Spidey's Animated "Firstborns"

Screenshots from Spider-Man: The Animated Series & Spectacular Spider-Man.
Taken from Season 1 Episode 4/8 (TAS) & Season 2 Episode 2 (Spec) respectively.

A long time has passed since I rewatched the entirety of Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Not only it feels like that, but it literally happened over the course of multiple months in the first half of 2023. Initially I wanted to write down something related to that, but then I decided not to as I figured that all those silly Just an Idea "articles" would be more than enough. However, there's still something I can rumble about in regard to this amazing animated series and this time I'm taking this opportunity.

There's actually a lot of things that The Animated Series did before that would later on be used in other Spider-Man projects and become more popular/prominent. It was a pioneer in many ways. Certain aspects of Peter Parker's mythos that many take for granted nowadays have originated from this cartoon and I think it's important to look back and celebrate that. Some of them are pretty obvious while others might actually catch you off guard.

Known Symbiose.

The most famous contribution of The Animated Series to the Spider-Man mythos has to be "The Alien Costume" storyline in Season One. It brought more popular take on Venom's origin that was different from the comics. Instead of discovering the Symbiote during Secret Wars, future Venom finds Spider-Man sometime after getting to Earth. I'm pretty sure that even the changes in Peter's behavior were first implemented in this cartoon. Although I believe that this detail was later retconned and changed in comics.

Both Raimi's Spider-Man 3 and Spectacular Spider-Man introduced Venom in similar fashion to a point of recreating specific scenes from 90s animated series. You can argue that this origin was an easy choice simply because it wasn't connected to a major Marvel event like Secret Wars (which The Animated Series did depict much later) as both project operated within self-contained universe with no other heroes and teams.

I believe the Ultimate Spider-Man comics were also a thing around that time with its own take on the symbiotes where they were a result of scientific experiment or something. Its "Venom" story arc was published through February to July 2003, so they had that option and still chosen The Animated Series approach. To be fair, I'm pretty sure Ultimate comics don't have an exactly good reputation for a good reason, but I won't pretend that I bothered really researching it. I'm still not much of a "comics guy".

Either way, I think it's clear that this simpler approach to Symbiote suit and Venom is more appealing to general audience and I think that said simplicity is what makes it work so well. There's no universal event happening on the background, and it's not part of some special experiment. Symbiote's effect on Spider-Man does make it more straightforward evil as opposed to something more nuanced, but people are interested in Venom being an antagonist (at least, at that point in the narrative). I would also like to state the obvious about Peter Parker being sinister in a goofy way is a feature as he's a dork, after all.

Subtle Concepts.

Many people talk about how The Animated Series was ended on a cliffhanger and wished it got one more season while in reality this cartoon has ended perfectly. The "Spider Wars" served as not only the perfect conclusion to the story of this Spider-Man, but also introduced the multiversal storylines for future projects like Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and all variations of Spider-Verse. Some may argue that it wasn't a good thing as usually Spider-Man is viewed as a street-level hero and I largely agree with that. While it's nice to look at some versions of Spidey here and there, Spider Wars episodes stand strong as the best version of Spider-Verse.

During my revisit of the series, there're some things that stood out for me. I'm sure that I probably still forgot and/or missed out on some details, there're a couple of things I wanted to talk about. For example, an episode "Doctor Octopus: Armed and Dangerous" from Season One revealed that Otto Octavius to be Peter's favorite scientist and Spider-Man even used that to his advantage. Although I believe that this fact was referenced a few times later throughout the series, overall it wasn't as important to the story as it was in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 and Marvel's Spider-Man by Insomniac Games.

Another thing that stood out to me was Daily Bugle. Besides the famous newspaper, John Jonah Jameson also owned a news station known as "J3 Communications" and reported on certain news himself in The Animated Series. J3's helicopter was regularly present during various events on the series in order to show footage of recent events to the people of New York City. It actually felt like this J3 Communications thing had more presence in the series than Daily Bugle, even though in reality things were more balanced.

Which this dynamic immediately reminded me about Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of The Daily Bugle and Spider-Man: No Way Home specifically, there were several TV and online versions of the paper in other Spidey projects. Besides The Amazing Spider-Man films (where it's both news station and a newspaper), other prime example would likely be Daily Bugle Communications from Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon. According to Wikipedia and my vague memories, at least. Never watched it and have no plans to change that.

Spectacular Note.

Looking back, it's both interesting and awesome to see how influential Spider-Man: The Animated Series ended up becoming. Some many concepts and ideas that many people are now taking for granted originated from this wonderful cartoon. It proves that you can have some great alterations in Spider-Man mythos that mix things up and bring something truly unique to the table. Currently it seems like we might not see the return of MCU's Spider-Man for longer than anticipated, I hope they won't lose the opportunity to revisit some ideas from The Animated Series or come up with something totally new. I mean, I wrote three different posts about it during my breaks from rewatching the cartoon.

However, I would to end this "article" by going in a different direction and talk about something that kind of bothered me ever since I watched Spectacular Spider-Man series for the first time. It's another amazing cartoon that did some many things right. Unlike The Animated Series, Spectacular didn't have an actual ending: that's sad, but it is what it is. As you watch it, you quickly pick up on how the series throws in subtle teasers of future storylines whenever it's showing off some characters on the background or something more upfront. Viewers' attention and prior knowledge of Spider-Man gets paid off.

With this in mind, I would like to mention a specific moment from second episode of Season Two called "Destructive Testing". Within its first minutes of it, there's a scene where Gwen quickly dodges a ball right after exiting the class. They even make Peter comment on how impressive it is since, and I quote, she did that "with no Spider-Sense"... or did she? This version of Gwen Stacy was spending a lot of time at the Empire State University as an intern, and they still had spiders in there. At some point in the season, Gwen also stops wearing glasses like Peter...

Yes, I think that Gwen Stacy got beaten by a spider at some point in Season Two of Spectacular Spider-Man. I know that going to such conclusions based on just a couple of evidence, but aforementioned dodge just stood out so much. The creator's of the series were clearly focused on putting a lot of details for the fans of the character and this moment with Gwen Stacy was louder than sighting of Roderick Kingsley and Cletus Kasady. While she would've liked be similar to Julia Carpenter's version of Spider-Women, it's as close to the early hypothetical version of Spider-Gwen as we could've got... unless there's some alternative comic or something I don't know about, yeah. Same goes for all the other things.