can't recall any off the top of my head.
• In the very, very brief look we get at Aunt May in this episode, she looks nothing like she did when she previously appeared in Horn of the Rhino. Did...did she spend the money from Uncle Ben's life insurance on plastic surgery?

Review: Given that we're not getting Spider-Man's origin until the second season, I have to wonder: how ingrained was he into the pop-culture consciousness at this time? While I'm probably completely wrong, I have a mental image of kids sitting down to watch the first season of this show, getting confused about who Spider-Man is and writing in to the network (...somehow), and so the network decide that they'd better show his origin. Nowadays we take Spider-Man's origin for granted, but at the time, was this considered to be essential?

While this story manages to hit all of the beats of the origin, even getting some dialogue directly from Amazing Fantasy #15 in, it feels a bit off. Due to what I can assume were cuts to the animation, we get a lot of shots of the city, or of Spider-Man swinging around, which doesn't help the pacing. We get only one scene with Uncle Ben and Aunt May, and while they didn't appear much in the original story, the relationship they had with Peter was immediately apparent and was strong enough that we didn't need more than what we saw. Here, it feels kind of distant, like we're looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.

So, overall: good job at hitting the essential beats, but the pacing kills this episode dead in its tracks. It takes us half the episode for Peter to discover his powers, and while that doesn't sound too bad, there's so little content before it that it feels unnecessary to take so long in doing so. For a lot of this episode, it feels as though someone's put it on at three-quarters speed. Again, I'm assuming that a lot of this is due to animation purposes, so, um...look forwards to more in the future?