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

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Comments (3)
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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.

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