A Web of Hot and Cold: A Look Back at Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends / Michael French

Michael French

I’m always thinking about the past. Aside from still having my childhood possessions, my memories are vivid, and they go back a very long way. As a result I sometimes conduct what I’ve dubbed “memory forensics.” I try to organize my memories, learn when they happened and from there reconstruct a narrative of my life. The Internet has been immensely helpful in this regard.

My first memories are just images, moments in a hospital when I was 1 or 2 years old, holding my grandmother’s hand, things like that. But my first active memories around the age of three are all about superheroes.

Superman was the first Halloween costume I remember, and Spider-Man was the character that dominated my earliest memories of cartoons.

Before 1983, children’s television was regulated and cartoons could not have toy-based tie-ins, which is why, for many years, afternoon children’s programming was made up of reruns of older cartoons like Tom & Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby-Doo, Chilly Willy and the Flintstones, while Saturday Morning was the time we were able to see all of the new cartoons.

Where I lived in Nashville, my favorite afternoon cartoon was the ’60s Spider-Man television series, and then on Saturday Mornings, I got to see Spider-Man in a brand-new cartoon, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends!

Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends ran concurrently with a solo Spider-Man cartoon. The solo cartoon lasted only a year before being replaced by The Incredible Hulk, but Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends was extremely popular and a Saturday Morning staple until 1986, even though it only had 24 episodes. They just kept rerunning them!

The original idea was Spider-Man teaming up with Iceman and the Human Torch, but there was some kind of licensing issue, so they created a new character – Firestar. Spider-Man, Iceman and Firestar live in Aunt May’s house, pay her rent and help take care of her little dog, Ms. Lion.

Peter Parker’s loft apartment room is James-Bonded to transform into a tactical superhero headquarters with the flick of a trophy on the mantle, but he still has trouble scraping together enough cash for web fluid.

In each episode, the three heroes square off against a Marvel super villain.

In the first episode, our heroes must thwart Spidey’s nemesis, the Green Goblin. It’s obvious from this episode that the tone of the show is lighthearted, as all three of them must attend a Halloween party at their college. Peter goes as Spider-Man, only to discover every guy in the room is dressed like Spider-Man. A few minutes later, Firestar, costumed as Spider-Woman, uses her powers to ruin the makeup of a girl vying for Peter’s attention.

This kind of interplay is one of the unexpected tropes of this series. When not crime-fighting, Peter Parker and Bobby Drake constantly compete for the affections of Angelica Jones, better known as Firestar. There’s a strange running subplot of who’s dating who, unexpectedly emphasized romance and in some cases, girlfriend swapping.

In one episode, Parker goes to a party hosted by his creepy uni-browed professor and takes Mona Osborn with him. Iceman is dating Mona, but he’s totally ok with Peter Parker dating Mona at the same time. The two guys also admit to each other their feelings for Firestar, but Iceman says fire and ice don’t mix. That doesn’t stop him from being a third wheel without a date though.

Spider-Man is worried that if he’s rejected by Firestar, it will end their super team. Sometimes they get so preoccupied with each other’s love lives, they stop being superheroes. In ‘The Prison Plot’, Magneto takes hostages, but that doesn’t stop Spidey and Iceman from pestering Firestar about who she’s dating that evening. A guy named Sunfire earns Firestar’s affections thank to his similar powers, and they make out at the end of the episode in a shot as epic as a 1970s album cover.

Eventually after a series of various romances, Spider-Man and Firestar close the gap between them.

Aside from the preoccupation with superhero love lives, the series has a Saturday Morning charm to it, and it’s one of the first cartoons I remember while eating cereal on weekends, playing around the same time as Filmation’s Zorro and Blackstar. Amazing Friends is a transitional cartoon, stuck between the overly non-violent ’toons of the 1970s like Scooby-Doo and the more action-oriented cartoons that defined the 80s, but you can see in Amazing Friends the beginnings of more daring animated storytelling.

In ‘The Quest of the Red Skull’, they don’t hide from the Nazi underpinnings of the Red Skull character. His henchmen throw the Nazi salute, and the heroes encounter swastikas and even watch a film about Hitler’s rise to power.

Marvel took the opportunity to make the series a gateway moment for younger kids who might not read their comics. This resulted in a vast number of guest appearances by tons of heroes and villains from all over the Marvel Universe.

They help Thor fight Loki, they team up with Namor, Dr. Strange, Captain America and Shanna the She-Devil to thwart the Chameleon. They take on Magneto, and even assist the X-Men in defeating Juggernaut. Even lower-tier villains like Shocker, Beetle and Zzzax get screen time here.

This was also at the height of Dr. Doom’s heyday as Marvel’s most popular villain, probably because he evoked that Darth Vader feel we all loved back then. Dr. Doom took a prominent role in the intro sequence, despite only being in one episode. Dr. Doom would later headline the Secret Wars Mattel Toyline in 1984 before ultimately fading during the rise of X-Men popularity in the early-1990s, ultimately giving way to Magneto.

In a clumsy attempt to keep up with the times, the show introduces us to a villain called Video Man, created by Electro to trap Spider-Man and his friends inside a video game, which predicts the plot of Tron. Video Man is as lame as he sounds, and tragically one of the few villains in the show to make multiple appearances.

At one point they fight Dracula, but that was requirement of any show in the ’70s and early ’80s. You had to fight either Dracula or Bigfoot to be legit.

One of the oddest episodes is ‘Swarm’, in which a meteorite lands in a farm and turns all of the bees in the area into an aggressive, symbiotic lifeform that morphs any humans that get in its way into human-insect zombies. It’s also one of the most obnoxious episodes, as the villain and all of his infected minions just repeat the word “swarm” over and over again.

There are some great things about this series. In the later episodes the quality of the animation improves greatly and the writers dedicate episodes to the origins of each hero. They don’t shy away from the death of Uncle Ben emotionally, though they never actually say the word “died.” Iceman had his powers from birth and joined the X-Men, while Firestar’s origin plays out almost exactly like the plot of Carrie. Picked on in school, labeled a freak, and duped by her rival’s boyfriend, she exacts revenge on them for framing her which results in their expulsion (though she could have just as easily set them on fire).

Exactly how the Spider Friends came together is a stone the writers don’t leave unturned. In ‘Origin of the Spider Friends’, we see them pick their team name and watch Tony Stark set them up with their James Bond-style headquarters.

Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends is a cartoon made on the cusp of great change in children’s entertainment. Debuting in 1981, it was a series that didn’t have the luxury of a merchandising tie-in. Before 1983, cartoons were heavily regulated, and couldn’t have toys related to them, in addition to major restrictions on depictions of violence. Fortunately, Spider-Man had big name recognition so getting kids interested in Amazing Friends wasn’t a problem.

At the time, the only toy options were unrelated Mego Pocket Hero versions of Spider-Man and later on Mattel Secret Wars versions of Spider-Man, and Iceman if you could find him, but he was extremely rare. There was a single comic book, but there was never a dedicated Amazing Friends figure series.

Toy Biz repainted a Medusa figure in the 1990s to resemble Firestar, which is funny given that Mona Osborn costumed as Medusa to go with Angelica to the costume party in the very first Amazing Friends episode. It was a ToyFare Magazine exclusive, but you can’t put an in-scale group of Toy Biz figures together. Iceman is too short, Spider-Man is too big. It’s a mess, though probably appropriate given the animation errors in the series.

Hasbro and Toys ’R’ Us released an exclusive Amazing Friends figure three-pack in 2009 and later released Ms. Lion as a pack-in with a Mary Jane Watson figure.