The mostly-forgotten history of live-action Spider-Man on television
With The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brave New World both owning cinemas globally right now, racking up well over a billion dollars between them with another billion on the horizon, it wasn’t a surprise to log onto streaming services the past few days to find curated shelves of content capitalising on their pop cultural dominance. One platform delivered movies and TV shows covering Homer and other sword and sandal epics, another had a collection of Christopher Nolan films, while another did the obvious and grouped together all of the Spider-Man films and shows from over the years (Disney obviously did this, but I am sure I saw it done elsewhere).
This sort of curation is a good thing, delivering audiences easy access to the sort of content that has been on their mind and they’re primed for.
But when it came to the Spider-Guy, I very quickly noticed an absence of some pretty key titles in his screen history. Spider-Man may be raking in the dollars at the box office right now, just as he has with most of his big screen outings, but early in his existence, he was a creature of television.
I’m not talking about his obvious appearances in cartoon series over the years, which have been plentiful. I’m instead focused very much on live action depictions of the character. None of them seemingly available on streaming services anywhere.
The best known of them is the largely forgotten 1977 TV show starring Nicholas Hammond. The Amazing Spider-Man launched with a movie-length pilot in 1977, followed by five episodes in 1978. The show rated well, but attracted an audience of kids and teens. The sought-after 18-49 demo weren’t all that into it.
The show was deemed expensive and not worth the bother with it attracting the wrong audience, so a second season of eight episodes was greenlit and burned off throughout 1978-79 with episodes dropped randomly throughout the year.
I don’t know how much of The Amazing Spider-Man I have ever seen – episodes were released on VHS over the years and I know I saw some of this as a young kid in the 80s. Some episodes, the pilot and the two-parter that launched the first season, were released outside the US as movies for cinema distribution.
It isn’t a show that I have ever seen repeated on television, nor has it ever been released on streaming services. Which is, frankly, weird.
Also weird is that relative unavailability of the other live action show to star Spider-Man that debuted in 1978. Titled Spider-Man, the show ran for 41 episodes and a feature film to kickstart it. These days it is generally known as Japanese Spider-Man or Toei Spider-Man.
Made for Tokyo Channel 12 by Toei Company (the company best known for the Godzilla films), the show is a curiosity discussed in comic nerd circles, but has very little footprint outside of that. And that’s a damn shame as the show has an incredible cool factor about it.
Seriously… this theme song…!
It ran from 1978 to 1979 and hasn’t been made available for streaming, outside of a brief time it was available on the Marvel website.
And then there was the very first live-action Spider-Man. A series of shorts that began during season four of The Electric Company, Spidey Super Stories ran for 29 episodes.
If you don’t know The Electric Company, this was a show that launched in 1971 just two years after Sesame Street, made by Children’s Television Workshop to provide a show for kids who had gotten too old for Sesame Street. Notable cast members included Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, and Rita Moreno. Voice cast included Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel, and Joan Rivers. And guests were fairly eclectic: Woody Allen, Barbara Eden, Victor Borges, Diane Keaton, Lily Tomlin, Peter Graves, and many more.
Of these three shows, I have seen far more of the Electric Company than I have the others. For some reason SBS in Australia were still showing this in the mid to late 80s and I firmly remember being entranced by the oddity of this voiceless Spider-Man.
But, like the other live-action Spider-Man shows from the 70s, they only live on as obscure trivia with legit access scarce to non-existent. A shame. These shows deserve to be more readily available.
RIP Big Pussy
I learned an important lesson this morning while preparing this section. The Sopranos has a beloved and integral character named Big Pussy… this is not a character name you can type into Google Images without context as part of the search query.
Actor Vincent Pastore, who played Salvatore “ Big Pussy” Bonpensiero on The Sopranos, died over the weekend, aged 80. Like a lot of the actors on the show, he was not a trained actor and came to the show after a different career. In Pastore’s case, he worked in and around New York’s nightclub scene before finding his way to acting, cast in a number of crime films as mob heavies.
As per the New York Times obit:
Mr. Pastore came late to acting, after spending over 20 years as a nightclub bouncer and limo driver, and eventually becoming a manager and owner of a club in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Among his regulars were the actors Matt and Kevin Dillon, who knew him from his days as a chauffeur. Impressed by his charisma, they persuaded him to take acting classes and audition for small roles in New York-area theater.
He climbed quickly, getting parts in TV shows and independent movies, as well as small roles in “Goodfellas” (1990) and “Carlito’s Way” (1993), both about mob life and set in the city. His first major role was in the film “The Jerky Boys” (1995), as the right-hand man of a mob boss played by Alan Arkin.
More mob-themed roles followed, including in the movies “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1996), “Gotti” (1996) and “Mickey Blue Eyes” (1999), many of which had him acting alongside some of the Italian American actors who would later populate the cast of “The Sopranos.”
