In 1995, producer Ralph Sall and MCA released an album called Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits. The album was made up of covers of the theme songs of various Saturday morning carton shows. For instance, Matthew Sweet covered Scooby Doo, Where Are You? Sponge covered Go Speed Racer Go. Liz Phair did a version of the Banana Splits theme song. In order to promote the album, MCA released a music video compilation on VHS tape. It was hosted by a young Drew Barrymore. You can still order a copy of it off of Amazon. It’ll only cost you around twenty dollars.
The Ramones were brought in to cover the theme song for the first Spiderman-Man cartoon show. The video, which was directed by Johnathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, features animated Ramones performing while an animated Spider-Man swings around the city. (If Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris sound familiar, that’s because they went on to direct feature films. They’re best-known film is probably still Little Miss Sunshine.) The Spider-Man theme song proves to be the perfect song to be covered by the Ramones, as they give an energetic performance that feels like it could have been written for any of the current MCU productions.
Interestingly enough, both Spider-Man and the Ramones were from the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens. There’s no evidence that any of them met Uncle Ben before this unfortunate demise. If they had met, Ben probably would have told them that with great audio equipment comes great responsibility. Ben then would have kicked everyone off of his lawn and gone inside to take a boomer nap.
The theme song for Spider-Man was written, in 1967, by Paul Francis Webster and Bob Harris. Before he wrote the Spider-Man theme, Webster won three Oscars for Best Original Song. Over the course of his career, he would be nominated a total of 16 times. Of his Oscar-nominated sons, I guess Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing is the best known but its popularity pales in comparison to the song he wrote for Spider-Man. Who doesn’t know that Spider-Man can do everything that a spider can?
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