Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Background Music from the Original 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon

Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a pro­duc­er, arranger, and jazz com­pos­er. And while he’s best known for arrang­ing music for Bil­lie Hol­i­day’s Lady in Satin (1958), he also enjoyed a long career orches­trat­ing music for tele­vi­sion. Work­ing under a pseu­do­nym “Yvette Blais” (his wife’s name), Ellis com­posed back­ground music for the car­toon stu­dio Fil­ma­tion between 1968 and 1982. And, dur­ing the late 60s, he notably cre­at­ed the back­ground and inci­den­tal music for the orig­i­nal Spi­der-Man car­toons.

Above, hear Ray Ellis’ Spi­der-Man sound­track. The show’s talk­ing parts and sound effects have been removed as much as pos­si­ble, then “pieced back togeth­er into com­plete form,” by a YouTu­ber who uses the moniker “11db11.” All of the music from Sea­son 1 is includ­ed, plus many record­ings from Sea­sons 2 and 3. It’s worth not­ing that the 52 episodes from the orig­i­nal 1967 Spi­der-Man TV series have been com­plete­ly restored. You can pur­chase them on DVD online.

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via Retroist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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Comments (4)
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  • Ted Mills says:

    This is one very long sur­re­al­ist car­toon. Bra­vo.

  • Pater Perker says:

    Some­where between 0:37 and 0:44 Spidey man­ages to fix the sign on the store (“Jewlery”->Jewelry).

  • Moeskido says:

    I wish the licens­ing could be arranged by a group like LaLa Land Records to gath­er up all this stuff, remas­ter it, and release it as a com­mer­cial prod­uct. Apart from the car­toon’s own theme-derived cues, I believe a lot of these tracks were orig­i­nal­ly tak­en from a British music library. Many can be heard being used in NFL films of the time.

  • Walton Page says:

    I loved this cap­ture of 11db11’s. After sev­er­al lis­tens, I found the need to edit a 32 minute jazz suite out of the 68 min­utes a audio. I also reduced the amount of dia­log (you may notiee where I cut a cou­ple bars or a cho­rus here or there>) I’ve also done some audio-restora­tion– some mul­ti-band com­pres­sion and some EQ for a more nat­ur­al son­ic pro­file. (For my ears)

    I cut a video to go with it, but the cur­rent own­er is not let­ting clips go onto youtube with­out a fight, so I end­ed up hav­ing to use a kalei­do­scope fil­ter to make it unrec­og­niz­able.

    Feel free to check it out if you are inter­est­ed. No harm, no foul if you are not.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLK3b24a9NA

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