Spider-Man
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Our Review
The best superhero cartoon of the 1990s is not on the list people argue about, and that is mostly its own fault. Spider-Man: The Animated Series ran 65 episodes on Fox Kids from 1994, adapting the comics with an arc structure years before prestige TV claimed to invent it, and the jazz funk theme song (one verse, four syllables, forever) is one of the few cartoon themes worth humming.
Christopher Daniel Barnes plays Peter Parker as a nervous college kid who keeps losing roommates and girlfriends to the job, and the show lets the soap run: Flash Thompson is genuinely menacing, Mary Jane carries story, and Roscoe Lee Browne’s Kingpin is the best Wilson Fisk until Vincent D’Onofrio showed up. The Insidious Six, the X-Men crossover when the Fox X-Men cartoon guests over, and a multiverse finale that makes Spider-Verse look like homework, all animated on a TV schedule that should not have allowed it.
All 65 episodes stream on Disney+. If you have the theme song stuck in your head already, admit it and press play.
Our score: 8.5/10. The 90s superhero cartoon that aged best.
