"Spidey Super Stories" is a live-action, recurring skit on the PBS children's television series The Electric Company. Episodes featured the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man, provided to the Children's Television Workshop free of charge, and was played (always in costume) by puppeteer and dancer Danny Seagren. It premiered during the premiere of The Electric Company's fourth (1974â€"1975) season, show 391.
Stories involved the masked superhero foiling mischievous characters who were involved in petty criminal activities (such as burglary or assault). The cast of The Electric Company played the roles of the various characters in each story, with another serving as narrator. In many of these sketches, in keeping with Stan Lee’s writing style, viewers were addressed as true believers.
Unlike other live-action and cartoon productions of Spider-Man, this version of the web-slinging hero did not speak out loud, instead communicating only with word balloons (having a similar role to Clarabell the Clown of Howdy Doody), in order to encourage young viewers to practice their reading skills because he was drawn without a mouth. He also never appeared out of his costume as Peter Parker and, given the series' budget limitations, used his web-shooters sparingly. (Many times, the scene cut to a pre-drawn panel of Spidey using his web-shooters, with the caption "Take that!")
The theme song that plays at the beginning and end of the shorts was written by Gary William Friedman. The lyrics are as follows:
- Spider-Man, where are you coming from?
- Spider-Man, nobody knows who you are!
- Spider-Man, you've got that Spidey touch
- Spider-Man, you are a web-slinging star!
Episodes
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Approximately one dozen "Spidey Super Stories" segments were produced during The Electric Company's 1974â€"1975 season, with another twelve or so during the 1975â€"1976 season, and an undetermined number during the series' final season.
A 4-DVD boxed set was released by Shout! Factory and Sony BMG Music Entertainment on February 7, 2006, named The Best of Electric Company. It featured 20 episodes from 1971â€"1977 (D4D 34121), three of which contained Spidey segments.
A second 4-DVD boxed set with 20 shows from 1971â€"1976 was released on November 14, 2006 (82666-31014). Two of the episodes in this boxed set featured Spidey segments; however, in several of the other episodes, the Spider-Man segments were edited out to minimize the appearance of the character because of rights issues. Episode 60A, from season five, which featured a Spider-Man sketch as the sketch of the day, was altered drastically from the version that originally aired on television.
On March 7, 2006, another DVD named The Best of the Best of Electric Company, a truncated version of the volume-one boxed set, was released (DD 31006).
1974â€"1975
A number of episodes from season 1 (season 4 of The Electric Company) featured Spidey battling the villain in the screenshot of the comic book cover. Other only had a standard picture of Spidey alone. This is documented in the chart below.
1975â€"1976
1976â€"1977
In other media
Comics
From 1974 to 1982, Marvel Comics published a comic book called Spidey Super Stories, which was aimed at children ages 6â€"10. A total of 57 issues were produced, written by Jim Salicrup. During the early years, a comic book version of one of The Electric Company Spidey skits was included. A truncated version also appeared in The Electric Company Magazine. In contrast to the live-action segments on The Electric Company, Spidey often appeared out of costume as Peter Parker.
Every issue of Spidey Super Stories featured at least one story where Spidey would team up with an established Marvel Comics superhero and/or fight an established Marvel villain. This served to introduce other Marvel characters to new readers who were unfamiliar with the company's characters prior to seeing Spider-Man on The Electric Company. Most of these stories would feature quick origins, usually taking up a single page or less, of both the featured hero and villain. Guest heroes included Iron Man (on several occasions), Captain America, Doctor Strange, Spider-Woman, Nova, The Cat and Ms Marvel. Guest villains included the Green Goblin, the Blizzard, Jack O'Lantern, and even Thanos.
Other stories in the issue would feature regular characters from The Electric Company, such as Easy Reader and detective Fargo North, with Spidey as a supporting character; conversely, The Electric Company characters would sometimes appear as supporting characters in the Spidey-centric stories. Supporting characters from other Spider-Man comics made regular appearances as well, such as Peter Parker's girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson, and the staff of Parker's workplace, the Daily Bugle, most notably editor J. Jonah Jameson.
All issues were declared easy-to-read by Easy Reader in a stylized drawing on the comic's cover. To aid comprehension by young readers, the stories featured larger print and less complex stories than most comic books; in particular, Spidey Super Stories as a rule featured no more than four evenly divided panels per story page.
Marvel themselves parodied Spidey Super Stories in a humorous issue of What If...? For two pages, an alternate universe is shown where Marvel had instead teamed up with the National Endowment of the Arts to produce Spidey Intellectual Stories, where Spider-Man defeats the Mad Thinker by debating philosophy. The Watcher notes that it "is for a [yawn] select audience, to be sure."
Record
"Spidey Super Stories" also appeared as a special vinyl record in the 1970s licensed by Children's Television Workshop to Peter Pan Records. Included on the record are two stories from The Electric Company: "Spidey Versus Mr. Measles" and "The Queen Bee." Other stories include Spidey versus an evil toy-wielding criminal called the Jester in "The Last Laugh," The Purple Pirates and Evil MacWeevil in "The Leader of the Pack" (which includes a cameo of Fargo North, Decoder), and Spidey's origin story. Three other stories feature Spidey with members of the Short Circus, and Pedro and his plant Maurice fighting the Mole Man in "20,000 Feet Under the Ground"; and the group tackling more traditional Marvel Comics villains in "Deadly is the Doctor Called Doom" and "Spidey Versus the Sandman." On the records, Spidey/Peter Parker was given a voice, but a picture of Spider-Man on the back utilized the traditional Spidey-talking technique of having his words in word balloons. Elements such as Spidey's spider-sense and the spider-tracer are used in these stories as well.
References
External links
- Danny Seagren at the Internet Movie Database, with episode listing
