‘The Spectacular Spider-Man’ Lead Says Disney Actively Worked Against The Series After Buying Marvel: “They Made It Hard To Get An Audience”
While fans of The Spectacular Spider-Man have long lamented the fact that the absolutely incredible animated series was brought to an undeserving and premature end, they can now take at least a little bit of solace in the fact that, per series’ lead voice actor Josh Keaton himself, its cancellation had nothing to do with its ratings and everything to do with Disney’s corporate greed.
Keaton, who in addition to the series’ incarnation version of Peter Parker has also performed such notable roles as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 3, and Hercules in Disney’s animated series of the same name, offered his insight into The Spectacular Spider-Man‘s final fate during a recent appearance on the Toon’d In! with Jim Cummings podcast, as hosted by the eponymous voice actor.
Looking back on his time behind the mask, Keaton was at one point asked by the show’s producer, Chris Judge (not to be confused with the God of War voice actor of the same name), as to “How many years did that [show] last?”, to which he recalled, “I mean, we got cut short, because that was that was right around the time that Disney was going to buy Marvel.”
“So, we did a season, it was critically acclaimed, it was getting great ratings,” said the voice behind Marvel Rivals‘ multiverse-hopping Iron Man. “And then we were doing Season 2, and while we were recording Season 2, that was when Disney bought Marvel. And they basically never cancelled us and never picked us up – they just never said anything.”
In adding insult to injury, Keaton then revealed that at one point, “They told us, you know, ‘You’re going to be headlining our new network Disney XD!’ But then when they put us on Disney XD, they showed the episodes out of order, they kept changing the times that it was going to air, they never really did any promotion. They made it hard to get an audience.”
“Also we went from being on network TV, on Kids WB!, to a network that really at the time was only on, like, Dish Network,” he told his hosts. “If you didn’t have dish network you didn’t have disney xd. It was really obscure, so very obscure.”
Drawing his thoughts on The Spectacular Spider-Man to a close, Keaton took a moment to address the circumstances surrounding a possible series revival – though sadly, rather than a glimmer of hope, the voice actor could only admit that such a return for Petey and his amazing friends was unlikely due to Disney’s unwillingness to put the fans first and share even a small portion of the potential profit pie with Sony.
“People are always asking me you know could it ever come back,” said the Spider-Man voice actor to the man who, interestingly enough, provided the voice of Shocker in 1994’s Spider-Man: The Aniamted Series, “The thing is is that Disney now owns the rights to the character of Spider-Man for TV, but Sony still owns the rights to the show The Spectacular Spider-Man. So if Disney wanted to continue making it, they would have to basically pay Sony to license the show so they could keep making it. Why would they do that? They’re like ‘We can just make our own show.’ [which they ultimately did in the form of 2012’s Drake Bell-led Ultimate Spider-Man]”
From there asked by Judge, “They never released [Spectacular Spider-Man] on Disney Plus either, right?”, Keaton affirmed, “They briefly did right when Across The Spider-Verse [which itself features a spoken cameo from his version of the wall-crawler] was going to come out. They had it on there.” – but not without also speculating, “I think that the reason they even put it on there is that Netflix put it on there.”
His theory aside, Keaton closed out his time on the topic by reflecting on the series’ subsequent performance with viewers.
“Sony put it on Netflix, and this show that had been absent from media for all these years was, like, trending number one on Netflix,” he said. “It did amazing on Netflix. It brought a whole new generation of kids into The Spectacular Spider-Man.”
“And then when that happened, Disney put it on Disney XD, but they still had the season finale and another thing out of order,” concluded Keaton. “They still never fixed it, and so they had it on there out of order. And then once the movie was out of theaters, it disappeared again. It’s been Parker luck one time, one thing after the other.”
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