Spider-Man has come a long way on screen. While everyone remembers Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s contributions, many may not recall that there was also a 1970’s The Amazing Spider-Man TV show starring actor Nicholas Hammond as the titular webslinger. The hour-long show ran for two seasons on CBS between 1977 and 1979. You can check out the funk-tastic opening credits below…
As was the case with a lot of these older comic-book shows, studios didn’t yet have a firm grasp on how to translate these stories to screen. The dialogue would often come across as silly, and the costumes a bit goofy. Interestingly, Spider-Man creator Stan Lee was apparently disappointed with the series. An old Emmy TV Legends interview (via THR) with Spider-Man creator Stan Lee was recently unearthed, and it seems that the comic book legend himself was none too keen on the show:
“The Spider-Man TV series I was very unhappy with because very often, people will take a novel, let’s say, and bring it to the screen … and they will leave out the one element, the one quality that made the novel a bestseller. With Spider-Man, I felt the people who did the live-action series left out the very elements that made the comic book popular … They left out the humor. They left out the human interest and personality and playing up characterizations and personal problems.”
Humor and humility is obviously a very important part of the Marvel Universe, and it would obviously be important to Stan Lee, in which case he’ll no doubt be delighted with the current crop of movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
… You can find Jordan on Twitter (@JordJJones), and Facebook.
Originally published June 28, 2017. Updated December 5, 2019.
