Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars the Voices of Paul Soles, Peg Dixon, Paul Kligman, Ed McNamara, Chris Wiggins | Written by Various
UK Certification U/PG | UK RRP £14.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 395 minutes | Created by Steve Ditko & Stan Lee
When I was growing up in the '90s, I had a Spider-Man cartoon to watch. Was it the original that began in '67 and ended three years later? No. Was it the 1994 toon series? Yes. Surely the first is better? That's a negative. That may be the case with most original shows, but Spider-Man's 10-minute episodes are a lackluster animated affair that I am glad I wasn't around to sit down with on Saturday afternoons as a kid.
Watching the last volume of the second season and the entire third, I tried to put myself in the shoes of a child in the late '60s. I also tried just as hard to enjoy the show, but I just couldn't. Watching something with a low budget isn't a problem for me, usually, but with Original Spider-Man it was. The animation is so poor that it does nothing to enhance the flimsy storyline of each short episode. They all follow the same uninspired format and it makes for extremely dull viewing.
Loaded with recycled shots, music and an endless barrage of stock sound effects, each episode usually features a villain with an outrageous, nonsensical scheme, threatening New York City. The never-satisfied J. Jonah Jameson of the Daily Bugle is quick to give Peter Parker an assignment to take pictures of the laughable menace, while his alter ego Spider-Man battles the foe and grabs the pics. It's the same routine in every episode. How could kids back then enjoy such a show? When you look at wholly original toons like The Flintstones (1960) and Scooby Doo (1969), there is simply no excuse for Spider-Man's sub-par animation when it's based on a comic book juggernaut from Marvel, even for that three-year period in the close of the swinging sixties.
Why do most of the evildoers have green skin? Why does Peter Parker talk to himself constantly? And why does he look and sound like a 40-year-old man rather than a university student? Too many questions raised and not enough answers. There are countless inconsistencies in the show and most of it quite simply makes absolutely no sense. There is an episode towards the end of the third and final season where Parker flies out to a snowy location with a Daily Bugle colleague, only for their plane to crash and have them land right in the middle of wafer-thin plot central. Fast forward to the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man's victory and they suddenly jet off the barren mountains without any explanation as to how in the blue hell they got back into the skies. A cringe-worthy show of epically bad proportions. My deepest sympathies to those who grew up on this trash. And God help me if I ever have to endure that hauntingly horrific theme song once more.
EXTRAS None.