Spider-Man: The Animated Series: Before Watching

While I've mentioned previously that Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends is the first Spider-Man show I've covered that people seem to still have some memories of and nostalgia for, it's pretty safe to say that for a lot of people, Spider-Man: The Animated Series* is the definitive Spider-Man show. Why? I'm not quite sure, although I can't say I've really heard anything bad about it.

Unlike the other Spider-Man shows I've covered, this is one that I've actually seen some episodes of. Something like fifteen or so years ago, I watched a DVD (maybe even a video) of it which contained all of the Venom episodes, and while my memory's not good enough to remember many details, I do remember liking it, even if I had no idea that Iron Man was an established hero when he showed up in the Carnage arc.

Other than that, there are a few other little tidbits I've picked up over the years about the show, some of which I'm probably wrong about. I'll be interested to see how many of them do end up being true as I go through the show:

• The Sinister Six are renamed the Insidious Six; I think because the word Sinister was considered too scary for kids
• I think that this is the series where Electro is the Red Skull's son? That's a weird character choice to make.
• The show wasn't allowed to show Spider-Man punching anyone, and so there's a lot of censorship. There's also an urban legend that it wasn't allowed to show pigeons being disturbed on rooftops as Spider-Man ran across them.
• Since the show couldn't kill anyone (too scary! Kids don't understand the concept of death!), it instead threw characters through interdimensional portals. I definitely remember this happening at the climax of the Carnage arc, and I'm fairly sure that I heard that it happens to Mary Jane and the Green Goblin in this show's equivalent of The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
• The Hobgoblin is introduced in this show before the Green Goblin, I think. I'm curious as to whether there will be any references to the Green Goblin if the Hobgoblin's origin is touched on.

One more thing that I've been looking forwards to for a while is that this series is starting to draw from more recent contemporary comics - Venom appears, and from the looks of some of the episode titles, we'll also get Hydro-Man, Morbius, the Punisher, and other villains from the post-Ditko and Romita eras. As decent as Spider-Man (1981) and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends were, something that both were lacking in was a good use of characters from the 1970s and early 80s. On the flip side, this show is responsible for the idea of the black suit influencing Peter negatively, which I think has been soft-retconned into the comics by now.

* Technically, the name of this series is just Spider-Man, but I've already got to use years to distinguish between the 1967 and 1981 shows, and this helps to make it stand out more.

Watching the opening, I'm impressed by the animation. It's all very fluid and showcases Spider-Man's abilities (particularly his agility) quite well. Good grief though, the music and synthetic voice playing over it all are terrible. I hope that they get replaced in later seasons, because right now I can't say they're working for me. That aside, there's a good showcase of some villains in the opening, although there are also a lot of robots that Spider-Man's fighting. I hope that they're from just one or two episodes, and that they're being shown so much because the animation was done for more of them at the time the opening was made. (Although thinking about it, fighting robots gets around some potential censorship issues).

Overall though, I've got to say that I'm really optimistic, both because of the reputation of the show and the fluid animation. With my initial thoughts out of the way, that leaves sixty-five episodes to get through - if even half of them are good quality, that's already more than the last two series I watched.

Join me next time as I start my journey into one of the most popular Spider-Man series, with "Night of the Lizard". I'll be looking forwards to hearing your thoughts as I go.