The single biggest challenge to restoring all 13 episodes to their original broadcast condition is finding high-quality source material to work with. The quality is all over the map in terms of what’s out there, and we will be using various parts of all of these to create our definitive edition. For instance, we might dub the audio from one source to the video from another, or we might splice some transitions from an off-air recording into a cinematic edit of a scene. Whatever it takes to get the best possible result.
Firstly, there are the original 80s releases, which came out under various labels like CBS/Fox, Prism Entertainment, and Playhouse videos, which are the oldest releases out there and also generally the worst quality due to the softness of the picture in addition to their age. Then there are the Rhino releases, which are several years newer and appear to use better quality prints, but they have their own set of issues with excessive grain and occasional oversharpening. Curiously, the only episode that seems to have had a proper release as a standalone episode is “Photo Finish.”
Then there are the off-air recordings, which are the sole source for one episode that was never released on VHS at all. To the best of our knowledge, the only place anyone has seen “The Captive Tower” since its original broadcast in 1978 is a couple of runs on the Sci-Fi channel in the US and satellite broadcasters in the UK. All of the other episodes were paired up for creation of the movie versions, but because there was an odd number of episodes in the run, one was necessarily going to be the odd man out. That one was “The Captive Tower,” which was also possibly the best episode of the entire run, making it doubly unfortunate that they chose this particular one to remain on the shelf. Off-air recordings are also the only source that includes the original spider web transition at the commercial breaks for several of these episodes, as they were removed from many of the VHS releases. This is problematic because restoring the transitions is not as simple as creating the graphic. The audio cues that accompany the breaks are also gone, which means the cues need to be taken from another source in order to recreate the breaks properly. The off-air recordings will certainly have a role to play here.
Three of the episodes – the pilot movie, “The Deadly Dust,” and “The Chinese Web,” were released internationally as cinematic features under alternate titles such as “Spider-Man Strikes Back” and “The Dragon’s Challenge.” These have also been released on VHS primarily in international markets, and the prints used for these releases are noticeably higher quality than for the domestic video releases. That would appear on the surface to make them the preferred source material for these episodes, except for the fact that they contain edits which make them markedly different than their home video counterparts. “The Deadly Dust,” for instance, has scenes of martial artist Emil Farkas using a nunchaku removed because of the legality and strict regulation surrounding the weapon in many overseas markets. So if any of these sources were to be used, at a minimum they would need to have the missing clips reinserted from another source.
Lastly, there are the unicorns – the video discs. The three films that were released theatrically were also released on Laserdisc in Japan, and the pilot film was released on CED videodisc domestically. Additionally, Prism Home Video released two of the omnibus format movies on laserdisc domestically in 1990. Without going into details about the technology of these discs, suffice it to say that CED was pretty much dead as soon as it hit the market in 1981, having already been surpassed by the superior laserdisc. Its quality was generally only slightly better than VHS because the disc was read with a physical stylus like a phonograph record and was limited to around 500 plays before deteriorating. Laserdiscs, on the other hand, are more dependent on the quality of the player for their picture quality because despite what one may think intuitively, laserdisc was an analog format like a vinyl record. The pits and lands were simply read with a laser instead of a stylus. Theoretically, laserdiscs should be the best quality sources for The Amazing Spider-Man, but that may or may not be the case in actual practice.
| Episode Name | Omnibus VHS | Episodic VHS | International VHS | CED Videodisc | Laserdisc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spider-Man (pilot) | X | X | X | X | |
| The Deadly Dust 1 & 2 | X | X | X | ||
| The Curse of Rava | X | X | |||
| Night of the Clones | X | X | |||
| Escort to Danger | X | X | |||
| The Captive Tower | |||||
| Matter of State | X | ||||
| The Con Caper | X | X | |||
| The Kirkwood Haunting | X | ||||
| Photo Finish | X | X | |||
| Wolfpack | X | ||||
| The Chinese Web 1 & 2 | X | X | X |