Spider-Man’s memed cartoon shares a credo with Across the Spider-Verse

polygon.com:

Almost everyone knows the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon for two reasons: the “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can!” theme song and the “Spider-Man pointing” meme, an all-purpose image from the 19th episode that’s been used for everything from criticizing politicians to poking fun at professional athletes. It’s become so popular that a version of it appears in the ending of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and in a “break the internet” bit of shameless PR, Marvel recreated it with live-action Spidey performers Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland to plug Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Aside from that, the show is typically remembered for… being bad. To be fair, there are better Spider-Man cartoons out there: The low-budget animation of the 1967 show can be clunky, the character models often look warped, and every voice is played with Extreme Cartoon Energy. But there is far more to the show than earworms and meme notoriety, and the new Into the Spider-Verse sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, is the reminder. Like the two big-budget Spidey blockbusters, 1967 Spider-Man’sthree seasons show how a story told by the right team of artists can push a character as iconic as Spider-Man through a full spectrum of comic book fantasy.

Much of the first season of the show is deeply indebted to the work of Spider-Man’s original co-creator team, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Early-episode stories like “Where Crawls the Lizard,” “Never Step on a Scorpion,” and “Captured by J. Jonah Jameson” are almost direct retellings of Amazing Spider-Man issues 6, 20, and 25, respectively. Even when they stray from it, the first season is always keen to capture Lee’s bombastic plot beats and penchant for big emotional turns. When it comes