Marvel Animation Could Learn a Lot From the Weird Spider-Man Unlimited

In The Late Great, Primetimer staffers and contributors revisit shows that were cut short but still cast a long shadow over the TV landscape.

X-Men '97 is a return to form for Marvel Animation, reverential to the comics from which it pulls its material and even more so to X-Men: The Animated Series, its decades-old predecessor. This devotion to what came before has laid a solid foundation for Marvel to continue building and expanding its animation wing, but if it's serious about creating a new generation of die-hard fans in the years to come instead of scratching present-day itches, the House of Ideas might consider two things: fully embracing its Saturday morning roots and taking a chance on a weird project every once in a while. And the weirder, the better. 

Take Spider-Man Unlimited, Saban Entertainment's short-lived 1999 cartoon for Fox Kids that flung Peter Parker (Rino Romano) far from his friendly New York City neighborhood to strange new terrain: a Counter-Earth ruled by a race of animal-human hybrids called Bestials created by Marvel's version of Dr. Moreau, the High Evolutionary (Richard Newman). (Back then, he was a comic villain deep cut; today, Marvel Movie-Heads know him from Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.) It was a bold take for a character who had already seen success in animation, then most recently with the popular Spider-Man: The Animated Series. However, this boldness eventually proved too risky for Fox Kids; after a rowdy 13-episode debut season, Unlimited was done. 

Spider-Man Unlimited represented the elasticity of Marvel's nimble Web-Head a generation before Spider-Man was spun into a multiverse of Wall-Crawlers in the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. In 1999, Unlimited showed audiences how Peter Parker's sense of power and responsibility transcended any concept, regardless of how out-there and unexpected his surroundings might be.
 
Its origins began with the untimely cancellation of Spider-Man: TAS in 1998, whose final episode saw Peter Parker (Christopher Daniel Barnes) floating through the multiverse alongside Madame Web (Joan Lee, wife of Stan), a thread too conspicuous to leave dangling and too convoluted to untangle in a follow-up series. Yet, Spidey's future on the small screen remained up in the air, so it fell to producer Avi Arad, the godfather of Spidey multimedia as we know it today (for better or worse), to develop a new Spider-series with animation jack-of-all-trades Will Meugniot (Captain Planet and X-Men, among others). 

Sony Pictures' cinematic vision for Spider-Man, recently freed from a decades-long rights dispute, meant that Meugniot's original idea — a faithful adaptation of the first 26 issues of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's The Amazing Spider-Man — was kaput. Spider-Man 2099 (featuring Marvel's future Spidey, Miguel O'Hara) was briefly considered for the series but was tossed out due to the success of Warner Bros. Animation's Batman Beyond. Fox Kids knew it wanted a new Spidey cartoon, but how to pull it off was the trick — if Meugniot couldn't adapt storylines from the comics and the network didn't want to repeat Beyond, what was a Spider-Man to do?

The answer that came from this chaotic uncertainty is almost elegant in retrospect. Meugniot, alongside head writer Michael Reaves (Batman: The Animated Series), upended the Marvel toy box and kitbashed its contents into a new reality for Spider-Man to play in — somewhere with the scope, if not the drama, of Disney's Gargoyles (a series for which Reaves wrote extensively) and the funkier anthropomorphic aspects of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all set to the recognizably hard-luck rhythms of the amazing Spider-Man. After that, their job was simple; all they needed to do was fill it with characters that would send kids running for the comic spinner racks nearest to their TV sets. 

This is where Spider-Man Unlimited took its wildest swings. On Counter-Earth, obscure Marvel characters were set loose, which lent the series a distinctive look from the more typical Spider-Man adventures that preceded it. Among its offbeat riffs on popular characters came a parade of Stan Lee/Jack Kirby-created second-stringers: of course, there were The Beastials (The Knights of Wundagore, or "New Men" in the comics) and the High Evolutionary, but Unlimited also managed to work in X-51 (Dale Wilson), a Kirby-created machine sentry who served the Evolutionary until he achieved sentience in Episode 5, "Steel Cold Heart." It's clear X-51 was meant for bigger things in future seasons, given his place among the rebels who defied the Beastials deep within the ghettos of Counter-Earth's New York, referred to glumly by the locals as "The Basement."

