The first live-action Spider-Man was... well, it was a guy named Donald Glut (pronounced like the butt-muscle), who made a fan film in 1969. Sure, that's not official, and it's possible Marvel hired actors to model the character before that, but it's got a documented existence and it did play in a theater at least once, so technically it counts. Plus, Glut went on to a professional writing career that saw him working on several Marvel cartoons, so yeah. Anyway, the second live-action Spider-Man was... okay, the second one was Danny Seagren, alongside Morgan Freeman on The Electric Company. But the third live-action Spider-Man? Well, that we've got a source on!
For the first time on the screen... the world's favorite
adventure super-hero comes alive!.
That isn't the text from the back of the box, it's the tagline for the movie. Because the box says "inspired by the 1977 Spider-Man movie" and nothing else. But it does have a photo of this toy in the pose from the movie poster, so that's pretty neat. Yes, this was a TV movie, the double-length pilot for CBS' new show, but it (and two other two-parters) did get a theatrical release in Europe. Airing in September, the pilot movie was CBS's highest-rated program of the year, but it was expensive to produce the stunts for the ongoing show and CBS kept moving it all over the schedule in an attempt to draw away viewers from other networks' popular shows, so it only ended up lasting two ultra-short seasons for a total of 14 episodes. It's mostly forgotten today, since it's never had any kind of home video release, but now Hasbro's made an official toy. Could things be changing?
1977's Spider-Man was played by Nicholas Hammond, best known as the eldest son in The Sound of Music. We don't get an unmasked Peter Parker head, alas, but the Spidey head is new: the most distinctive part of this costume is the eyes, which are weirdly round. Like, they still have the traditional pointy black outlines, but the lenses themselves look like Pete made them from two halves of a tea strainer. Combined, it looks like he invented winged eyeliner. The black sections around the eyes are raised, not just painted on, giving a bit of realistic depth to the sculpt.
Below the neck, CBS Spider-Man uses the same molds
as Toei Spider-Man, which makes sense: it's a softer sculpt, and looks like a fit human being wearing a tight costume, rather than like a superhuman wearing spandex that somehow fits into the muscles. In addition to the weird eyes, TV Spider-Man wears his belt outside his suit, and has a single huge, clunky webshooter on his right wrist. It's interesting that at the exact same time, America and Japan both created a Spider-Man TV series, and both versions wore a big silver bracelet, but on opposite arms. Were they both referencing the same thing somehow? Did Marvel tell them to do it? Was it pure coincidence?
Since there are no legitimate copies of this series out there,
any time you see any clips or anything online it's just a copy of a copy of a copy that came off a VHS tape, so the image quality isn't great; so half the time, you can't even see the webs on the costume or the legs on the symbol on his chest, but Hasbro painted them cleanly instead of, like, doing pureposefully blurry lines. The audacity!
One area where Japan's Spider-Man was better than America's was the physicality. Shinji Tôdô('s stunt double) was always crouching, hunching over, and generally scuttling about whether on walls or floors, while Nicholas Hammond('s stunt double) was just standing around normally or at best walking with his hands on the ground like any adult human would do. Of course, since both action figures share the same articulation, you can finally make America's 1970s Spider-Man move like a dang bug.
The figure's accessories include two existing webbing "splats" we've seen before, an alternate pair of relaxed hands, and a webline
that's an actual line. Like, the show was clearly just using white rope to stand in for his webs, so this toy includes a length of thick string instead of something plastic. How silly and fun! If they'd wanted, they could have included a pistol for him, so you could re-enact the greatest superhero line ever delivered, as seen when the show did The Clone Sage (no, really): "That's right Peter: I'm you, and you're me, and this is a gun." Amazing!
The packaging is a graphical throwback. It's a box, like most Marvel Legends come in, rather than a Retro Collection blister card, but the logos on it are all taht disco-era sort of layered rainbow look. Far out and groovy, my man! The insert behind the toy is the same skyline scene seen on the back of the box and thus on the movie poster, a great way to display him.
After CBS's Amazing Spider-Man series was cancelled, we wouldn't see another live-action Spider-Man until... well, 1985, when Scott Leva, who worked for Marvel's character appearance program, was used in the photographic cover of Amazing Spider-Man #262. He's also the Spidey who appeared in the bloopers of the 2000 X-Men film (which might mean Earth-10005 is the same place James Cameron's hypothetical Spider-Man movie would have taken place, since Leva was allegedly the frontrunner for the starring role in that). But then we finally get to Tobey Maguire and the other Spiders-Men you think of. Stan Lee wasn't a fan of the series (he found Peter Parker too one-dimensional and the plots too boring), but it's undeniably earnest, and the effects are pretty high quality for 1977 TV - remember, its competition was The Incredible Hulk, not Star Wars. To call it "low rent" is to say Flash and Green Arrow are bad because they're not Prometheus. The Spider-Man movie and Amazing Spider-Man TV show haven't had an official release, but you can find them online super easily, if you want. And it's worth checking out a little bit, if only to see how far things have come.
-- 11/17/25
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