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In 1967, Spider-man came swinging out of the pages of Marvel comic books and onto television screens across America for the first time. Marvel Editor Stan Lee oversaw the creative team at Grantray-Lawrence Animation studios during the production of 38 wildly-popular, ground-breaking Spider-man cartoons - some of which adapted stories from the Marvel comic books, and some of which featured all-new adventures and new characters never seen in the comics. This brand-new, eagerly-awaited book presents a detailed episode guide for the complete first season of this milestone chapter in the history of both Spider-man and Marvel Comics. For each of the first season’s 38 shows, this guide devotes four pages: one for color pictures, one for synopses and commentary, and two for background information such as storyboards, pre-production art, character-design model sheets, teleplay pages, or other behind-the-scenes production memoranda from the personal archives of the show’s executive producer Robert L. Lawrence. The cartoons’ sequence of presentation in this book follows the sequence used on THE ’67 COLLECTION DVD SET (released by Buena Vista in 2004) to facilitate this book’s use as an unofficial companion guide for fans viewing the highly-regarded DVD set. In all, this book features over 700 full-color pictures from both the show’s archives and the cartoons themselves. Besides the many pictures, in-depth analyses of the shows are offered with an emphasis on the differences and similarities between the cartoons and the comic books, with a look also on how the shows evolved from ideas to finished cartoons. Stan Lee’s involvement in these cartoons has been little known until now: He was deeply involved in re-writing and editing the teleplays and storyboards and coming attractions - and even in re-writing a line of the famous theme song, where his hand-written edit is added into the finalized version of the sheet music. His involvement in these Grantray-Lawrence cartoons was so extensive that he began hiring new writers like Roy Thomas and Denny O’Neil and Gary Friedrich in the mid-1960s to help ease his workload on the comics so he could focus on successfully transitioning the Marvel super heroes from the comic pages to the television screen and promoting them (and the comics) on college campuses with Producer Robert Lawrence. This book also presents many special features, such as a look at Peter’s life on the show: his friends, his gallery of foes, his many gadgets, the creative uses of his webbing, and a presentation of the show’s theme song and its creators along with the complete 72-frame pre-production storyboard sequence for the show’s famous opening and theme song. In short, this book is the most complete and most comprehensive presentation ever published on this historic and ground-breaking television show that marked the first time Spider-man’s adventures took place outside the pages of a comic book; these cartoons kicked off the media rise to prominence of what is now arguably the most successful character franchise of the 21st century. Read how it all began here -- with this very first Spider-man cartoon series way back in 1967! |