Leading this resistance was John Jameson (John Payne), the astronaut son of Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah, whose crash on Counter-Earth first prompted Spider-Man's cosmic trip. In the premiere episode "Worlds Apart," Spidey finds two symbiotic stowaways on John's space shuttle, Venom (Brian Drummond) and Carnage (Michael Donovan), the only villains in Unlimited who distract from the central action between the human resistance and the Beastials. Aside from the surprisingly affecting 11th episode, "One Is the Loneliest Number," where Parker reunites Venom with his human host despite their mutual animosity, these monster symbiotes serve little purpose beyond capitalizing on their immense popularity. (This exploitation of Venom and Carnage came at a cost to Unlimited’s memory; their squidgy redesigns are the show’s most controversial aspects.)

Along with its premise, Unlimited took creative license with Spider-Man without completely breaking the mold. Peter is still devoted to the Earth-bound Mary Jane Watson (Jennifer Hale), which keeps him from exploring a relationship with his landlord, Naoko Yamada-Jones (Akiko Morison), a brilliant (and single) doctor who lives with her son, Shane (Rhys Huber). Yet the longer Peter stays on Counter-Earth, the closer he becomes to Naoko and Shane, a family dynamic that matures the perpetually youthful Parker, an interesting development to find in a kids’ cartoon. Here, Peter takes responsibility not only for Shane and Naoko's safety but also for their happiness.

Where's Shane's father? That's something Unlimited plays with, too. Naoko often argues over the phone with her ex-husband, Hector, about Peter staying at their home. Despite Hector only being seen in flashbacks, Meugniot and Reaves complicate this love triangle with an additional chaotic element: Counter-Earth's mysterious version of the Green Goblin (also voiced by Romano), shown to have romantic feelings for Naoko and whose kooky, verdantly neon get-up looks to have been cobbled together by a clever tinkerer, as Hector is said to be. Was this green Goblin secretly Hector in disguise? Future seasons might have told.

Creating a show that can be remembered years, even decades later, demands more than just soapy love triangles and wild costume designs, something Meugniot and Reaves understood intrinsically. "The undertone of the series is much more than villains trying to take over the world or get rich," Meugniot told Wizard Magazine in October 1999. "This is about oppression and classes and racism. It's dealing with more sophisticated themes in addition to good old-fashioned superheroes and supervillains. It's [going] to come across as a very mature show, visually and narratively." Unlimited existed just as kids' cartoons were maturing; one can only imagine the depths that might have been explored had Peter Parker's Counter-Earth adventures been developed today.

Yes, Spider-Man Unlimited remains a 1999 artifact. Those themes Meugniot discussed were buried under the deep colors and shadows that were very much of the time (the cel animation filled every frame with as much black paint as possible, handy whenever Spider-Man put his nanobot suit on stealth mode), yet they thrived because of them. Spider-Man Unlimited might have been a gonzo action cartoon with talking animals, but it kept Peter Parker’s core edict — with great power, there must also come great responsibility — at its core. On Counter-Earth, Peter found a common cause with alien strangers; together, they learned forgiveness is always the best course, even against their worst enemies. A true Spidey tale, through and through.

Watching Spider-Man Unlimited now, it still has lessons to teach. As good as X-Men '97 is — and there's no question it's an idyllic project for the present state of the superhero landscape — it's a safe play. Risks are rarely ideal for big studios, especially one that's currently on its hind heels like Marvel Studios. And sometimes, risk ends with cancellation, catastrophe, or both. But it's the weirder, more offbeat projects, the kind Marvel used to make in the relatively freewheeling days of network television, that foster the most devoted fans. Longevity for the brand is no bad thing. But if Marvel's next battery of superhero trifles is to be remembered for more than just existing, its path ahead is simple: go off-road.

Jarrod Jones is a freelance writer currently settled in Chicago. He reads lots (and lots) of comics and, as a result, is kind of a dunderhead.