The late 70's saw an influx of television series based upon the adventures of heroes and superheroes. Where the early 70's saw hour after hour taken up with private investigators, the late 70's took us to outer space in the future with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and his robot companion Twiki ("Bidi Bidi Bidi"), showed us the adventures of Wonder Woman, making Linda Carter a household name, and gave us the weekly adventures of the Incredible Hulk, producing a memorable line ("You wouldn't like me when I'm angry") and forever fusing the image of Lou Ferrigno in green body paint and a fright wig into our collective consciousness. But amazingly during this time, a famous hero was brought to the small screen in a completely forgettable hour adventure show - the amazing Spider-man.
The show began as a pilot in 1977 starring Nicholas Hammond as Peter Parker. True to the comics origins, Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained amazing abilities, including the ability to climb walls and increased strength. Unfortunately, from there the comics and the television series begin to diverge. While the comics (and the later movie) tell of how Peter lost his beloved uncle due in some aspect to his own actions, the television series just had him slap on the spandex and begin climbing walls in what can only be charitably referred to as questionable special effects.
The original pilot was met with a certain amount of success so the following year an hour drama starring Hammond. The only other two characters that made the leap from the four colors to the small screen were Parker's Aunt May and his boss J. Jonah Jameson. The rest of the cast was made up of your typical 1970's cast, two co-workers, one white and one black.
The stories didn't involve super-villains and such, but instead, people building atomic bombs, mind control chemicals, kidnappings, etc. - all the usual 70's TV fodder. The lack of real action, the sub-standard special effects, and the paper thin plots soon had the minimal viewership fleeing. Spiderman only saw a couple of seasons and soon was no more.
My least-favorite memory of the series was the eye pieces in the webcrawler's outfit. For as long as anyone can remember, the eye holes in Spider-man's mask were covered with a material that kept people from seeing his eyes, but allowed him to see out. Unfortunately, despite breakthroughs in aviator's glasses by the 70's, the costume designer for Spider-man decided to go with something that resembled pieces of a pasta colander to cover the eyeholes. Though not a huge issue, I remember even back then dismissing the whole show if they couldn't do better than that.
In later days, Spider-Man/Peter Parker has been portrayed on film by a variety of actors; indeed, there have been three separate movie franchises that showcase the character. The first, starring Tobey Maguire, had three movies: Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007). The second, starring Andrew Garfield, had two movies: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). The third franchise, which is incorporated into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, has thus far included Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), and stars Tom Holland as Spider-Man. Holland also appeared in these other MCU films: Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).