From: tcw@kepler.unh.edu (Timothy C Webb)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.animation
Subject: Re: OLD Spider-Man
Date: 17 Nov 1992 20:13:58 GMT
Organization: University of New Hampshire  -  Durham, NH
NNTP-Posting-Host: kepler.unh.edu

In article <YORK.92Nov16145222@oakland-hills.lucid.com> York@Lucid.COM writes:
>
>It is also worth noting that Ralph Bakshi had a role in this series.

  Yes, he was the executive producer for the show's first season. For the
second season, he was dropped (or he left, I'm not sure), so these shows are
actually pretty different from the first season ones. The second season
definitely wasn't as wierd, didn't incorporate a lot of fantasy elements, had
some new music (the music from both seasons is fantastic!), and had slightly
better animation (although it still used a lot of stock footage)

>I found the show entertaining, but the budgets and production values
>were quite low.  They made lots of use of stock footage (a large
>fraction of each episode is Spider Man swinging around the appropriate
>background painting), including using weirdly-cut footage of Spider
>Man crawling up a building to depict him crawling down a pipe (in the
>episode where all of Manhattin is levitated, I think).

  There was definitely some wierd stuff going on! I wouldn't be surprised if
the guys who worked on the first season of this show were all wasted when they
did it!
  Speaking of this particular episode, the show often used basically the same
concept for two or three episodes, giving them different names and making
subtle changes in the plot. For example, there are at least three episodes
with the main villain that appears in this particular one where Manhattan is
levitated (entitled "Swing City" (appropriately enough, Spidey spends about
half the episode swinging around as you describe above)). There is another
episode called "Specialists and Slaves" where many of the same things happen,
but a subplot is inserted, a few scenes changed, and the villian is given the
name "The Radiation Specialist" (he has no name in "Swing City"). This was
an easy way to make lots of shows dirt cheap!

>Also, in one of the most amazing cost-cutting measures in all of
>animationdom, one entire episode of the series is simply a Rocket
>Robinhood episode re-worked to put Spider Man in the leading role.
>Maybe you wondered why a this SF-related stuff didn't seem to make any
>sense in the Spider Man universe?

  Ha! That's an interesting bit of trivia. I imagine a lot of the wierdness
that went on in the show was Bakshi's doing.
 
>[I thank which ever low-budget UHF station in Boston it was that used
>to show all this stuff (chanel 27, maybe?)]

  It was on channel 25 many years back (before Fox took it over).

-- 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*               Tim Webb                    tcw@kepler.unh.edu                *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*             "...I can almost play the whole song on my organ!"              *
*                               "What song?"                                  *
*                 "Uh...it's called `shut my mouth blues'."                   *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Newsgroups: rec.arts.animation