Spider-Man: The Animated Series at 30 — Did this show help create the MCU as we know it?

During the ’80s, the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoon was endlessly rerun long after the show was canceled. To a generation of kids, that was their Spider-Man, until 1994 when Fox Kids debuted Spider-Man: The Animated Series. That cartoon premiered 30 years ago this month, largely thanks to the massive success of X-Men: The Animated Series. Fox already had that show and Batman: The Animated Series for superhero fans, but the network was convinced to give Spidey a shot as well. That led to one of the best adaptations of Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko’s signature creation.

X-Men has gotten a lot of credit for making a case for the live-action film that followed in 2000, which in turn led to the superhero movie boom of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some have even called that show the original MCU. However, that’s an honor that Spider-Man deserves, because this is the show that went out of its way to expand the animated universe by introducing multiple Marvel heroes. The first adaptation of Secret Wars was on this series, and it even did a multiverse team-up of Spider-Men decades before Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. More importantly, it was one of the first adaptations of Spider-Man to stay relatively close to the source material.

Now, in honor of the 30th anniversary, it’s time to look back at why Spider-Man: The Animated Series is an all-time great comic book show.

The show stayed true to the comics

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Almost every Spider-Man cartoon after this one has attempted to radically rewrite Peter Parker and his supporting cast, usually by making them younger and younger. By this point in time in the comic books, Peter was married to Mary Jane Watson and a veteran photographer for The Daily Bugle. Spider-Man: The Animated Series rolled back the clock a little by making Peter and his friends college-aged adults again, and it felt like a callback to the stories when Peter’s professional ambitions and his love life were often torpedoed by the demands of living up to his Uncle Ben’s words: “With great power, there must also come great responsibility.” Spidey just wouldn’t be Spidey if being a hero didn’t constantly screw things up for him.

The show did make a few changes to the characters around Peter. One of the biggest examples was the way that Felicia Hardy was introduced as a fellow college student and a potential love interest for Peter before she became the Black Cat. Felicia was initially portrayed as this show’s answer to Veronica Lodge from Archie Comics before she became a more heroic character. Some of the show’s villains also appeared out of order from the comics, because Toy Biz — the toy company that had the Marvel license — had a lot of sway about which characters should be used. Regardless, this series captured the spirit and flavor of the comics in a way that none of the subsequent Spider-Man shows were able to do.

It embraced comic-book style serialized stories

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From the second season through season 4, Spider-Man: The Animated moved toward season-long story arcs. X-Men: The Animated Series was also meant to take place in a specific order, but most of that show’s stories were standalone episodes. Spider-Man played like a true comic-book serial, and re-created the sensation of reading a new issue to see how the hero would get out of his latest jam.

The fifth and final season was broken up into multiple smaller stories, but only the season premiere was a single-episode story. Everything else built up toward a cosmic finale for Spider-Man.

Spider-Man was heavily censored

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This is not a mark in Spider-Man‘s favor, but no retrospective about it would be complete without acknowledging how much the show was censored compared to Batman and X-Men before it. Real guns were only shown in select flashbacks, and everything else was a laser gun. The violence was so watered-down that Spidey himself couldn’t throw a punch! Even the Punisher — a violent anti-hero who flat-out murders criminals in the comics — was essentially neutered on the show and transformed into a more kid-friendly incarnation.

Perhaps the most egregious example of censorship other than the guns was Morbius’ inability to bite anyone with his vampire fangs after his transformation. Instead, Morbius had small mouth-like openings on his hands that he used to drain blood from his victims. It was so tame that he was almost like a bloodless vampire. In retrospect, it seems like Fox’s censors were harder on this series after Batman and X-Men had pushed the envelope for animated violence.

The series introduced several Marvel heroes to a new generation

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It should be said that Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends did feature a lot of guest heroes, including the X-Men. However, Spider-Man: The Animated Series did it in a much more impressive fashion by allowing most of the characters to be presented with their personalities and powers intact. Iron Man, Blade, Captain America, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, and more appeared. And the biggest crossover outside of Secret Wars was the two-part appearance of the X-Men, with their voice actors from the other series. Those episodes firmly established Spider-Man and X-Men as companion shows that were set in the same universe.

Why did Spider-Man have so much freedom to use these characters? To sell toys! That was really the only agenda, even though Iron Man and the Fantastic Four did get their own animated shows in syndication outside of Fox. Additionally, Spider-Man mentions the Hulk by name in the very first episode of the series. But because UPN was running the Incredible Hulk animated series, the character wasn’t allowed to be used in Secret Wars.

Spider-Wars

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The final five episodes of the series were the culmination of a long-running subplot about Madame Web — the same character who had a mega-flop earlier this year — grooming Spider-Man to face a threat that only he alone could defeat. After the three-part Secret Wars adaptation ended, the remaining two episodes, Spider-Wars, sent Spidey and multiple other Spider-Men to a world where Peter was corrupted by the Carnage symbiote.

This was a foe that Peter came to realize could not be defeated in battle. He had to make the other Peter realize what he had become, which convinced Spider-Carnage to reject what he had become and sacrifice himself. That could have been a fitting ending for the series, if the show had dealt with the lingering thread of Mary Jane’s disappearance, who had been missing since the third season finale. Instead of giving Peter and MJ some emotional closure, the show wasted valuable moments on Stan Lee flirting with Madame Web, who was voiced by Lee’s wife, Joan Lee. Because of that extremely self-indulgent scene, viewers were only left with Madame Web’s promise that she would take Peter to Mary Jane… we just never got to see it.

The creative team behind the series didn’t intend for this to be the final episode, but Fox pulled the plug after 65 episodes and soon had another wildly different show in its place called Spider-Man Unlimited. That series felt like a big step down from Spider-Man: The Animated Series, and it took place in its own continuity before shuffling Spidey off to another Earth.

The future

Marvel Television

Since Spider-Man: The Animated Series didn’t offer any resolution for fans, X-Men ’97 — the sequel series that shares continuity with X-Men and Spider-Man — featured a cameo appearance by Peter and MJ that was meant to confirm that Mary Jane was saved some time after the series finale.

Much like its predecessor, X-Men ’97 has been very well-received by viewers and renewed for additional seasons. Fans have also clamored for Spider-Man: The Animated Series to get a sequel series, but that seems unlikely since Marvel already has a new show lined up. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is premiering on Disney+ in 2025, and that series has more in common with the MCU than any of the previous Spider-Man shows. That series has already been renewed, and as long as it’s running, there probably won’t be any more animated shows in the works for Spider-Man.

As noted above, Spider-Man: The Animated Series does have some shortcomings. But the things it did well were so good that this show belongs in the pantheon among Marvel’s best adaptions.

Watch Spider-Man: The Animated Series on Disney+.