Meet the Japanese Spider-Man

Marvel 616 is an eight-part documentary series on Disney+, pitched as an anthology of documentaries about Marvel. Having watched about half of them now I take from that pitch the idea they are essentially unrelated in any way.

This first one is about ‘Japanese Spider-Man’. The entire story takes place well before Marvel figured out how to do proper movies, well before mainstream television series and well before they were a global brand.

The status of Marvel at the time of this story was as little more than comic bookstore fodder. I don’t mean that in a condescending way – I mention it because the story this documentary explores would be unthinkable now.

Essentially it goes like this: entrepreneur goes to Japan, falls in love, realises he needs a business or he’ll starve and remembers he loves comics. As entrepreneurs do, he brings together Marvel and a local Japanese toy maker Toei and between them they agree to do business.

He then spends time and passion and basically all his remaining resources on pitching Spider-Man. Except this isn’t Peter Parker, this is an entirely homegrown hero with giant transforming robots, alien Japanese versions of Ming the Merciless and a host of other recognisable Japanese tropes. Except when they were done, in 1978/79, they weren’t cliché and weren’t tired but were completely innovative. And the show looks mad; Nazi crow people are the Big Bad’s mindless army and they’re all basically aliens fighting their war here on Earth.

What’s really important is that Japanese Spider-Man essentially existed in its own bubble with different origin stories, different enemies, powers and pretty much everything except the suit and the name.

The documentary follows a meandering path and it comes alive most when talking to either Shinji Tõdõ (the main actor) and Hirofumi Koga (the main stuntman). These two characters come across as being genuinely passionate about the show and remember clearly what it was like to film.

Otherwise the documentary doesn’t really have much to say – it doesn’t talk about the place of the show in Japanese culture, nor how it was received. It leaves unexamined the role of women in the show (let’s charitably say Japanese Spider-Man fails the Bechdel test comprehensively) and again doesn’t think through how it fit into the wider context in which it was developed.

Nor does it explore why the show was cancelled after one season – the entire event told to us with a single line about how Toei moved onto other shows.

We don’t even find out what happened the American who pitched the idea despite the fact he’s in the documentary.

There are weighty claims about how Japanese Spider-Man’s legacy includes Sentai and Transformers and a host of other tropes we now take for granted but no exploration of the evidence for this (i.e. timelines, creators moving onto those shows etc.).

I leave it not being entirely sure what the point of the episode was. It doesn’t work as a documentary and doesn’t offer us any actual insight into the nature of the show and the challenges faced in bringing it to screen.

However, it’s not a complete failure and that’s because Hirofumi and Shinji bring such charm to the screen with some, frankly terrifying, stories about the stunts they pulled off and the excitement they felt that I watched right to end and felt like this tiny episode in TV history was a curio whose existence is worth remembering.

My rating: 6 Spider-Men out of 10

Stewart Hotston