One of the best animated adaptations.
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Let's get one thing straight: it's apples and watermelons trying to compare the Sony live-action "Spider-Man" trilogy to this WB Kids TV show, also from Sony, and so I won't even try. But for an animated TV show "The Spectacular Spider-Man" is pretty decent. The only thing is--and fans should be warned--it's not the first season or even a collection of episodes. "The Spectacular Spider-Man: Attack of the Lizard" cobbles together the first three series installments from the 2008 series in order to create a fairly fluid 70-minute feature. I say "fairly" because knowing it's an edited and spliced production helps to explain why it feels like a kitchen-sink affair. Vulture does a fly-by, the Goblin turns up on the periphery, Electro gets a little air time, but the villains come and go in a revolving door that only slows down for any kind of development when the one-armed Dr. Curt Connors injects himself with modified lizard DNA and becomes The Lizard.
Promo for the series indicates that while this one is pitched at kids, the producers expect that a fair amount of teens and adults will also follow along. I could see that. The show stays pretty true to the Spider-Man mythology, the animation is decent, and creator Stan Lee is onboard again. This is the tenth time Spider-Man has been the subject of a TV show, and it gets back to basics, with Peter Parker (voiced by Josh Keaton) as nerdy as his live-action counterpart. Peter is forever getting picked on by Flash Thompson (Joshua LeBar) and his bully friends, but the real shocker is that Harry Osborn (James Arnold Taylor) is also a nerd with freckles who looks a little like a cartoon Ralph Malph. Gwen Stacy (Lacey Chabert) isn't as glam this outing, either. Like Peter, who's supposed to be 16, she's a gangly little high school student who's angling to get an internship with Dr. Connors (Dee Bradley Baker, who did The Lizard voice for the 2000 Spider-Man Nintendo and Playstation games and the 2001 sequel). Stacy has braids, brains, glasses, and no idea that Peter is actually Spider-Man. What's interesting is that out of all the TV transmutations and variations, this is the first time that Stacy has ever been a main character.
All of the characters have those big round eyes and minimalist angular features that betray an anime influence, but the drawings and backgrounds are detailed enough to simulate an energetic and believable cartoon world, and the animation itself is more fluid than anime. Whether Spidey is scaling a building or slinging a web, there are scenes that also will call to mind the Sam Raimi films, and those allusions have to be deliberate.
Though the look is slightly different, the tone and content and spirit of animation easily evoke the comic-book hero and his stories. The wry wisecracks are here, along with the web shenanigans and the cops arriving just in time to unwrap another "package" with a calling card from their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Old-timers like myself will have flashbacks to the old Dick Tracy cartoon series because of the angularity of some of the villains and the quick way that Spider-Man dispatches the bad guys. The fun is watching him do all of this without breaking a sweat, and because he's never really in the battle of his life and because of all those wisecracks, the cartoon violence is tame enough for young viewers.
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[release]24733[/release]