The Original Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends is Some Fun Nostalgia

I had originally put this in a "Stuff I Watched" entry but it got long enough that I figured I might as well put it in its own entry for people to not read.

Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends (1981):  While I was goofing around on Disney+ after watching Ahsoka, I remembered I had this in my queue to watch--or rewatch really since it was on in the early 80s Saturday mornings.  Probably with the success of Superfriends in its various iterations, Marvel launched a new Spider-Man animated series and since Spidey doesn't have a sidekick they needed to give him some "amazing friends."  One is Iceman, aka Bobby Drake, who was part of the X-Men.  The other was a new character called Firestar, aka Angelica Jones, who has fire powers.  They all live in Aunt May's house with Miss Lion the dog and go to ESU, which is Empire State University or Eastern State University or something like that.

The animation is not great, pretty much on par with Superfriends or other shows of the late 70s and early 80s.  The stories are pretty simple too for the most part.  Some of them involve Spider-Man villains like the Green Goblin, Electro, Shocker, and Scorpion.  Others involve other Marvel villains like Dr. Doom, Magneto, Juggernaut, and Loki--who's not as cute and debonair as the movie version.  As well besides the two "Amazing Friends" Spidey sometimes teams up with other Marvel heroes like the X-Men, Captain America, Thor, Dr. Strange, and the Hulk.

Overall I actually liked it better than Superfriends.  The stories aren't as weird as some of the Superfriends stories so it ages a little better.  There's even a little more mature material in Peter and Bobby both wanting to go out with Angelica.  There's also a decent episode where Peter thinks back to how not stopping a robber led to the death of his Uncle Ben, which is also a little mature for an early 80s kids show.  The last three episodes all feature a love interest of sorts.  The first has Spidey meeting a girl from the future and falling in love with her to the point he goes back with her to the future, except his 20th Century germs would kill everyone there so he has to go back.  The second involves Firestar and a former lover who has become a cyborg that goes rogue in the X-mansion, taking control of Cerebro to try to kill Firestar and the X-Men.  The last episode involves Iceman's sister who is under the control of a bad guy and so he has to stop her from taking control of a satellite that like a precursor to SkyNet would control a lot of the world's defenses.  These episodes aren't really well done but they at least make the attempt to not just be stupid quips and punching.

Obviously it's not a great series, but with a nostalgia filter it's not too terrible. (3/5)

(Fun Facts:  3 years after this show, Marvel produced the Transformers series and there are a lot of similarities.  Most notably the voice of Spidey, Dan Gilvezan, is also the voice of Bumblebee.  And of course Frank Welker is in both series, because there was probably a law passed in the 70s that you can't have an animated series without him.  Which I'm not saying is bad, just that the dude is in EVERYTHING in that era--and still in tons of stuff today.  There are also some of the same writers, the same generic "rock" music, and the same kind of scene transitions only with Spidey webbing instead of Autobot or Decepticon signs.  Some of the stories are even pretty similar like the one where Spidey and his friends go to Hollywood is a lot like "Hoist goes to Hollywood."

When not in her Firestar guise, Angelica looks almost identical to Mary Jane Watson in the comics, only her hair is usually brown instead of red.  Since MJ is never mentioned it seems like they were using Angelica in place of her.  Really if MJ had fire powers that might have made for some interesting comics.  As I noted previously, after this Firestar was added to the comics, though I don't think she ever really had her own title and only shows up periodically. 

There were 24 episodes of the series but you can only find 23 on Disney+.  The 12th episode is not available.  Looking it up on IMDB it's called "The Quest of the Red Skull" and features Spidey and his friends teaming up with "Hiawatha Smith" (an Indiana Jones ripoff) to go to Africa to stop the Red Skull from starting WWIII.  I guess in these enlightened times, Nazis are not as appropriate for kids as they were back in 1981.  Also, there could be some cultural stereotypes and just the name "Hiawatha Smith" sounds cringey.  The third episode is available but has a content warning.  The reason becomes clear pretty quick.  Sunfire the Japanese mutant with fire powers isn't so bad but his evil uncle is buck teeth or fangs away from being a WWII-era stereotype.  Yikes!

There were a couple of attempts at kind of a backdoor launch of an X-Men series.  Bobby and Angelica are both mutants who were part of the X-Men for a time.  One particular episode has Bobby and Angelica going to a reunion at the Xavier mansion that the Juggernaut interrupts to fight Spidey, his friends, and the X-Men including Charles Xavier, Cyclops, Storm, Phoenix, and Wolverine, who for some reason talks with an Australian accident.  That kind of winds up being prescient since they cast an Australian as Wolverine in the live action movies.  The second episode taking place in the Xavier mansion also features Nightcrawler, Colossus, Kitty Pryde (aka Sprite), and Thunderbird, whom I'm surprised didn't get this a content warning.

Spider-Man creator Stan Lee is the narrator in 17 of the 24 episodes, most of them in the first half and then it apparently tails off after that.  The title of this series was later revived, only with Miles Morales and Gwen Stacey as the amazing friends.)