There are days when making a decision on what kind of music to listen to is an impossible task. Should it be early ska and rocksteady? Too chipper. How about a little sludge metal? Too unsettling. Peruvian psychedelic cumbia? Definitely getting closer. Hey, how about 68 minutes of incidental music from the 1967 Grantray-Lawrence Animation/Krantz Films animated Spider-Man series?
A faceless internet hero, known only as 11db11, has made it their business for the past few years to make as much of the “funky and jazzy TV theme songs and background music from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s” available online as possible. 11db11 describes the Spider-Man compilation as “Every piece of music from the original 1967 series, talking parts and sound effects removed as much as possible, pieced back together into complete form. All the Ray Ellis music from season one is here and there’s a lot from seasons two and three as well.” For any person to whom those words mean anything, this has got to be a godsend. The description even comes with a meticulously curated log of each bit of music and which episode it’s from. There’s also a supplementary video, featuring “a couple of swingin’ tunes by Johnny Hawksworth.”
TV dorks and retro nerds should feel a deep debt of gratitude to this anonymous uploader for all they’ve done for the field of theme song collections. But this surprisingly groovy collection is their pièce de résistance.