Why a 42-Year-Old Superhero Cartoon is Better Than a Pony

By Glen Weldon

Need a break?

Lookit: Over at Marvel.com, they've just started streaming episodes of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon. The first episode went up last week, and they'll post a new one every Thursday.

Now granted, the animation itself is pretty slapdash (Spidey spends an awful lot of time web-swinging across town, passing the same six buildings several times along the way), but there's much to recommend.

First, of course, the theme song: When its brassy, six-note opening blast gives way to the syncopated drum lick, try to keep from butt-dancing; try.

Then the lyrics kick in, and start going all Socratic Method on you:

Is he strong? Listen, bud: He's got radioactive blood!

Can he swing? From a thread! Take a look overhead!

Sure, it's no "In her satin tights/fighting for your rights," but it is, I think we can all agree, patently groovy.

Then there's the jazzy, infectious score, complete with surf guitar. Hey, Spider-daddy-O! Hang eight!

Listen -- really listen -- to the sound effect of those wrist web-shooters: so perfect, so difficult to emulate with the human mouth. Millions have tried.

Finally, the voicework. Paul Soles was the very first actor to voice Spider-man (just five years after the character was created), and lent him a sardonic, wisecracking tone that I still hear in my head every time I read a Spidey word balloon. (That's Paul "Hermy the Elf Who Wants to Be a Dentist" Soles, FY proverbial I.)

Still not convinced?

After the jump: Why this show's a cultural touchstone -- to some of us, anyway. Plus the pony thing.

Understand that if you were to poll the cohort of adult comic geeks, the overwhelming majority would tell you that it wasn't a comic book that first consigned them to a life of memorizing the entire membership roster of the Legion of Super-Pets. It was TV.

An entire generation was introduced to the Caped Crusader through reruns of the '60s Adam West Batman, and only learned the roster of DC and Marvel heroes via the Super-Friends and X-Men cartoons, respectively.

At the time, the comic book adventures of these characters seemed a comparatively thin gruel -- something you resorted to when your family was on vacation and TV reception was spotty.

For me, it was an episode of this Spider-Man series that started it all. In fact, if Marvel.com keeps to its Thursday schedule, the episode that transformed me into the geek I am today should go live on Thursday, August 20.

The year: 1977. The place: Mike Ervine's ninth birthday party. I get dropped off early, before Mr. and Mrs. Ervine have finished setting up the "big surprise" in the backyard. Mike and I stand around in his den awkwardly, make idle fourth-grade small talk (I suspect long division and/or Chewbacca figured prominently) and turn on Channel 17.

The episode title comes up. "The Origin of Spider-Man."

The origin of Spider-Man. It is a revelation.

It's a new, mysterious word, for one thing, which always tends to wind me up. But there's something odd about the action onscreen, and it's this: there isn't much. No big fights, anyway. I'd seen the show before, watched Spidey battle Electro, or the Vulture, or the Sandman. But this!

Peter Parker, putzing idly around high school? Going on a field trip to a lab? Getting bitten by a -- Oh my God! The realization sets my tow-headed head a-tingling: This is how it happened!

"This is how it happened!" I whisper to Mike.

But he isn't there.

He's out back, with the other kids, who must have arrived at some point. Suddenly Mrs. Ervine appears in the doorway. She swoops over to the television and turns it off with a barely perceptible flick of her wrist. "Go ahead," she says, eyeing me strangely. "They're choosing up teams for baseball. Then there'll be pony rides and cake."

"But," I say, "They're showing Spider-Man's origin." I lean into my new word, giving it everything I can muster, hoping it will register, hoping she will appreciate the gravity of the situation at hand. "His origin."

Understand something -- something that eludes Mrs. Ervine, who's staring down at me now like I'm a small, stubborn stain on her sectional: Nothing in my world has thus far prepared me for the idea that superheroes have beginnings.

Bugs Bunny didn't have an origin, after all. Bullwinkle was and had always been Bullwinkle. That Batman was something else before he started using Bat-Thermal Underwear and matching wits with Egghead and Olga, Queen of the Beserovian Cossacks: That? Is a tremendously exciting idea.

So exciting that it sets me on a quest -- I resolve then and there to uncover the secret origin of every superhero I come across, for the rest of my life.

Yes; Even Matter-Eater Lad.

But that quest would have to wait for another day.

"Go ahead," Mrs. Ervine says, hustling my pale, unathletic form out the sliding glass door and into the patch of backyard being used as a baseball diamond, where the usual array of petty humiliations (bobbled grounders, whiffed swings, paroxysms of reflexive flinching) lie in wait for me, along with one other, wholly new species of humiliation, made special for this day:

Bitten by pony.