YMMV / Spider-Man (1981)

• Complete Monster: Red Skull returns. See that page for details.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The show's rendition of Medusa. Although her time there was brief, I.E. a single episode guest appearance, her romance with Spider-Man was memorably sweet and inspired much fanfiction over the years.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The train wreck in "Revenge of the Green Goblin," where the passenger train Norman Osborn is riding on hits a rockslide, derails and explodes, presumably killing many people except Osborn. Fourteen years later, a very similar train wreck caused by a rockslide would happen in real life at Kootenay Lake in Canada, except it was a freight train, but the engineers were still killed and other crew members injured.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "The Sandman is Coming" provides two examples.
  • Spidey not wanting to give blood for fear of the radiation in his veins harming others became this a few years later as it became clear contaminated blood was a major vector for the spread of the AIDS pandemic.
  • A building reading "Sony" can be seen in the background. Sony would later create or be involved with three Spider-Man film series, the first and third of which even featured the Sandman in their respective third films.
  • After losing his mask, Spidey protects his secret identity by resorting to wearing a Brown Bag Mask. This was way before he was forced to take on the identity of the Bombastic Bag-Man after rejecting the black suit symbiote in the comics.
• More Popular Spin-Off: This adaptation of Spider-Man has been overshadowed by the more popular Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, which aired concurrently at the time. The fact that the solo series aired in syndication while Amazing Friends aired as a Saturday-Morning Cartoon on a major network may have been a factor, in addition to the fact that Amazing Friends was referenced in other forms of media (including Ultimate Spider-Man) and enjoyed occasional reruns into the early-2000s, enough for newer generations to be aware of that series, while this one was very rarely seen for many years before the advent of Disney+.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Corey Burton received his first major voice role here as The Lizard.

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