In the late 1970s, The Amazing Spider-Man television show starring Nicholas Hammond as the web slinger was a staple of childhood for many of us. In early 1978, Wednesday night was must-see television in households with kids all across America. No, it wasn’t really a great show. The special effects technology required to do Spider-Man properly didn’t exist yet, and certainly not on a television budget. As a result, they took the approach of other superhero television shows with the same problem like The Adventures of Superman and The Incredible Hulk and made Spidey’s villains more human than super. No Green Goblin, no Doctor Octopus, no Sandman. Just run-of-the-mill bank robbers, coin thieves, blackmailers, mad scientists, and domestic terrorists.
The show also wasn’t very faithful to the comic books – no Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy, Uncle Ben, Flash Thompson, or Betty Brant, and characters like Aunt May and Robbie were limited to a couple of short cameos. Nevertheless, the show was fun and a lot of people of a certain age remember it very fondly. Unfortunately, not everyone felt that way, chiefly Marvel honcho Stan Lee. Lee made no secret of his disdain for the direction the show took, and star Nicholas Hammond attributes the origins of this split to the decision to have Spidey fight ordinary criminals instead of comic book villains. There may or may not be more to the story, but for whatever reason Lee hated the show.
Producers Charles Fries and Dan Goodman held all the distribution rights to the show for 20 years, after which they reverted back to Marvel. During the time Fries Productions had control of it, there were attempts to commercialize it after its cancellation, but because it only ran for 13 episodes it wasn’t a candidate for syndication. Instead, they took the approach of editing episodes together into omnibus format movies that were sold to cable TV and independent stations as one-shot movies. These could be seen occasionally on stations like WTBS and USA throughout the 1980s.
Once home video really became a thing in the later 1980s, many of these movie compilations were released on VHS cassette through labels like CBS/Fox Home Video and Prism Home Video. Unfortunately, the quality of these releases was pretty terrible. The picture on these releases was generally soft and flat because they were cheaply produced from whatever dirty, multi-generation copies they had lying around instead of cleaning the original prints, or even better, striking new prints from the negatives. In fact, we’re not even sure these releases were made from film prints at all – they might have been made from the master tapes that were distributed to TV stations at the time. But it’s understandable why they didn’t – restoration was expensive, and it was a fringe show with a small fan base. Frugality was the order of the day in order to be profitable.
In the mid-1990s, these movies made their temporary home on the Sci-Fi Channel (in its pre-Syfy days), where they were occasionally run as Spider-Man marathons for a few years. During this time, the movies were re-released on VHS under a partnership between the Sci-Fi Channel and Rhino Home Video in which the videos were co-branded. This time a bit more care was taken in the production, although not much. These releases didn’t have the softness of the earlier releases, but they still suffered from a lot of problems like crushed blacks, excessive grain, and dirt on the prints. In some cases, glue from dirty cuts can even be seen on some of the prints.
Once the distribution rights reverted back to Marvel in the late 1990s, the show was promptly buried at the very back of the vault and has never seen the light of day since. Rumor control had it that Stan Lee was personally blocking any release of the show because of his dislike for it, although it remains unclear whether he actually had that kind of power, especially following Marvel’s acquisition by Disney in 2009. Regardless of the reasons, the show remains buried. It has never been released in its proper episodic format, and has never been released in any format on DVD or Blu-Ray, although poor quality bootlegs made from the VHS releases can be found online.
The show deserves a proper release, and there are a lot of groups and online campaigns aimed at getting it released. Maybe it will happen someday. Stan Lee died in 2018, and so if he ever was a barrier to release as rumored, that hurdle should now be cleared. Disney is a huge company with tons of franchise properties, and it’s possible that they may simply not know what they have sitting in the back of the vault. Nevertheless, we must proceed under the assumption that the show will never be released and work with what we have.
This project is a volunteer, not-for-profit labor of love managed by a team of dedicated fans willing to put in the time, money, and work required to preserve this classic show. Its goal is to collect the best available source material and produce a definitive fan edition that restores the episodes as closely as possible to their original episodic format in high-quality HD video. The team is modeled on the legendary Doctor Who Restoration Team, whose work has set the bar for vintage TV shows.
The team does this in their spare time and spends their own personal money chasing down quality sources. At this time, we are not making our finished work available for distribution, largely because the project is in its infancy and there is nothing to share. But we will be sharing restored HD clips to demonstrate what is possible with the sources and technology currently available. Hopefully, little teasers will generate interest in the show and help ramp up pressure for an official release. At some time in the future, it’s possible that we may make our work available as a preservation project similar to Harmy’s Star Wars Despecialized Edition. However, there are legalities and risks that would need to be weighed out before that could happen.
In the meantime, follow along with us as the project moves along, and we hope you enjoy reading about our work as much as we enjoy doing it.