Marvel now streaming 2 episodes of ’70s Japanese Spider-Man live action show

By Rob Dean | January 12, 2015 | 8:33pm

Aux Features TV

As part of its Spider-Verse event going on in comics now, Spider-Man is recruiting different versions of Spider-Men (and Spider-Women) from different dimensions to help battle a threat the superhero can’t face alone. (It makes a bit more sense in context.) In the recent Amazing Spider-Man #12, for instance, Spider-Man recruits Takuya Yamashiro and a giant robot to help in his quest. Many people were probably confused as to who this new guy was and why he had a huge mech called Leopardon to battle evil-doers. Yamashiro was the main character from the ’70s Japanese live-action show, in which Spider-Man would summon his gigantic robot counterpart to take on various villains of the week. Humongous Leopardon was called in to fight monsters once they became equally giant and is a precursor to the Zords of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and other robot avatars in the super sentai genre. Leopardon also made a guest appearance towards the tail-end of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One book as the protagonist’s choice for his own giant robot fighting machine,

As part of educating its readers about the origins of these characters, Marvel posted a short bio online written by current Spider-Man writer Dan Slott and is also hosting two episodes of the hard-to-find show. These have been making their way around conventions on bootleg VHS and DVDs for years, and occasionally pop up on YouTube. But now those interested can enjoy the show in much better detail (for the ’70s) along with properly subtitled dialogue of “SupaidaMan” and his robot of destruction. The two episodes are below, with the top one being the first ever episode entitled “The Time of Revenge Has Come! Beat Down Iron Cross Group!”