I’d wager that most of you visiting 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.
A few years ago I was thrilled to find a DVD compilation of childhood favorite The Electric Company. You can read a bit about it — and in particular its crossovers with predecessor Sesame Street — on the Muppet Wiki, as well as in greater depth on Wikipedia.
I have fond memories of the show, from Rita Moreno’s familiar opening shout to the animated Adventures of Letterman shorts to Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader to Skip Hinnant in Fargo North, Decoder, to — of course — Danny Seagren as the strangely silent Spider-Man. What surprised me when I popped in the DVD was how much was unfamiliar, including the delightfully absurd soap-opera parody Love of Chair. The first episode of the serial is up on YouTube, albeit bootlegged; one minute long, just when you think it’s started running on fumes it finishes with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments. [Warning: Very brief smash cut to Bill Cosby.]
Some interesting but spoilery trivia follows in the comments section below.
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