Secret comic book movies: The Amazing Spider-Man TV pilot (1977)
By Mike McNulty
“…my guess is he’s wearing sneakers.”
You also don’t need any spider-sense to know that a Spider-Man TV show from the 1970’s will look very cheap by today’s standards. This is especially obvious when it comes to Spidey’s wall-crawling scenes. To be fair, there are moments where, despite some obvious wire-work and camera tricks, it can look pretty convincing – especially since these scenes are actually shot on-location in New York City. But often, director E.W. Swackhamer uses some obvious and laughably bad green-screen effects, making it very obvious that Spidey is crawling over a projection of a building instead of a real one.
The restrictive made-for-TV budget also results in a webslinger who doesn’t often do much in the way of web-slinging. Yet during the two times this does happen, you might be shocked to see that its an actual person swinging from one building to the next. There’s also a few point-of-view shots that are, without a doubt, the inspiration behind the POV sequences in Mark Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man movies.
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As for the costume, the lower production values actually works in its favor. If you wanted a realistic, homemade-looking Spidey suit that’s also comic book accurate, you couldn’t have asked for better. There is a point where, in one scene, Spider-Man wears his belt of web-cartridges on the outside of his costume, which looks quite distracting. Later episodes would also show him wearing his web-shooters over top of his gloves instead of underneath them as this pilot movie does.
One common complaint about the pilot, and the eventual series, is that there’s not a lot of screen-time devoted to Peter actually being Spider-Man. This didn’t really bother me given the cost involved in putting the Web-Head on the small screen. Besides, this “less is more” approach made those scenes with Spider-Man all the more enjoyable, even if it’s not as “amazing” or “spectacular” as one would like it to be.