FEATURE: The Japanese Live-Action Spider-Man is More Than Just a Wacky Time Capsule
In the 1970s, Marvel was on a television licensing spree. It’d spent most of the ’60s becoming the tastemakers of the comic book industry and were eager to see the brand expand. In the United States, this would come most notably with The Incredible Hulk, a live-action incarnation that would turn bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bashful rival in Pumping Iron into a superhero icon.
There were also series like Spidey Super Stories on The Electric Company, The Amazing Spider-Man on CBS, Spider-Woman, The New Fantastic Four and even a bizarre crossover with Hanna-Barbera, Fred and Barney Meet the Thing.
Their efforts wouldn’t just be centralized in the United States. Toei, a Japanese production and distribution company, had also been making great strides in live-action television series and were involved in the production of now-classic series like Kamen Rider and Super Sentai. Their array of costumed heroes, characters that provided a stunning mix of martial arts-inspired action and tokusatsu (live-action with heavy practical effects) thrills made them a great option for the Marvel Comics roster. And who better to enter the fray than the character that has, since his inception in 1962, always served as Marvel’s flagship superhero, Spider-Man?
This was not the first Japanese adaptation of the web-slinger. In 1970, Monthly Shonen Magazine published a Spider-Man manga, one that initially began as a retelling of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s classic comics, and then increasingly diverged into original material. The series saturated itself in pop culture as an often surreal exercise in superhero derring-do… the Toei Spider-Man isn’t exactly comic book-accurate.
The series came out of a short-term cross licensing deal between Toei and Marvel, allowing them to use each other’s characters with fair creative liberty, and it’s by far the most popular of their dual efforts. In it, young Takuya Yamashiro derives his powers from the survivor of a downed spacecraft, Garia of the Planet Spider. This allows him to become Spider-Man and use a Spider-Bracelet, the source of many of his feats. He can even control the spaceship, which can turn into the giant robot Leopardon — perhaps the most notable deviation from the comics, as the American Spider-Man’s vehicles rarely got more complicated than the dune buggy-esque “Spider-Mobile.”
If you’re a tokusatsu fan, it’s clear Toei’s Spider-Man feels like a mish-mash of tropes from the genre. Encountering a ruined spacecraft that leads to you getting powers (powers that you hold on your wrist) reminds one of the origins of Ultraman. Yamashiro’s job when he’s not spider-manning around is, at first, that of a motocross racer, bringing to mind the motorcycle elements of Kamen Rider — though there was also a burgeoning Japanese youth subculture built around motorcycles during this time period, so they were everywhere. And Leopardon, the giant robot Spider-Man uses to take on foes when they get similarly gigantic, seems right out of Super Sentai.
Leopardon actually predates the appearance of a giant robot in the Sentai franchise, an example of Spider-Man’s popularity influencing what would become a staple of its genre. And though its inclusion in the show has become perhaps the most well-known differentiation from the original comics, its role diminishes as the series goes on. The robot suit suffered major wear and tear and was allegedly stolen, forcing Spider-Man‘s producers to reduce Leopardon’s later appearances to whatever they could mine from stock footage.
Spider-Man’s motivation stays the same here… sort of. Yamashiro’s father dies early on, giving him the impetus to fight crime and Professor Monster’s seemingly endless parade of bad guys, but without all of the “With great power comes great responsibility” themes tied to Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. Despite what a few out-of-context GIFs in 2023 might show you, Yamashiro makes for a pretty likable Spider-Man.
Actor Shinji Todo is a veteran tokusatsu performer and would later take on major roles in series like Denshi Sentai Denziman and Super-Robot Metalder. As Yamashiro/Spider-Man, you can see him working through a lot of the spider-like poses that, at that point, were extremely new in live-action. In fact, when one looks at similar actions done by blockbuster Spidey actors like Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland, their moves look way more akin to Shinji Todo than anything in the live-action U.S. Spider-Man series running at around the same time. On a side note, Todo’s constant ow’s and grunts when getting beaten up by a villain are very reminiscent of Tobey Maguire’s take. The most underrated key to any good Spider-Man performance is knowing how to get your butt kicked.
According to the Marvel’s 616 documentary series (formerly on Disney+), despite being generally a good time, Marvel higher-ups were less than impressed. Aside from the suit, the entire idea of Spider-Man had mostly been overhauled. Even the character’s personality is changed — Yamashiro is much more confident than Peter Parker’s depressed everyman. Stan Lee loved it. At that point in his career, Lee had all but departed from his creative work and instead spent much of his time as Marvel’s public face, taking his personality from the famed Stan’s Soapbox in the comic pages and becoming Marvel’s ultimate hypeman.
Lee found the more fantastical take on Spider-Man to be right up his alley, allowing Toei’s version to last for as long as it did. It served as a marked contrast from the TV projects in the U.S., ones that typically saw their heroes in everyday settings tackling foes that didn’t exactly have the pedigree of the Green Goblin or Doctor Octopus. For The Incredible Hulk, this worked in its favor, turning its titular goliath into a righter of the wrongs of whatever suburban scenario he happened to wander into that episode. For Spider-Man, it was less than optimal — The Amazing Spider-Man on CBS would only last 13 episodes.
Toei’s Spider-Man, on the other hand, lasted 41, along with a short “movie” helmed by frequent series director Koichi Takemoto, a man who eventually had installments of Kamen Rider, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, Battle Fever J and Denshi Sentai Denziman under his belt. In a way, it was the then-pinnacle of U.S. comic book creators trying to get live-action Japanese versions of their characters made: the Adam West Batman series had been a huge hit in Japan and even ignited the delightful Bat-Manga by the late Jiro Kuwata. For a little while, the creators of the show had courted the studio Toho in trying to concoct a way for Adam West and Burt Ward to wrassle with Godzilla, but no agreement for the Caped Crusader vs the King of the Monsters could ever be reached.
The legacy of Toei’s Spider-Man has only grown since, with Yamashiro’s Spidey eventually making his way into the storylines of Marvel comics and becoming one of the legion of Spider-folk in the eagerly awaited Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Long considered a kind of cultural oddity, that cameo allows for further proof that, regardless of whether they have a giant robot or not, all Spider-Men are worthy.
Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter! His book, Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught A Generation To Catch Them All, is available wherever books are sold.