“It’s easier for me to play a tough guy than it is to play the good guy,” Mr. Pastore told The New York Daily News in 2000. “I grew up in a tough neighborhood. I didn’t study the classics. I’m a street actor. A lot of my training was on the set.”
Pastore was one of my favourite’s on The Sopranos, a sentiment that many fans of the show will share. It was a shame that he saw his demise so early in the run of the series, but it was an important loss for the show as it told viewers that if this guy can be disposed of in the show, nobody was ever safe.
Too often characters are improbably kept around only because they are fan favourites. There was no greater fan favourite than Big Pussy, owed largely to the presence of Vincent Pastore and the warmth he imbued his role with.
I don’t really know Pastore from much beyond The Sopranos. And I’m very okay with that. There’s something about the show that has me quite happy to never see any of the actors in other roles. It is rare to see many behind the scenes photos or videos from the show and with so many actors in it non-professionals, it keeps the integrity of it pretty tight. Obviously, The Sopranos is not a documentary… but the way that it exists so divorced from Hollywood has always left it feeling like its own thing.
News Desk
Marvel and DC both bury a superhero show in the same week, Netflix courts Dan Brown and reunites The Inbetweeners, and Tom Selleck is still salty about Blue Bloods.
Casting & Greenlights
Rebecca Hall is now confirmed to be joining Netflix’s Dan Brown series. Hall has been cast as Katherine Solomon in Netflix’s untitled adaptation of The Secret of Secrets, playing opposite real-life husband Morgan Spector as Robert Langdon. Carlton Cuse (Lost, Jack Ryan) showruns, with Brown co-creating and executive producing. Read: Deadline
The Inbetweeners reunion movie is happening at Netflix. Deals haven’t yet been finalised, but Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, Blake Harrison, and James Buckley, are expected to return. Creators Iain Morris and Damon Beesley are back too. It’s worth noting that if any of the boys in the show were to have fathered a child in their late teens or early 20’s, based on the timeline of the show, the kid would be about the age of the boys in the original series… Read: Variety
Silo showrunner Graham Yost and American Gun writer Aric Avelino will adapt Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy for Apple TV, Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto, and Cool Machine as an ongoing crime series with Barry Jenkins executive producing. Read: Variety
Cancellations & Departures
Wonder Man co-creator Andrew Guest says contracts were signed and a writers’ room was about to open ahead of its surprise cancellation announced on Friday. He assures fans that this isn’t in service of a Wonder Man movie. Read: Variety
DC’s Booster Gold HBO show is also dead. Writer creator David Jenkins confirmed on Threads that his version of the series “won’t be moving forward,” though the project may continue with a new creative team. Read: The Wrap
Dermot Mulroney is exiting Chicago Fire early in season 15. Read: Deadline
Reunions & Revivals
Max Greenfield says he’s read New Girl revival scripts and they’re “amazing.” He told Today with Jenna & Sheinelle, “As far as I know, it’s happening.” But… does it need to? Read: The AV Club
Tom Selleck is still frustrated about the cancellation Blue Bloods. On Ted Danson’s podcast, Selleck said the cast took a 25 percent pay cut trying to keep the show alive while it sat at number six among all broadcast programs in its final year. “Nobody wanted to leave,” he said. Read: THR
In Warnermount news…
John Oliver has extended his HBO deal for Last Week Tonight through 2027 and into the possible David Ellison regime. Tellingly, it’s a one-year extension rather than his usual three. Read: THR
For the upcoming trial, Paramount wants a November hearing; the 12-state coalition of AG’s and the WGA want next April. Tick tick… Read: The Wrap
And also…
A “high-quality bootleg” of Spider-Man: Brand New Day streamed on Twitter/X, reaching 5.9 million accounts before being pulled. Read: The AV Club
One-time actor Taylor Sheridan is heading back in front of the camera for Lioness season three, expanding on his season-two cameo as a CIA officer. Read: THR
Trailer Park
As teased at the end of the Gabby’s Dollhouse movie, Gabby’s little sister makes her debut in Gabby’s Dollhouse when it returns for season 14 on Sept 14.
Moria debuts August 14 on Netflix.
In this highly stylized fictionalization, Moria Casán transforms her life story into a symbolic spectacle of fame, controversy and ceaseless reinvention.
The Shards debuts this week on FX/Hulu - August 5.
FX's The Shards is a seductive drama series from executive producer Ryan Murphy, based on the acclaimed bestselling novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of privileged high school seniors at an elite prep school as they navigate identity, sex, jealousy, obsession and the dangers lurking beneath the surface of American adolescence.
Vadhandhi returns for season 2 on Prime Video August 7.
Mousetrap debuts on Netflix August 28.
A reclusive writer wakes to find his identity stolen - and must ally with a ruthless loan shark to reclaim his life from a man known as "The Rat."
That’s the newsletter for the today.
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