L'Araignée

The music, the mood, the voice acting - everything was great, and some of it is timeless. Some of it is dated, true, but it is the best cheesy fun out there! I can't think of the voice of Spidey or JJJ without thinking of this show - which had AMAZING music - very moody and fun! Try it and love it!

The problem with comic books today, is that they are waaayy too sophisticated for most kids to comprehend... I read Spiderman when I was 6 and 7 years old (I read it when I was older as well, but I will get to that) and I could follow the stories to some exent, but mostly I read it because the cartoon was soooo cool (much cooler than any later Spiderman incarnations)... the animation was quirky, the voices were very Shatnerian (I think I just invented a word, and I will now use it frequently), but it was fun and it made sense to a young mind.

Now, don't get me wrong about comic books, I really appreciated the more sophisticated stories when I was a teenager, but I have no idea how the medium will gain new fans when you cannot hope to get involved with them until you are at least a teenager (when such things are uncool)... and a lot of the material is too intense for young eyes anyway... maybe a line of comics for younger fans would be good. I dunno, but I feel bad that my kid will likely not have comic book heroes in his life to any meaningful degree... I just wish that cool shows like Bakshi's Spiderman were still on the air to fill in the gaps.

Hell I wasnt even really thought of when this show first came out. I use to watch it on Fox 5 in NYC with my dad when I was 3....that was about 20 years ago. This was definetly the best of the 60s Marvel cartoons. I preferred the first ones, I liked the Bakshi ones, but I liked the shorts because they mostly used the comic villains. The Bakshi ones didnt start using real comic villains towards the end. Fox Family occasionally shows it, but rarely. If you can find videos of this series at comic stores pick them up. This was a great show.

The animation was not great by present standards, but through the age of 12 or so this series hit the spot. Further, though they leaned heavily on repeating with stock footage, most of it was pretty good and represented the action and strength of the character well. Every once in a while they turned the background sideways or something and achieved a startling effect without using new elements.

I love that Peter Parker sounds like a boy and Spidey sounds like a man. It's the uni, don't you know.

They best part for me is the theme song, one of the best of all time, and all of the incidental music (even the bulk of the special effects). Crime jazzy and dark. All of the episodes had great, swinging musical textures and overtones.

The Bakshi stuff is stellar. Really idiosyncratic and daring. Spidey ends up removed to different dimensions and levels of the earth, battling the supernatural than the super- villainous. The humans are generally pawns caught in a cosmic battle between good and evil and Spidey comes through, natch. The oft-referred to backgrounds (black, dark blue, purples, fiery reds, etc., were awesome, as were the castles and thorny, leafless backdrops (ala Sleeping Beauty). The color schemes were sickening (purple and off greens with splotchy reds and hints of bruisy yellow. Brilliant. The music also took a further leap from poppier crime jazz and soda stand teen rock to psych-out freak rock interludes, darker crime jazz, and even odd sci-fi and kraut-rockish stretches. Watch the first episode on disc 3 or 4, the one with the Mole Men. The music is absolutely incredible.

My two kids, 3 and 5, respectively, love these Spider-Man cartoons. They hold up for me, as well.

Although the animation was terrible by today's standards, this series had a style that was very much in keeping with the 60's Spider-man comic books. There were a standard set of shots with Spidey swinging along buildings, or coming right at the screen, which they used over and over and over again.

Some of the episodes were taken right from the comic books(such as the one where Jameson sends a robot with his face on it after Spider-man--it even used lines directly from the comic). Others were rip offs of shows from Rocket Robin Hood(in particular the "Dimentia Fiiive!!!" one). These were the worst ones because they tended to meander and frequently had these psychedelic background skies that were really depressing to stare at.

It was a good show for laughs--intentional and otherwise. Whenever I read a Spider-man comic--I think of J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker, and Spider-man with the voices they have in this series.

Note: the music was actually pretty good--very fast moving--and of course the title song with its memorable lyrics: "Spider-man, Spider-man, does whatever a spider can, can he swing from a web? Take a look overhead, hey there, there goes the Spider-man!"

Once you hear that song--you'll never get it out of your head.