Spider-Man
Spider-Man is a Toei Company-produced live-action television series in Japan that is only tangentially based on the Spider-Man character from Marvel Comics. The television program consisted of a total of 41 episodes, all of which were broadcast on Tokyo Channel 12 at the same time every Wednesday at 19:30 Japan Standard Time (JST) between the dates of May 17, 1978 and March 14, 1979. During the Toei Manga Matsuri film festival that took place on July 22, 1978, a theatrical episode was also screened. From March 5 through December24,2009, English subtitled versions of all 41 episodes and the movie were released on Marvel's official website. Even though the Toei adaptation of the character wore the same costume as his Marvel counterpart, the show's plot and the genesis of the character's abilities were completely different from what was shown in the source material. In this form of Spider-Man, he not only fought villains on his own, but he also controlled a massive robot known as Leopardon, which he would call upon to battle a scaled-up version of one of the show's antagonists. Toei would eventually incorporate the notion of huge robots into subsequent iterations of their own Super Sentai franchise.
Released: 1978-05-17