The Quiet One

I’d wager that most of you here don’t remember the first live-action Spider-Man
on screen.



Clearly, based on the image above, I don’t mean Tobey Maguire. Or Nicholas Hammond, who starred as Peter Parker over 12 episodes of The Amazing Spider-Man on CBS starting in 1978, spun out of a TV movie the year before — or even the stuntman inside the costume for most of that show, Fred Waugh. Or, for that matter, Shinji Tōdō; he led Toei's スパイダーマン [Supaidāman], a very loose adaptation of the Marvel character, which aired in Japan during roughly the same span as its American counterpart.

No, I’m talking about Danny Seagren.

Seagren, a dancer and puppeteer whose association with Jim Henson is limned at the Muppet Wiki, wore the red-&-blue suit for 29 installments of Spidey Super Stories and a handful of other segments on what at the time was my personal favorite among the PBS stalwarts of my childhood: The Electric Company.



This Spider-Man never spoke aloud. From his introduction during the cold open in
the October 1974 premiere of the show’s fourth season — moving silently right under the nose of Jim Boyd’s dismissive J. Arthur Crank — Spidey’s Spidey would encourage viewers to read by communicating via hand-drawn word balloons or thought bubbles that popped up overhead (not silently but with an odd bleep, quack, or boing). His speech had mixed-case letters, as in everyday handwriting, and they were crudely done. I’ll say the same for most the panels that the segments used for transitions, which is a shame given that Marvel’s art director and classic Spider-Man artist John Romita was apparently in consultation with the show.

The Spidey segments began with the opening of a mocked-up comic book, sporting a Romita-style Spider-Man on its cover, and it framed the actors within panels on a page. Win Mortimer drew the interiors under Romita covers for the Spidey Super Stories monthly that Marvel launched on newsstands in conjunction with Children’s Television Workshop, mixing guest appearances by friends and foes known to fans of his extant four-color exploits (Captain America; Doctors Octopus and Doom) with other familiar Electric Company figures who sometimes crossed into the segments on TV as well (cleverly named detective Fargo North, Decoder; Jennifer of the Jungle).

That publication outlasted the six original seasons of The Electric Company by several years — greatly expanding its usage of the Marvel Universe pantheon while eventually transitioning to bimonthly release — but carried to the end on every cover a small head shot of Morgan Freeman’s Easy Reader above the testimonial “Easy Reader says, ‘This comic book is easy to read!’”



Danny Seagren left us this past November at 81. Per obituaries like the one at the Legacy website, his family has suggested that donations in his name be made to the Entertainment Community Fund; mine was entirely incommensurate with the role Seagren played in sparking my lifelong adoration of costumed adventurers. His lithe, deliberate movement as Spider-Man contributed mightily to a thrilling air of mystery reinforced in those segments’ memorable theme song:

Spider-Man —
Where are you comin’ from, Spider-Man?
Nobody knows who you are!