The History Of Live-Action Spider-Man Actors That Time (And The Spider-Verse) Forgot
It's easy to forget, what with all the recent hype about it, but as far as movies are concerned the concept of a "multiverse" is anything but new. Gwyneth Paltrow was starring in rom-coms about alternate realities 25 years ago, with the groundbreaking "Sliding Doors," and just a few years later Jet Li tried to kill every other version of himself across alternate realities in the action-thriller "The One."
But a few things have certainly changed. Audiences seem to grasp the concept pretty clearly now — making weird and complex films that would have probably struggled to find mainstream acceptance years ago into massive Oscar-winning crossover hits — and so do motion picture studios. Thanks to multiverses, studios can now create movies and shows where every iteration of their intellectual property can exist simultaneously, making the nostalgic seem new and the fan service seem poignant.
And for whatever reason, the focal point of these multiverse blockbusters is usually Spider-Man. There are three (soon to be four) big-budget superhero movies about different versions of Spider-Man meeting each other, and so far they're all genuinely great motion pictures. They use the multiverse concept to give introduce new variations on a character we love, resurrect and provide long-denied closure to versions we already knew, and — in the classiest way possible — exploit that IP, so every iteration of the character gets to come back, and say "Hi" to their pre-existing audience while also finding a brand new generation of fans.
Well, almost every iteration. For whatever reason, some of the earliest live-action versions of Spider-Man don't seem to be making the cut.
Primetime Spider-Man, the forgotten wallcrawler
The popularity of live-action superheroes isn't new. They used to be in movie theaters all the time in the golden age of Hollywood, mostly in serialized stories. That's how we met the first live-action versions of Batman, Superman, Captain America, and Captain Marvel (aka Shazam), to name a few. There was a mini-renaissance in the 1960s, thanks to the popularity of the satirical "Batman" TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. And then, in the 1970s, primetime television was briefly dominated by live-action versions of "Wonder Woman" and "The Incredible Hulk."
Doctor Strange got his own (failed) TV pilot in 1978, and Captain America starred in two TV movies in 1979, but a live-action version of "The Amazing Spider-Man" actually got some traction. After starring in a backdoor pilot (i.e. an episode of television that can be repurposed as a standalone movie if it doesn't go to series), Spider-Man appeared in an additional 12 episodes across two truncated seasons. Nicholas Hammond, who had co-starred in "The Sound of Music," played Peter Parker as a relatively mature college student. He was a science nerd, he sold pictures of Spider-Man to The Daily Bugle for money, and he had an elderly Aunt May.
"The Amazing Spider-Man" pilot was released as a feature film in international markets, along with films based on its two-part episodes, called "Spider-Man Strikes Back" and "Spider-Man: The Dragon's Challenge." It's not a bad show, really, although it's frustrating that Spidey's enormous (and not always expensive) rogue's gallery never appeared in the series. It's not currently available on home video or streaming services, and Hammond — still working, and having recently appeared in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" — somehow didn't have a cameo in "No Way Home" (even though he was hoping for an invite) and doesn't seem to be in the "Spider-Verse" yet.
Turkish Spider-Man, the original 'Clone Wars'
The live-action Japanese Spider-Man TV series also aired in the late 1970s, with a run of 41 episodes and a tie-in movie. But while this version of the character — who also fought giant monsters with a mecha called Leopardon —may not have appeared in "Spider-Man: No Way Home," we have been assured that he'll show up in "Beyond the Spider-Verse" so we won't take them to task for not putting him center stage yet.
We are, however, still mad that the first live-action "Spider-Man" to ever appear in a motion picture — which also debuted overseas — hasn't made the cut. (Or, if he's in those huge "Spider-Verse" crowd scenes somewhere, he's way off in the background and obviously needs more screen time.) Sure, it's not an "official" movie, but it's one of the greatest cult superhero films ever produced: "3 Dev Adam," aka "Three Giant Men," in which Captain America and the Mexican superhero wrestler El Santo team up to fight Spider-Man, who is a supervillain.
And not just any supervillain. This version of Spider-Man, played by the late Tevfik Şen ("Yor: The Hunter from the Future"), is up to the usual criminal shenanigans — counterfeiting money, stealing artifacts, etc. — but he also kills a lot of people in "3 Dev Adam." At one point he even shoves a woman's face into a boat propeller. But, in a plot point that somehow predicted the very weird future of the Spidey franchise, this version of Spider-Man also has a lot of clones. So we gotta give him credit.
It may be hard for the "Spider-Verse" films to find a place for the Turkish Spider-Man since so far all those Spider-Men have been heroes, and since Tevfik Şen is no longer with us, but come on ... there's gotta be a place for the first live-action feature film Spider-Man somewhere in the "Spider-Verse," doesn't there?