Recently I came across YouTube video clips of a live-action Japanese Spiderman TV show from the ’70s.  This is something to see… prepare to be surprised, even if you know quite a bit about Spiderman.

If you watched the video, you might’ve noticed it was from 1978 and it featured a giant live-action transforming robot.  How long did it take before America got transforming robots?  Something like 1984, wasn’t it?  The Japanese have been ahead of us for a while on cartoons and sci-fi technology.

According to this other video (with a different theme song, one you may be more familiar with), Spiderman has a flying car (the Spider Machine GP-7), and the giant transforming robot is named Leopardon and belongs to Spiderman.  The song says he has radioactive blood, and he wears some type of mechanical device on one of his wrists.  I’m really curious about the story now…

On a related note, someone took clips from the Japanese Spiderman TV show and made a compilation video, adding NES-style music from Mega Man.  (NES = the original Nintendo system, in case you didn’t know.)

Spiderman’s pre-fight antics look amusing, plus his voice in Japanese is awesome (“SPYDA!”).  I’m gonna have to watch one of those episodes sometime…