Holding out for Spider-Man

Not to sound like an old fart, but when I was your age we didn’t have Spider-Man movies.

We didn’t have superhero movies. I began collecting comics when I was 10, with Spider-Man No. 123, and, at the time, in the summer of 1973, there may have been a “Super Friends” cartoon on Saturday mornings but that was it. Besides, “Super Friends” was DC, not Marvel, and it was obviously made by people who weren’t aware of the changes Stan Lee and others had wrought in the comics industry.

Marvel superheroes had real problems (girls, money) and lived in a real place (New York City). Some didn’t even want to be superheroes. Even if their powers weren’t a curse, as they were for the Thing and the Hulk, they didn’t exactly make their problems go away. Just the opposite.

Why fight crime?
You could argue that Spider-Man was one of their least unique creations. Yes, he was the first solo teenage superhero, and, yes, he lost as Peter Parker as often as he won as Spider-Man. But unlike most Marvel characters he operated within the traditional superhero framework: He had a secret identity and prowled the night in search of crime. Of course there were twists within this formula.

Peter Parker, like Clark Kent before him, was a nerd. But Clark’s nerdiness was a pose — a way of deflecting attention away from his super self — while Peter actually was a nerd. He asked classmates to go to a science fair with him and sobbed when they mocked him. If a radioactive spider hadn’t come along, he’d still be dateless and clanking test tubes in a lab somewhere.

As for prowling the night in search of crime? Most superheroes did it just cuz. They were descendants of a tradition in which a masked hero fought injustice in an age of despotism: Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro.

Video ‘Spider-Man 3’ Tobey Maguire takes on two new villains in ‘Spider-Man 3.’ Columbia Pictures

Batman was the first superhero to actually have a psychological motivation for fighting crime. As a child, he saw his parents killed before his eyes and so does what he does out of a deep-seeded need for revenge. He wants to get the bastards. That origin was written in 1939 and no one improved upon it for over 20 years until Stan Lee wrote about Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy No. 15. When Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben is killed by a burglar, Spider-Man, seeking revenge, gets the bastard, then realizes the killer is a petty crook he had the opportunity to stop days earlier, but, out of selfishness, hadn’t. “If I’d only stopped him when I could have!” he cries. “But I didn’t. And now Uncle Ben is dead...”

So Spider-Man fights crime less for revenge than from guilt. He’s trying to cleanse himself as much as society. The tragedy is he never can.

A nerd overwhelmed by guilt. No wonder I identified.

Holding out for a hero
Part of the reason I’d grabbed that copy of Spider-Man No. 123 were memories of the “Spider-Man” Saturday morning cartoon, which aired from 1967 to 1970, and which I’d liked. But beyond its jingly theme song (“Does whatever a spider can...”), it hasn’t aged well.

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During its first season there are only three recurring characters: Spider-Man (whose catch-phrase is “Wallopin’ websnappers!”), Betty Brant (who just wants to get engaged) and J. Jonah Jameson (who’s forever slamming doors and complaining about “lazy teenagers”). A few supervillains are true to the comic (Doc Ock, the Vulture), while others seem lifted from a Scooby Doo mystery (Parafino, the Fifth Avenue Phantom). The shots of Spider-Man web-slinging around town are used ad nauseum, while the chief action, from both hero and villain, is ducking out of the way of thrown objects. Fun.

Ralph Bakshi produced the final two seasons and he gives us some cool, moody, Manhattan backdrops. But each half-hour is one long story rather than two short ones, and it’s stretched out interminably with even more web-slinging around town. It’s like torture.

NBC News video Spidey's villans April 30: TODAY's Al Roker talks to the three new bad boys of ‘Spider-Man 3’ and Mary Jane's competition, Gwen Stacy. Today Show Entertainment

Still, in the summer of ’73, I would’ve gladly been tortured. We had nothing — only “Super-Friends,” with its watered-down version of the Justice League of America. Does Hong Kong Phooey count as a superhero? We grabbed at anything. We were desperate. We heard there was a Wonder Woman TV movie, but when it aired she was blonde and wore a track suit and hardly did anything super. I stayed up late one Friday for a TV version of the Broadway musical, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman!,” but it was campy and Superman’s hair was poofy and he hardly did anything super. A “Doc Savage” movie was released but it was low-budget and campy.

I watched “The Electric Company” hoping they’d include one of their live-action, comic-panel “Spidey Super Stories,” in which Spider-Man spoke in word balloons and battled villains like the Blowhard, the Prankster and the Spoiler. At least it was educational.

Then one day I saw a promo for ... could it be? ... a live-action, prime-time Spider-Man TV show? Wow! A guy in a Spider-Man suit was being pulled up the side of a skyscraper while he mimed a spider-ish climbing motion. It looked like the coolest thing in the world.

It wasn’t. Nicholas Hammond, late of “The Sound of Music,” was too pretty, his hair too poofy, to play Peter Parker, while Robert F. Simon was too avuncular for J. Jonah Jameson. Meanwhile Spidey looked like he was wearing Batman’s utility belt, his web-shooting looked more like rope-shooting, and the climbing-up-the-building thing? Slow going. Like it was work. The show was so bad even I stopped watching.

“Superman: The Movie” began to change things. It was epic in scope and they got the exact right guy for the role. It was also the second-highest grossing film of 1978, so studio execs took notice. Unfortunately they took notice in the wrong direction; not toward “Spider-Man” but back to other 1930s icons: the supercampy “Flash Gordon” and the supercrappy “The Legend of the Lone Ranger.” It took another 11 years before Tim Burton’s “Batman” blew away the box office, then another 11 years before the Merry Marvel Marching Society marched onto Hollywood for good.

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