Spider-Man Reviews

Sometimes saying that a show is high-camp is not a knock against it. Sometimes it’s the highest form of praise for something that may or may not be striving for it. I’m still not completely sold on the idea that Spider-Man was supposed to be a high-camp action-adventure show, but I couldn’t find any other way to watch it.

While it seems like the barest amount of time, effort, skill and money went in to making this show, it does provided some extremely pleasurable viewing experiences. It’s nice to see a superhero show embrace some of the more zany, corny and outlandish aspects of its source material and run with them. Even if it does end up providing stories and conflicts that are half-baked and resolutions are of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety. Why does Rhino (twice!) want to make a golden statue of himself? What purpose could this possibly provide? The show never bothers to explain, but it does lead me to my next point.

In the comics, and to a much larger extent the video games, have Spider-Man’s webshooters have the ability to alter the size, shape and density of his artificial webbing. Ok, so far not too outrageous, but this show stretches that limit to the breaking point, if not a few notches past it. His webbing is a glue-like substance one minute, capable of turning hard as rock the next, pliable, easily escapable by villains, and other times it stops them dead in its tracts. Here his webbing doesn’t bother with any sort of physics or logic, not even of the flimsy comic book variety!, but exists solely as a dues ex machina in order to reach the conclusion of the episode.

So, there’s the laziness on the writers’ part, but what about the animation? To say that the show was produced on the lower-end is a nice way to put it. This show isn’t so much animated as it is a bunch of paper dolls held up in front of backdrops with the most limited amount of animation grafted on to them. There is no web-design on Spider-Man’s outfit for the most part, and frequently only his bottom jaw is animated. There’s a certain charm to the crudeness that used to pass for Saturday morning entertainment, but it reaches its breaking point in the second season’s bottom half and the entirety of the third season.

Recycling sequences in animation is no great secret, it happens quite often. But this show has to set the standard for it. Why bother to animate a new episode at all when one can just redub a previous one and cut it and reassemble it in such a way that it gives the appearance of being both new and old at the same time. Three episodes in a row in season two recycle the same animation sequences. I don’t mean the web-slinging stuff, which is used constantly to do nothing more than eat up time, I mean an entire sequence from an episode that has to last at least five minutes or more. It involves an underground civilization and the monstrous looking creatures that inhabit it. I thought I had already watched this episode and that my Netflix account was being glitch-ridden. Not so as it turns out thanks to a quick search on Wikipedia.

The third season must have roughly 15% new animation as the bulk of it is sliced and diced old episodes. Once more, the exact same villain actually, levitates Manhattan above the rest of New York. Vulture tries to commandeer and destroy a military gadget. Mysterio plans revenge on Spider-Man, and this instance has totally abandoned his traditional costume despite wearing it earlier on in the show’s run. These episodes are particularly rough to look at since they seem to have been made from well-worn materials.

And I don’t know what’s up the rogues gallery, but Spider-Man has a wealth of unique, colorful and interesting characters to choose from. The first season uses many of the most famous and adds a few new ones, but the second season abandons all of them for science-fiction storylines involving mad scientists, underground creatures and Nordic gods. This bizarre territory has a certain undefinable charm to it. Superhero shows are rarely allowed to get so surreal, even down-right head trippy. Comparing the first season to the latter ones is, frankly, hilarious.

The first season seems to exist in a knowing, obviously corny universe. There are good guys and bad guys, and they must each do their part in the action-packed story that has little or no time for character development or emotional investment. The backgrounds are clean, bright metropolitan cityscapes that are as Americana as apple pie, baseball, and you know the rest. Ralph Bakshi took over the main creative reigns beginning with season two and decided to make the show look more expressionistic and atmospheric. Suddenly the night skies became strange burst of black, purple and blue colors. Rocket Robin Hood, a silly sci-fi adventure show, was in production at the same time, and much of what was created for that show was recycled for this one. This explains the surreal, strange turn the whole enterprise took after a while.

If I’ve sounded like I hated the show, I didn’t. It held a curious charm, something you can’t quite put your finger upon. It’s easy to see how this became an internet meme, the show practically does it to itself in numerous occasions. I’m still trying to figure out why every female character that Peter Parker meets is a redhead who barely a stunning resemblance to Mary Jane, even though they’re never actually her until one episode where she’s turned into Captain Stacy’s niece and looks like a ginger Gwen Stacy.

But this show did provide the first adaptation of Spider-Man’s origin, and remains highly faithful given the constraints of children’s television, and Paul Soles does provide a nice voice for the character. Soles is fairly iconic at this point as the voice of the elf Hermey in Rudolph, and at times I couldn’t shake that mental image, it didn’t help that Paul Kligman plays his boss in both shows. But the “Gee whiz! Aw shucks” sweetness of the show, (un)intentional humor, crude animation and forward-momentum of the plots did make it easy, frequently enjoyable to watch.