WFMU's Beware of the Blog completed some of my favorite detective-work a few years ago regarding Ralph Bakshi's incredible, psychedelic kid's cartoon, SPIDERMAN '67. Granted, from what I understand, Bakshi didn't really take over till second season, '68, but that's when the show really became noteworthy, nightmarish, with the endlessly repetitive re-use of action animations (for a newer generation, think of Prince Adam's overly-regular transformation sequence into He-Man in MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE that saved those animators a ton of time and money every episode)...both economic AND nigh-hypnotic, especially to the impressionable 5-year-old mind. When I caught some in my mid-twenties on a vacation through Europe (over-dubbed in Italian no less), I think my jaw literally dropped in reaction to the surreality of Bakshi's cheap, weird, fantastic vision against a visual backdrop of Brakhage paint washes ("Now for children!") and an aural backdrop of...well, read below.
One of the best aspects of SPIDERMAN was its unbelievably groovy music, and finally a few years ago someone via WFMU has unearthed the source material for what would have otherwise remained essentially lost stock jams...stuff from a commercial-music-library-for-rent utilized by on-the-cheap movie and TV producers. This material brought a whole new dimension to the images cranked out of Bakshi's factory, somehow alchemically transforming what might have otherwise been dingy and tedious into fully realized, bizarre material...it's a great example of music and image butressing each other to sublimate beyond their own respective shortcomings: mediocrity is successfully abandoned, skipping the stage of mere decency to arrive straight to greatness. Good job!
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