PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
In its day SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN was one of the more well-lauded superhero cartoons, so much so that when it was canceled, some fans campaigned to bring it back. (Said attempt failed, in part because the Disney corporation acquired the rights to make Spidey cartoons from then on.) SPECTACULAR not my favorite take on the wall-crawler. For one thing, the show's version of Peter Parker, supposedly a high-school junior, looks too young to be close to being a "man," which is a large part of the character's appeal. But it is a much more nuanced series than most Spider-serials, for two reasons.
The majority of the story-lines, with the notable exception of a Venom continuity, derive from the classic Silver Age original by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita, privileging most of the classic villains from the sixties rogues' gallery. However, most of those characters were introduced in stand-alone stories and only rarely crossed paths with one another. In SPECTACULAR, villains like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus are frequently responsible for bringing other villains, such as The Rhino, into being. The net result of this approach is that, whereas the majority of superhero shows only have villains cross over once in a while, there are so many crook-crossovers here that it's shorter to denote the episodes that don't have them than those that do. For purposes of my crossover files, this is one of the few serials that I would rate as an "ongoing crossover." It also occurs to me that the writers may have taken some inspiration from the nineties SPIDER-MAN comics, which often had various villains employed by or empowered by The Kingpin.
The second notable aspect of SPECTACULAR is that Venom story-line I mentioned. Though I wasn't regularly reading the Marvel Spider-books at the time the infamous "black costume" plot began, I read many of the issues secondhand, and I liked nothing about what I considered a cheapjack ALIEN clone. I still have no good opinion of those stories, but a trio of stories in SPECTACULAR actually employed the Jekyll-Hyde theme fairly well. Because Peter Parker is so often presented as making good moral choices, a reader may sometimes forget that from the first Stan Lee showed that Parker had a number of flaws. He could be condescending, supercilious, and bad-tempered in various combinations. The Venom-trilogy portray Parker's slow seduction into his worst instincts so well that these are the only episodes I would judge to he high in their psychological mythicity.
That said, most of the episodes are just decent thrillers in which Spidey has various super-athletic battles with the Sandman, the Vulture, and the Shocker (given a Southern accent for some reason), so the overall mythicity of the series is just fair. Parker's romance with Mary Jane Watson is strangely played down, emphasizing instead a nerdy Gwen Stacy and a cheerleader version of the minor character Liz Allan. I found it moderately interesting that the high-schooler's romance with secretary Betty Brant never gets started in the cartoon as it did in the comic. Stan Lee somewhat glossed over the fact that in order to work in an office Betty would have been a legal adult as against Parker the high-school student. Yet even though Aunt May herself puts the kibosh on the non-starter relationship, I felt as if it was done for character conflict, not just to avoid a danger zone.
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