About

60's Spider-Man, also known as "Retro Spider-Man", refers to an image macro series based on still shots from the original Spider-Man cartoon series, typically featuring an absurd internal monologue that correspond with the actions depicted in the images.

Origin

The Show

The base still shots are from a Spider-Man animated television series that ran from September 9th, 1967 to June 14th, 1970. It was jointly produced in Canada (for voice talent) and the United States (for animation) and was the first animated adaptation of the Spider-Man comic book series, created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko.

Sometimes referred to as "Spider-Man '67," the series was notorious for its bad art and often over-the-top script as early as 2004.^[7] The show reached a newfound audience in 2009 after Marvel officially began streaming the episodes via its website on April 2nd, 2009.^[8] The episodes were subsequently reviewed on geek culture blogs like Topless Robot^[9] and Daily Pop^[10].

The Image Macro

The image macro originated on 4chan some time in 2009 after users of the board /co/ (cartoon) began threads inviting fellow users to watch original episodes of the show together via streaming services. The overuse of stock animation like images of Spider-Man swinging across skylines was representative of the show's low-budget production, leading to plenty of funny, awkward or odd moments throughout the series.

After the viewing of each episode, users would post screenshots in the thread with summaries of episode highlights. One of the earliest instances of such threads on 4chan dates back to July 19th, 2009^[5] titled "Spider-man on his day off." The discussion thread contained 153 posts featuring images of Spider-Man with humorous titles that are very similar to the overlaid text found in the image macros like LOLcat. As time went on, these screenshots were saved for further circulation and evolved into reaction faces or captioned image macros.

Spread

60's Spider-Man's popularity grew on blog sites such as Tumblr over the next year. One of the earliest Tumblrs to organize live streams of the original show was Wallopin Websnappers^[4], launched by a user named Hobbo who started the blog in November 2010^[6] as a place to organize livestream viewings and collect the 700 screencaps he had collected from the show.

Tumblr blogs exclusively dedicated to collecting captioned instances of 60s Spider-Man did not appear until February 1st, 2011, with the creation of You're a horrible man, Spiderman Brown.^[3] More single-topic Tumblrs were started later that year^[1][2], in addition to an active Tumblr tag.^[12]

Between April and July of 2011, compilations of captioned Spider-Man images were also shared on Reddit^[11], FunnyJunk^[12], Uproxx^[13], humor blog Pleated Jeans^[14], #1 Meme^[15], and geek culture blog The Uniblog.^[16] Several generators^[17] exist on MemeGenerator with different still images from the series.

Notable Examples

Related Memes

Masturbating Spider-Man

Masturbating Spider-Man is a series of image macros of an edited screenshot taken from the 60's Spider-Man series, showing Spider-Man sitting on a desk. Like other advice animals like Bear Grylls, the bottom caption normally remains consistent, being "And I'm Just Sitting Here Masturbating" the one featured on most of the macros.

This is Now A Spiderman Thread

This is Now a Spiderman Thread refers to a method of threadjacking or shitposting by posting an image macro with the caption that declares the derailment from the original post or to start a new thread based on the specific subject. While the practice was originally focused on posting 60’s Spider-Man images, it later covered other subjects, spawning the "snowclone" known as “This is now a X thread”.

Search Interest

Search traffic for "spiderman meme" picked up in January 2011 and has been climbing steadily since.

External References