Spiderman’s True Identity: Robin of Loxley

On the latest episode of Geeks and Beats, you may have heard both men talking about Rocket Robin Hood and the 60’s animated version of Spider-Man. And I completely understand where Alan is coming from because even as a child in the early 80’s, if you didn’t have cable, these two shows were staples of your Saturday morning cartoon line up.

Little did many of us know, that they were pretty much the same show.

Okay that’s exaggerating a bit but here’s the scoop. Rocket Robin Hood was a cartoon that ran for three seasons (1966 to 1969) made by a company called Krantz Films. Krantz would later take up producing the Spider-Man cartoon in it’s second season as it’s original studio, Grantray-Lawrence Animation had gone bankrupt. In order to keep the budgets down, Krantz Films would drastically reduce the amount of animation used in Spider-Man to the point where they reused whole episodes of Rocket Robin Hood and even re-use previous episodes of Spider-Man.

The Spider-Man episodes of “Phantom from the Depths of Time” and “Revolt in the Fifth Dimension” are pretty much the Rocket Robin Hood episodes “From Menace to Menace” and “Dementia 5” with Robin Hood and his Merry Men swapped out for Spidey. The even kept most of the same voice tracks (with the exception of Spidey). It probably helped that many of the voice actors on Rocket Robin Hood, also worked on Spider-Man.

If that weren’t cheaping out enough, two episodes from the first season of Spider-Man, one featuring th Vulture as the main villain and another episode featuring The Rhino were just edited together as one episode in a later season episode.

The diseases I could cure without all this trivia in my head.

Liked it? Take a second to support Brent Chittenden on Patreon!