Spider-Man: The Animated Series turns 30

[TMC]

30th Anniversary Retrospective Of “Spider-Man: The Animated Series”​

Spider-Man: The Animated Series debuted 30 years ago on the Fox Kids network, where it ran for five seasons and a total of 65 episodes. It joined other superhero cartoons of the time, such as Batman: The Animated Series, X-Men: The Animated Series, or even Gargoyles (though that was on a different network, and if you consider it a superhero cartoon). Spider-Man TAS still managed to shine and be successful enough to warrant multiple seasons. Primarily written by John Semper Jr., the show covered a lot of material from the comics, both classic and more modern (“modern” at the time the show came out, anyway), with Spidey himself mentioning things are starting to sound like “a bad comic book plot” during their version of the “Clone Saga”, which co-incidentally also celebrated its 30th anniversary earlier this year. Similar to the first couple of aforementioned shows, Spider-Man TAS had the advantage of picking from decades worth of material from the comics to adapt, mixing things up a bit more and at times creating something new. Compared to previous Spidey cartoons at the time, it also had the advantage of including newer characters from the comics, such as Hobgoblin, or Venom.

Featuring some pretty tight continuity and season long story-arcs, this was the first Spider-Man cartoon to really take the time to develop Peter Parker/Spider-Man and his supporting cast of characters. Along the way, various other superheroes from the Marvel Universe made it into the show for occasional team-ups. There were however a few exceptions, due to various problems including rights issues, something that keeps happening even today. Marvel still shares the television or movie rights to some of their characters with other studios, most notably Sony at the moment. While most of the characters and set-ups on Spider-Man TAS were mostly designed only to help sell a toy-line, the show still managed to succeed in delivering solid stories, despite some of the kind of ridiculous censorship issues that were forced unto it (i.e., plasma sucking vampires, and not being allowed to even use the word “sinister”). While it’s not perfect, the show has some charm and is still an entertaining watch.

Peter Parker/Spider-Man was voiced by Christopher Daniel Barnes. I don’t think the character exactly needs any sort of introduction at this point. In fact, the show didn’t start out with an origin story either (unless you count the opening credits which briefly covered the infamous radioactive spider bite), but it was brought up occasionally during the show’s run, with a much latter episode having a flashback scene of the events. This is something that you don’t really see much of these days, in animation at least, as most recent Spider-Man cartoons start out early in his career as a web crawling superhero. Spider-Man TAS didn’t need to do that; from the start you get to see Spidey is a hero and as the show progresses you get to watch all of the problems – and occasional happy moments – that come with that life style. As one would expect, Uncle Ben’s wise words “with great power, comes great responsibility” come into full effect over the course of the show. And it’s all done in a pretty organic, and entertaining way.