My three year old son Declan is absolutely obsessed with superheroes. Right now his favorite superhero is Spider-Man. So we spend a lot of time watching Spider-Man stuff on Youtube. As fellow parents have probably already discovered, Marvel and DC tend to be pretty tenacious about ensuring that parents and children not enjoy much in the way of Spider-Man, or Batman, or Superman, or Captain America for free on Youtube when they can be paying handsomely for the same privilege.
Literally anything is preferable to this tot-hypnotizing garbage so I was very pleased to discover that Youtube contains at least some official Spider-Man content in the form of an adorably clumsy cartoon that ran from to The animation for the s Spider-Man cartoon can generously be deemed primitive and less generously deemed total garbage.
The character design is stiff and awkward, the animation limited at best. It is unmistakably a cartoon aimed at small children that makes no attempt to be hip or cool or sophisticated or adult. There is no moral ambiguity in the s Spider-Man cartoon. The bad guys are never anything but bad and one-dimensional, while our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is devoid of the neuroses and angst that would define him both on the page and onscreen in his various iterations.
The superhero world is now one of infinite grays and infinite darkness yet the world of the s Spider-Man is aggressively black and white. The 60s Spider-Man is oddly fascinating in its blunt clumsiness but there are also elements that are genuinely good.
The theme song is rightly revered and remembered, and some of the backgrounds are so abstract, lurid and trippy that they border on surrealism.
