#DoomsdayPrep: Oh what a tangled web we knit.
Marvel has spent the better part of a decade convincing us that the multiverse is a shimmering tapestry of infinite possibility, but there are corners of the Multiverse that even the most ardent Feigeophile would fear to venture. Over the course of our #DoomsdayPrep, we’ll visit many of them.
The prospect of Nicholas Hammond’s Peter Parker being plucked from his disco-era obscurity to rub shoulders with Robert Downey Jr’s Victor Von Doom may feel remote, but who knows how desperate the Russos might get? In 1977, the live-action superhero was a creature of compromise, existing in a televised landscape that viewed the primary colours of the comic book with a mixture of suspicion and embarrassment. 1977’s Spider-Man (in reality the feature-length pilot for the TV series The Amazing Spider-Man released theatrically outside America) arrived not as a harbinger of the modern blockbuster, but as a low-frequency broadcast from a time when “grounded” wasn’t a creative choice, it was a budgetary stipulation. Directed by E W Swackhamer, the film presents a version of Peter Parker who feels less like the “web-head” of Marvel lore and more like a university student who has accidentally wandered onto the set of a detective serial in his onesie pyjamas.
When Peter Parker (Nicholas Hammond, yes Freidrich von Trapp from The Sound Of Music Nicholas Hammond), New York university student and freelance photographer for the Daily Bugle, gets bitten by an accidentally irradiated spider he soon discovers he has gained remarkable superpowers, such as super-strength, agility and the ability to climb sheer walls and ceilings. He’s compelled to put his newfound talents to the test when a mysterious Guru starts placing the good citizens of New York under mind-control to rob banks. Adopting the costumed persona of Spider-Man, Peter must find a way to thwart the Guru before he follows through on his threat to make ten random New Yorkers take their own lives if the city doesn’t pay him a $50million ransom.
Spider-Man attempts to establish the familiar beats of the mythos, but it does so with a sedate, procedural gait that owes more to Quincy, M.E. than Steve Ditko or Stan Lee. Hammond’s Peter Parker is a graduate student whose accidental brush with a radioactive spider leads not to a cosmic destiny, but to a series of encounters with the kind of nondescript white-collar criminals who usually populated Sunday night detective slots, or if they were lucky, briefly troubled The Six Million-Dollar Man. Here, the primary antagonist, Edward Byron (Thayer David), is a mind-controlling extortionist whose scheme to force citizens into committing crimes feels remarkably small-scale when viewed through the lens of modern superhero stakes. The script even omits the iconic “Great Responsibility” legacy of Uncle Ben (himself absent and unmentioned), leaving this Peter to stumble into vigilantism with a breezy lack of existential baggage.
Hammond plays Parker with a soft-spoken, academic charm, and while many of the supporting characters are present like Robbie Robertson (Hilly Hicks), Aunt May (Jeff Donnell), the film doesn’t really know what to do with them. It’s so confused about who J Jonah Jameson is, it introduces an entirely new character – Police Captain Barbera (Michael Pataki) – whose only role is to bellow at and berate Parker. Little wonder that this movie’s Jameson, Bewitched’s David White, was recast for the TV series that would follow.
Director E W Swackhamer handles the action with an economical literal-mindedness that is, in retrospect, quite endearing. Eschewing the kineticism of the source material, the film relies on practical stunts that involve stuntman Fred Waugh being winched up the sides of buildings or swinging from a helicopter, sequences which at least possess a tactile, gravity-bound clunkiness that no amount of modern CGI can replicate. Unfortunately the action sequences and physical performances only serve to highlight the absurdity of the costume; a spandex suit, lacking the textured sophistication of contemporary gear, and looking exactly like what it is: a man in a home-made bright red and blue onesie trying to maintain his dignity while clinging to a piece of very real, very precarious scaffolding and moving in a way no living person has ever moved, physicality that makes the contemporary Doctor Who monster performers look like Cirque de Soleil alumni.
The story of Peter investigating the mysterious machinations of Edward Byron (Thayer David), who uses hypersonic mind-control pins to force his victims to do his bidding belongs firmly to the era of the plodding investigate detective drama, eschewing the operatic villains of the source material for the kind of small-scale extortion that wouldn’t have been out of place in the later seasons of Hart to Hart.
Technically, Swackhammer’s Spider-Man is a fascinating snap-shot of pre-digital ingenuity and (sometimes literally) shoestring special effects work. Deprived of the ability to make a man fly or swing through Manhattan (or at least Los Angeles doubling for Manhattan spliced with judicious stock footage establishing shots) with weightless ease, the production relies on the terrifyingly real stunt work of Fred Waugh. Watching a man in a costume – which features chrome, light-reflective eyes that look more like a fly’s than a spider’s – clamber up the side of a building on visible cables is a jarring, tangible experience. These sequences, often shot with the camera tilted to simulate height, possess a gravity-bound clunkiness that makes the character feel remarkably vulnerable amidst the very real concrete of the concrete jungle.
Lacking the Steinbeckian odyssey of Bill Bixby’s fugitive drama The Incredible Hulk or the unironic pop-art vibrancy of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, which embraced its comic book origins with a wink and a spin, Marvel’s first real attempt to spin off a world-wide webslinger remains trapped in a beige purgatory, pretending that LA backlots are New York side streets while a funk-heavy score by Dana Kaproff tries to convince us we are watching something dangerous.
While it was a ratings triumph for CBS at the time, the network’s decision to air the subsequent series in sporadic clumps suggested they were never quite sure what to do with a man who could crawl on ceilings but couldn’t afford to swing between them and while it would run for two series and spawn two overseas theatrical sequels, it remains mostly a curiosity, a snapshot of a decade that wanted to believe in superheroes, but certainly didn’t want to pay for their powers to be shown properly on the small screen.
