"I felt very restricted by the half-hour format (which these days boils down to only 22 minutes of ACTUAL screen time) and I had always wanted to play around with something longer. In the sixties, when I first became a hard-core Spider-Man fan, part of the charm of the series was that the stories went on forever. Stan Lee was the first to do a "longform" comic book with a continuing story line, and I wanted to do for Saturday morning TV exactly what Stan did for comics in the sixties. Everybody was vehemently opposed to the idea (network, studio, etc), but I just did it anyway. I had to wait until the second batch of thirteen episodes and then I did it when nobody was paying much attention."