The Amazing Spider-Man

In September 1977, CBS brought Stan Lee’s Spider-Man to television with a two-hour movie, which was then extended as a series entitled The Amazing Spider-Man.

Peter Parker was played by Australian actor Nicholas Hammond, who had previously played the young Friedrich von Trapp in The Sound of Music and broken Marcia’s nose on an episode of The Brady Bunch.

Villains from the Spider-Man comics, such as the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, were nowhere to be found, replaced by more grounded, realistic foes such as mind-controlling New Age gurus, cultists and Latin American politicians.

Spidey’s beloved Mary Jane Watson was also nixed in favor of a reporter love interest named Julie Masters.

Filmed mostly in Los Angeles (an unconvincing attempt to pass for Manhattan), the series focused on Peter Parker’s personal struggles and attempts to solve crimes. When Parker did suit up as the webslinger, he was played by stuntman Fred Waugh, who bravely leapt, flipped and scaled buildings without the benefit of modern CGI.

Waugh also pulled photography duties, capturing first-person footage of stunts with a head-mounted “camera-hat.”

The series ran for 13 sporadically aired episodes before being canceled in 1979 amid network executive concerns that CBS was airing too many superhero shows.

While the show’s production values and special effects have aged rather poorly, the theme song is as irresistibly funky as ever.