⭐
Created by: Greg Weisman, a god among men, and Victor Cook
I was thinking of this show after reviewing Daredevil Season 1 and was reminded how genuinely good this show was! I just looked it up, and there are seven Spider-Man shows available on Disney+ now, but none of them have the writing and action that made this show. In honesty, I'm writing this review because if you've ever wanted to read the actual Spider-Man comics and never had the time, this is the best distillation of the classics you'll ever get. It combines the high school plot-lines of the original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko stories with the sensibilities of the movies. With the extended run-time of TV, it ends up feeling like the movies that we never got to see, and does a great job at fleshing out every member of Spider-Man's cast and making a great story out of it.
The fact that it's animated helps a lot. There's an energy and creativity to the fight scenes that simply can't be matched by most TV's usual budget, and there are all sorts of death-defying spider-stunts that can't really be filmed in live-action. The fact that each season is thirteen twenty-three minute episodes (not unlike Avatar's twenty-three minute episodes) means it's long enough to fit lots of plots, but never so long that they're invoking filler. It's also surprisingly continuity-heavy, with the events of episode two affecting episode three and so on. And that continues as the show goes on, which makes starting at the beginning especially rewarding.
It also avoids the melodrama of most super-shows, never hitting the boring drama of little kid shows ("who stole my diorama!??") but also avoiding the soap opera of CW shows ("my girlfriend is actually my sister???"). Everyone reacts, but there's not enough runtime that they need to drag it out for six episodes. The end result is one of the more reasonable high school ensembles on TV, where sometimes they make dumb decisions, but ones expected for people their age.
It's not for the littlest kids - I'd recommend it to seven year olds and up - but once you get past that, it's good for everyone. Like I've said, its greatest strength isn't in its ability to entertain one audience, its strength is that it can entertain people of all ages.
So far as watching it, you can buy a few episodes on Amazon or YouTube to see if you like it, and from there you can buy a whole season for $22. It's a notable investment (sadly, it's not available for free anywhere), but if your kids like Avatar or any of the Spider-Man movies or comics, they're probably gonna like this. Recommend
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