Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can. Spins a web, any size. Catches thieves – just like flies. Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man! Is He strong? Listen, bud. He’s got radioactive blood. Can he swing, from a thread? Take a look overhead. Hey, there! There goes the Spider-Man! In the chill of night, at the scene of a crime, like a streak of light, he arrives just in Time! Spider-Man. Spider-Man. Wealth and fame? He’s ignored. Action is his reward. To him, life is a great big bang-up. Wherever there’s a hang-up, you’ll find the Spider-Man!
The above paragraph contains the complete lyrics to the famed theme song from the Spider-Man cartoon series. Why did I start this review off with that song? It’s stuck in my head, I can’t make it stop! Stop the monkeys! Yes, folks I spent my entire Saturday just vegging on Buena Vista’s Home Entertainment’s recently released “”Spider-Man The ’67 Collection”” DVD Set.This DVD Set contains 52 episodes of the old animated classic that ran from 1967 – 1970 on Saturday mornings. Many people remember this cartoon series fondly, I happen to be one of them. When I first heard about this collection, I was excited, but as my recent experience watching “”Johnny Socko and His Flying Robot”” proves is that sometimes maybe it’s not good to go and relive your childhood. Maybe it’s better to continue to delude yourself into believing that the stuff you loved as a child will hold up when you are an adult. The first thing I noticed was how terrible the animation is, after watching it for an hour I found myself being sucked in, eventually I even deluded myself into thinking that even after all of these years the animation still holds up. The stories and the animation on the first three disks are still fun to watch. By disk four they had Spider-Man battling weird magicians, and cheesey space aliens, the stories become progressively more over the top as the years go by. And for some reason a lot of the villians in the later years were green – whether they be aliens, magicians, or criminals in masks. By the show’s last season the animation completely changed and it wasn’t for the better. The quality of the transfer is inconsistent at best. The first three disks contain crisp and clean video, sharp audio, and you simply can’t beat the nostalgia value. By the time you reach the fourth disk, it’s all over the place: some of the episodes are so bad you can literally see the graininess of the picture, at other times images appeared to be out of focus, and the audio sounded muted and scratchy. Reliving the past with this set was fun for awhile, but the bad animation and video/audio transfers mars a nice trip down memory lane. SPIDER-MAN SHOW GRADE C+ EXTRASWhat extras? There are none with this DVD. No cast credits, no featurettes, no audio commentaries, no nothing. There is a little booklet that contains the complete lyrics to the Spider-Man theme song, and episode titles. But that’s it.EXTRA’S GRADE – FOVERALL This package looks nice, but the lack of features, and poor quality transfer on the last two or three disks mars this set. It’s not a bad title for collectors, but ultimately it’s paper thin. FINAL OVERALL GRADE – C