48 Years Ago, CBS' Forgotten Spider-Man Show Debuted And Nearly Launched Two Epic Crossovers

Think you know Spider-Man on screen? From the 90s animated breakthrough to Spectacular and Ultimate, and with Spider-Man: Brand New Day set to mark his ninth big-screen swing, the real history might surprise you.

Spider- Man has been everywhere for decades, but there are still corners of his screen history people forget. Yes, you probably grew up with Spider-Man: The Animated Series in the 90s (and later The Spectacular Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man), and the live-action movies speak for themselves — with the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day lined up as the ninth entry since Sam Raimi kicked it off in 2002. But tucked in the vault is a short-lived CBS show that quietly turned 48 this week — and it spun off a surprisingly messy trail of TV movies.

The CBS show that tried to make Spidey work on a TV budget

The Amazing Spider-Man made its official series debut on CBS on April 5, 1978. That was after a movie- length pilot aired back in September 1977 — which CBS then shipped overseas for a theatrical run. When the weekly series started in April, it led with a two-parter, The Deadly Dust: Part 1 and Part 2, that Columbia later stitched into a feature-length release called Spider-Man Strikes Back and sold on VHS.

It did not last. CBS canceled the show in July 1979 after just 13 episodes. Still, the run generated two TV movies that found a second life on home video and, over time, ended up being better remembered than the series that created them. The whole experiment pretty much proved Spider-Man was a little too ambitious for late-70s TV money — but it also crawled so the movies could eventually swing.

Wait, four Spider-Man TV movies?

This part of the history is weirdly tangled, so here’s the simple version:

• The 1970s Japanese Spider-Man TV series spun off its own feature.
• CBS did a feature-length pilot for The Amazing Spider-Man in September 1977 that later played theatrically overseas.
• After the show began in April 1978, its two-part opener (The Deadly Dust) was recut and released on VHS as Spider-Man Strikes Back.
• The CBS series also yielded another TV movie cut from later episodes, and those two TV movies kept circulating on home video long after the show was gone.

Who was under the mask

Nicholas Hammond played Peter Parker/Spider-Man. J. Jonah Jameson was Robert F. Simon during the series, while David White handled the role in the pilot film. Chip Fields popped up at the Daily Bugle as secretary Rita Conway, and the show also featured folks like Ellen Bry and Michael Pataki. If you have never heard of half of this, you are not alone — a lot of modern fans don’t even know this CBS show exists.

The crossover that almost was

Back then, the only other Marvel character on TV was The Incredible Hulk, also on CBS, which ran five seasons and 80 episodes from 1977 to 1982. The stars wanted a team-up. Hammond, who was friends with Bill Bixby (Bruce Banner, with Lou Ferrigno doing the Hulk), once said they tried to make it happen:

"We talked about crossing the TV series, making a two-parter about Spider-Man and the Hulk joining forces," Hammond told THR. "But it never got past the stage of two actors talking at the end of the day over a beer."

Salt in the wound: Bixby later did get two Marvel TV-movie crossovers — The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) with Thor, and The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) with Daredevil. Both became cult favorites and helped crack the door for bigger live-action Marvel swings in the 90s.

Why it still matters now

Beyond the 48th anniversary, the show’s shadow keeps popping up in unexpected ways. Marvel and DC are each rolling out special one-shots putting Spider-Man and Superman on the same page. Writer Dan Slott even tried to take that nostalgia play all the way, pitching a story pairing Hammond’s TV Spider-Man with Christopher Reeve’s movie Superman — and promptly hit the rights wall. As he put it on Blue Sky:

"Ludicrous stuff I pitched for SPIDER-MAN/SUPERMAN #1 Part 2 of 2: 'Can I do 70's TV Live Action Nicholas Hammond Spider-Man meets Superman: The Movie Christopher Reeve Superman?'"

"And Marvel was like, 'You think that would be EASIER to get through? You KNOW how this works. What is wrong with you?!'"

So no, we didn’t get Spider-Man and the Hulk smashing crooks together on CBS, and we’re not getting Hammond meeting Reeve on the comics page either. But this odd little series — and the Frankenstein’d TV movies it spawned — still left fingerprints all over Spidey’s road to the big screen.