swingin' man

i remember when it all changed for me. i was seven years old and i'd just bought a reprint of an old amazing spider man. the opening page drew me in. peter parker is sitting in his apartment head in hand as his sickly aunt may lay in a bed in the next room. above his head are thought bubbles of all the people he loves, his enemies and other problems. i had never seen anything like it. up to that point superheroes were plastic, unflappable and without much depth. suddenly here was peter parker aka spider-man with real hang ups. i was hooked.
spider-man has always been my guy. yeah, i know, me and three-hundred million other people. it's funny though, when i was a kid i felt like i understood him better than most. now as marvel continues to rake in the dough on the new feature films and questions are in the air about the future of the franchise, i want to take you back to a simpler time.
1967 is the year of my birth. it's also the year the animated version of spider-man first hit the airwaves. they released it on dvd a few years back and it was as good (or bad depending) as i remember it. sure, the storylines may lack the depth of stan lee's early writing and the repeated use of the stock footage of spider-man swinging all over nyc may have gotten a little annoying. still, it's all we knew. and as much as the imagery is forever a part of my consciousness, perhaps an even stronger impression was made by the music.
we all know the catchy opening theme (listen bud he's got radioactive blood) but that is only the beginning. watching some of those episodes again on dvd, i found myself often humming the hooks and tapping out the rhythms while i was alone. i looked everywhere for some of the background music without success. finally an exhaustive web search took me to a college station blog where they had done an entire show dedicated to spider-man background music. sadly it seems the entire first season has been lost forever, so these selections are from the second and third season which got a little darker and more psychedelic. it's still pretty great though. if you're interested in hearing their entire podcast check it out here.
admittedly the stereo quality is a bit lo-fi on these, but if you dig spidey and you want to like wail man, then load your web shooter and give it a shot here.