My groove senses are tingling…
Fans of the Toronto-produced Spiderman TV cartoon all agree that the background music - often dubbed “Spiderman Jazz” - was some of the coolest soundtrack cuts ever produced. Kliph Nesteroff has finally tracked down the original master tapes in the Keith Prouse Music (KPM) library and has produced an amazing podcast for WFMU that I have archived here. This is gonna take you back to those Saturday mornings from your childhood, only with incredible sound quality!
Notes from Kliph Nesteroff:
Just over a year ago I posted an article about the elusiveness of the background music from the late nineteen sixties Spiderman cartoon that was produced by Grantray-Lawrence and Krantz Films (and sometimes featured Ralph Bakshi as a director). It has gone through some serious revisions since then and you can read it here.
The program enjoys cultish adoration due primarily to its incredible music score. Anyway, the basis of that article was all about how awesome the music from the show is and how impossible it seems to be to track down the original masters. Well, that problem, I am happy to say, has been solved - at least in part. The second and third season music tracks come from the KPM music library in England, they still exist, and they sound great. I did a podcast today pitting the muddy sounds of the music as it sounded beneath the dialogue and sound effects of the original show against the crystal clear master copies of the background music. The podcast also features some reminiscence from the man who provided Spiderman’s voice in the series, Paul Soles.
Perhaps the most revelatory piece of information that the discovery of these KPM masters unearthed is the name of the tracks themselves. Since the music was recorded for generic purposes to be used by anybody for any project or production, the sounds do not possess Spiderman related titles. However, if you’ve ever had the frightening experience of watching the notorious episode Revolt in the Fifth Dimension, you likely felt that it was a psychedelic cartoon made by animators high on acid. Turns out that the title of the crazy music in that episode was, indeed, titled LSD!