Spider-Man (1994 TV series)

"MAA: You were uncredited for some of your work on The Six Forgotten Warriors storyline. What did you think to Electro becoming an all-powerful God in the show, as opposed to the underachieving supervillain in the comics?"

"When he’s in Peter mode, I wanted to emphasize the youth and insecurity and wonder. When I was in Spider-Man mode, I wanted to emphasize the push back of the heroic nature and the will asserting itself to overcome these obstacles the character has."

"Spider-Man was different from other shows I worked on primarily because of the birthing pains. There were lots of people who had a say in what the show would be like, and none of them seemed to agree at the start. A draft of a script might please one of the producers, but then the network would hate it, and vice versa. There would be seemingly endless re-writes. Most shows have problems like this at the beginning, but this was the most extreme instance I've seen. And it was a bit of a surprise, too, because the comic was so explicit; you'd think that everybody would know exactly what the show should be, down to the smallest detail, based on the template that Stan Lee had laid out years earlier in the comics. But if it hadn't been John Semper's considerable diplomatic skills, the show might still be in pre-production."

"The character that stood out most to me was Jameson. His hatred for Peter and Spidey was so pathological; I eventually came to the conclusion that Stan was trying to say something about anti-Semitism - which wasn't just confined to Germany when Stan was growing up. Obviously, that's all subtext, but it explains a lot of things."

"Everybody - producers, network, writers, artists had a different conception of the Venom story; it took a half-day-long meeting with everyone - Avi, Stan, the network rep, the supervising producer (Bob Richardson), John and me, before a storyline could be settled upon - and that was just for the first half hour of the three-parter."

"I remember on Kraven that first season that Avi and Sidney really wanted some advanced stuff in there quoting of Russian poets and things and I think that ended up staying in. I just wondered why the biggest hunter in the world was named Kraven which, of course, means cowardly."

"BS & P, as they're affectionately known to writers, can make some things literally impossible. And most people outside the industry don't know what power they have. For example, I get some fans who ask why we didn't do this or didn't do that. As much as I wish they would, it's EXTREMELY rare for a large entertainment conglomerate to give 15-20 million dollars to a writing team and say "here's a pile of money and some comic books do whatever you want." To them, it's an investment. And BS & P functions sometimes very autocratically to safeguard their investment. They want to prevent anyone from suing for anything. Their big bugaboo is imitatible acts. For example: why didn't we use Ghost Rider? Because we all, as writers, hated the character and are afraid of motorcycles? No, BS & P forbade us from using a character that was ON FIRE. They were afraid little Johnny five-year-old might douse himself with lighter fluid, strike a match and ride his big wheel down the driveway shouting "Lookie, I'm the Ghost Rider! I'm cool! I'm melting! Owie 'MOMMIE!'" No joke, they worry about that stuff. I say: Darwin, but that's why I'm not a lawyer. Same with, initially, Daredevil one of my favorite characters. "We can't have Satan on our cartoon show" they said. We had to explain that he's not THE devil, he's a DAREdevil. Well, he has little horns. Can you take off the little horns? Can you make them look more like ears? He's got those red, evil eyes." It's stuff like that that makes you want to pack-up your laptop, move to a cabin deep in the woods and write thousand-page manifestos against the "moronic imbeciles.""

"I think the fact that it's still playing in syndication and that the videos are still selling after all these years shows how well it was done. Those stories hold up very well because of their intricacies and the series as a whole holds up because it lets you imagine yourself with Spider-Man's kind of problems: I've got school and a girl and some homework but I have to save the world!"

"Sure, the supervillain fights are fun, but really it's the soap-opera of Peter Parker's life that keep the audience invested in the character. Will Harry ever forgive him for stealing MJ? Will Felicia marry the Hobgoblin? Will Anna Watson ever get off his back? That's the good stuff."

"As for Hydro Man, it was a long time ago, but I think we weren't allowed to use Sandman, because he was going to be the villain in the Jim Cameron Spider-Man movie that never happened. So, John just substituted Hydro-Man. I kind of hoped the fact that he went to prom with Mary Jane made him slightly more interesting. (Total aside: Hydro-Man has Mary Jane meet her at the Hotel Seville, which was where I lived when I went to NYU. Now you know.) And the Spot? Well, I think we introduced him just to make an excuse for those interdimensional portals we used over and over again in lieu of killing people. He was such a silly character, that the only thing I remember about writing that was trying to jam as many puns off the word spot into the script."

"I think Stan Berkowitz and I just wrote it as though Cletus Kassidy was a serial killer and just never mentioned what he was wanted for. The cops certainly acted like he was a serial killer, they just didn't specifically say, "Boy, that Kassidy is one bad serial killer.""

"Stan's concept for Spider-Man was more reality based than the Batman material with a real student, quite poor and down on his luck, living with his Aunt in a real city � New York. It grounds this character so well with a contemporary audience, that when he goes through this life changing event of accidentally acquiring superpowers, the audience can relate to him even in this extraordinary circumstance. In theory, it could even happen to them. Even the super villains are more interesting, when they are placed in a realistic city environment. So this was the key to the direction we would take in developing the style of the show. Spider-Man would be designed to be more realistic than Batman and in an environment that was more authentic and as contemporary as possible. Consequently, it was a lot harder to achieve, because doing reality in animation on TV budgets is no easy problem. The drawing and design skill as well as the animation expertise is very demanding with less room for error. We also did quite a bit of research to make sure that New York City was as accurate as we could make it."

"By the time Spidey came on, there was a LOT of censorship at Fox. They were having whole countries like Canada ban some of their shows (Power Rangers, for instance) and they were very nervous about violence. When I watch the older episodes of Batman that first aired on Fox, they do all kinds of things that we couldn't do. By the time Spidey came on, Fox wouldn't let us do anything like that. No fists to the face, no realistic guns, no fire, no crashing through glass, no children in peril, no mention of the words death, die, or kill.""

