When I was a little guppy I was a huge reader of comic books, in fact comic books taught me how to read. I read DC Comics, Charlton Comics and Dell/Gold Key Comics, but I never even heard of Marvel Comics until the mid 70s when my older sister came into my room and tossed a copy of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and TOMB OF DRACULA onto my bed and said I might like these.
I remember flipping through them, DRACULA looked spooky and had a LOT of words— and Spider-Man? Outright scary in his costume and the particular issue had him grow extra arms! Yikes! As a kid who ran under his bed if someone gave me a Casper comic book this caused my little heart to seize up.
A couple of years later my favorite aunt took me to a comic book shop— it was a tiny place on Park Avenue in Worcester and there I found this Digest sized Batman comic book— which I thought was really cool.
A short while later, probably when I was 11 or 12, I started riding my bike all over the place and I made the twenty mile jaunt to a mall where I would peruse Walden Books and on one particular trip I found some paperback reprints of the early Spider-Man stories and I bought and devoured those. Reading Spider-Man from the beginning and seeing the work of Steve Ditko the character looked a lot less spooky to me.
The American Spider-Man, Nicholas Hammond, or more likely his stunt man.
In 1977 or 1978 CBS unleashed the SPIDER-MAN TV Series and I was officially a Spidey fan. The show was not very good, and I knew that even as a kid, but back then you were glad to have anything comic book related and you took what you could get.
Little did I know that they were doing a show at the same time in Japan featuring Spider-Man! While the American show followed the overall source of the material— i.e.Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man after being bit by a radioactive spider the show ignored Spidey’s rogues gallery and had him face the most boring gangsters and con men— bad guys so boring Starsky and Hutch yawned at them. The Japanese version found their version of Peter Parker, Takuya Yamashiro, gets his powers as an emissary from Hell spider bites him and Spider-Man is born to fight the evil Iron Cross Army, lead by Professor Monster, to stop them from taking over the world.
In this version Spider-Man drives a boss car which is nearly as cool as the Batmobile and gets a giant robot to call his very own when whatever monster he goes up against grows to super size as most monsters in Japan are prone to do.
It’s a show that features the best live action costume of any IMO because don’t forget Spider-Man is supposed to have made his costume himself, I’d love to see how the Toby MacGuire Parker did that.
Speaking of which, I’ve seen the three MacGuire films, the first one was good, the second one was excellent and the third one was forgettable. I saw about ten minutes of one of the Andy Garfield ones and I saw the first one Tom Holland did with the Avengers but I’ve not seen anything else.
I’m just not seven years old any more.