FLASHBACK
SEPTEMBER 1977
FLASHBACK
SFX’s time machine hurls us back to a random month once again
WORDS: NICK SETCHFIELD
Stuntman Fred Waugh’s son Scott directed Expend4bles.
CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY
Hammond It Up
14 SEPTEMBER 1977
Spider-Man was no stranger to the small screen. In the ’60s, he had fronted a cartoon – complete with an immortal theme tune that did whatever an earworm could – while the mid-’70s saw educational series The Electric Company, produced by Sesame Street’s Children’s Television Workshop, showcase a series of snappy, live-action skits called “Spidey Super Stories”.
CBS’s Spider-Man pilot would mark the web-slinger’s debut in a full flesh-andblood drama, two decades before Sam Raimi brought him swinging into the multiplex. Cast as Peter Parker was Nicholas Hammond, best known as one of the von Trapp brats in The Sound Of Music. Now 27, he made for a decidedly mature take on the high-school loser of the original comics. This Peter was a graduate student, nipped by that fateful radiation-soaked arachnid while conducting his own experiments in the lab. “They wanted a real actor, not a stuntman,” Hammond later recalled.