"Spider-Man was doubly hard because of all the pressure in the beginning. Not only is the character a flagship one for Marvel, but there was that pending Jim Cameron movie hovering over us. Also, Fox was the number one kids' network and they wanted nothing less than a huge hit. The result: the stakes were so high that everybody was already at each other's throats by the time I signed on. The political atmosphere was very tense."

"Mary Jane was never the real issue in Peter's life. Peter's insecurities were. And once those are fixed his problems, as a character, and as a hero in the Joseph Campbell tradition, are over."

"I knew that we were finished with 65 episodes, but I thought maybe we'd have a little bit longer. I thought I made it very clear at at the very end that he was going to get to Mary Jane. I was leaving that door open in case by some miracle they said we were going to do a few more."

"I didn't know if I'd last long enough on the series to actually do it. And the way we did it, with the whole John Hardeski thing, didn't really occur to me until much later. That whole sub-plot that linked her to Captain America and the Super Soldier Serum was completely my idea and I'm damned proud of it. I always though that having somebody project 'bad luck' on somebody else as a 'super power' the Black Cat's super-power in the comic books, was ridiculous. Doing the Super Soldier Serum thing got us into a much deeper, richer storyline, which is what I had to do to keep the series unpredictable and interesting."

"I always prefer story arcs and I think individual half-hour stories are dull and predictable. I originally had planned a season-long story arc for season one, but I was prohibited from doing it because others had agendas that needed to be served first. Toys needed to be featured (those hideous Spider-Slayers), certain characters needed to be rolled out and introduced (the boring Hobgoblin) and so, in season one, I was limited in the things that I could do. When season two began, I had total control over the storylines and as far as I'm concerned, that's when the real fun of the series gets going."

"For me the real fun of Spider-Man is the soap opera that goes on in Peter Parker's real life. The villains are mostly interchangeable. There really isn't much difference between Sandman and Hydro-Man when you get right down to it."

"I can still see the light in Avi Arad's eyes every time he said the words "Spidahhh-Slayahhhh!" It still haunts me in my nightmares."

"The Kingpin was a major villain in Spider-Man during the 'sixties when I first became a fan of the comics. I never intended for him to be so prominent in my series, but as the story arcs got developed, we needed a mastermind quietly manipulating things behind the scenes and he seemed the perfect choice. Also, he doesn't really have any interesting ability to speak of (okay, he's strong - big deal), so if you're going to use him at all, it just makes sense to use him for his mind. He's like Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories. He's constantly lurking invisibly behind the scenes, but his presence is always felt."

"The show was intended by Avi Arad from the ground up to be one big toy commercial. At first, I had to battle against that and things between us were very tense. At one point I was almost fired. Eventually he and I found common ground and he realized that a great show would sell toys better than anything, and I really wanted to make a great show. So we had fewer confrontations. But, from his point of view, it was still one big toy commercial. The toy line definitely affected me. It was common for me to get a phone call from Avi’s people asking me to use a certain character because they were going to make a toy out of him. But they were nice about it, and, I’m actually fairly accommodating, so we always managed to work it out. And I also affected the toy line. Avi was dead set against using Madame Web, but I insisted because I saw a place for her in my big final story line. So, despite his mumblings and mutterings about how he couldn’t make a boy-friendly toy out of a "lousy old broad", I used her with great success. And, guess what? They made a toy out of her! It’s one of my most prized possessions."

"My goal with Spider-Man was to be make the very first screen treatment of the character that was absolutely true to the comic book. I also wanted to bring him to screen in a way that evoked the same sense of wonder and excitement that I felt when I first started reading the comic in the sixties, right when it all began. I also wanted the show to be a ratings hit, to not embarrass me, and to piss off all my detractors. I’m happy to say that I succeeded on all counts."

"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."

"I think that the whole 'Green Goblin' saga was about as good as it got when Stan was writing the comic book series," said Semper. "It was intriguing, surprising, dramatic, exciting - everything I wanted my Spider-Man series to be. I remember reading the whole thing breathlessly when I was a kid. It was incredible. Why wouldn't I want to recreate that? I'm not a big believer in messing with something that's already 100% right. My ego isn't so big that I'd want to tinker with it and make it 'better.' God save us from all the 'creative visionaries' in this business who want to make things better."

"As it was, there were still plenty of unsold Hobgoblin toys on the shelves at Toys R Us that Christmas. Even with our two-part episode, nobody really liked the character that much."

"My favorite part is when, after Mary Jane's 'death,' Peter has his mask off and is standing on the bridge, thinking and looking down into the water," said Semper. "It's almost a full minute or more of just interior monologue - more like Japanese anime than anything American. No corny action, no villains, nothing. When was the last time you saw that on Saturday morning TV, huh?""

"For me, the story was about an epic kind of coming-of-age of Peter Parker, and when he got to the point where he could turn to his creator and say, 'Well, I'm really not the guy you created anymore. I'm somebody else now. When he gets to that point, I kind of felt like the epic hero's journey was over for him."

"Coming at it from an adult perspective, that, for me was, enough finality. I felt like I had done the whole hero's arc for Peter. But unfortunately, that's a very adult way of looking at things. And really, I momentarily forgot that I was catering to kids, and that they wanted to see if Peter got the girl. Yeah... so I left you all with a horrible feeling of incompletion."

"I used to tell my writers, 'We're doing the Peter Parker show. We're not doing the Spider-Man show. Let's approach it from Peter's life. Spider-Man is just one of the many complications with his life.' And I think that's one of the reasons why the show is still resonating with people…it's not about explosions and superpowers and costumes."