That should be enough for every kid to go gaga over. There were 29 Spidey episodes created for the Electric Company. This little book attempts to do just that. They were one part of an episode filled with silly characters and opportunities to read and learn. They were not meant to be watched that way. When watched one after the other, it becomes quite repetitive. He has the web shooter and that usually takes care of the job. Spidey typically shows up at the end of the story to dispatch the villain. When it was mentioned that this book was being written, several people broke out into full throated renditions of the song. It gets in there, introduces our hero and the mystery that nobody knows who he is, and then it is over. It is under fifteen seconds long, and that might be one of its best features. It has strong instrumentation and enthusiastic singing.
But the theme for the Electric Company version is also amazing. That should give any cartoon theme song a large amount of punk rock cred. It is a tune so fun and fierce that it was covered by the Ramones. There is the one from the cartoon show from the sixties. Spidey is gifted with two great theme songs. Everything feels off the cuff and improvisational. They dealt with the low budget aspects of it by allowing the actors to go wild. The villains were the best kind of ridiculous. It will be detailed later, but it should be mentioned early and often that these five minute Spidey episodes are delightful. This was a smart way to do it, because for shows on a budget, having a picture of an action scene is always cheaper than actually taping that scene. Some of the action was shown as drawn comic book pages. They were presented as stories from a comic book. There were 29 episodes of Spidey Super Stories aired on the Electric Company over three years. They asked Marvel Comics and were able to get Spider-Man for no cost.
Electric Company focused on reading skills and comic book characters seemed like a perfect addition to the show. But why shouldn’t they get Spider-Man? They can have Spidey speak only in written speech bubbles and if the kids want to follow the story, they better get to reading. In the mid-70s, the producers of the Children’s Television Workshop had an idea of introducing another superhero into their show, the Electric Company. There is no intention to get information wrong, but I might not be as thorough as some would like. This is not a serious work, but a piece of entertainment that focuses on comic book history and culture. While I attempt to be accurate, I am not beholden to academic rigor. There is some research in these books, but they are not intended to be scholarly works. The Comic Book Hinterlands series of short books are made to spotlight obscure parts of the comic book landscape.
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