Live From New York, It’s Spider-Man
By Philip Schweier
September 6, 2024 - 15:36
Marvel Comics
From 1972 To 1985,
Marvel Team-Up featured Spider-Man
paired up with other characters from the Marvel Universe. However Marvel Team-Up #74 (cover date October
1978) stands out as the only story to feature our favorite webslinger joining
forces with the cast of Saturday Night
Live.
The ground-breaking sketch comedy series debuted on NBC October 11, 1975, featuring the Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time-Players. It became an instant hit, especially among high school and college students who enjoyed its subversive, “everyone is fair game” approach to satire and comedy. Several of the original performers would become comedy legends: John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, and Bill Murray to name a few.
At a recent DragonCon panel in Atlanta, Bob Hall, who was editor on Marvel Team-Up at the time, explained how this peculiar pairing came to pass.
“John Belushi called up, and talked to Jim Shooter and said, ‘I’m a big Marvel fan. Can I come up and visit the office?’ The office had a certain mystique that Stan Lee had created, so Belushi came up, asked questions about what we had going on. I was not there at the time, but apparently he suggested having Spider-Man team up with Saturday Night Live."
A call was made to SNL producer Lorne Michaels, and he okayed the idea. Chris Claremont was chosen to write it, and Hall decided he wanted to draw the book himself. “I wasn’t going to let anyone else draw it but me, because I wanted to go to 30 Rock and meet these people. Aside from that, it wasn’t as much fun as you might think, because in those days there was no Internet, so finding reference on these people meant you had to watch a lot of Saturday Night Live. Getting them right was way difficult, but thankfully we had Marie Severin inking it. She’s an expert caricaturist, and that helped a lot.”
Stan Lee with the Not Ready for Prime Time Players
The story
features Peter Parker and MaryJane
attending SNL, featuring guest host Stan Lee.
Also on hand is the Silver Samurai, determined to retrieve a ring delivered to
John Belushi by mistake. Chaos reigns as the villain and his hirelings prowl
backstage in search of the ring, and Spidey and the SNL cast combine forces to
foil the bad guys without panicking the audience.
Samurai vs. samurai
After the comic was published, Belushi invited the creative team to the premier party for Animal House (1978).
However, this
wasn’t the last time Marvel and SNL
would cross paths. Marvel Comics editor
Larry Hama, who had a second career as an actor, had an uncredited role on the December
15, 1979 episode of Saturday Night Live.
Larry Hama (far left) on Saturday Night Live, December 1979.
“I did an episode with the second cast, in an Apocalypse Now skit with Martin Sheen,” he says. “They painted me white from head to foot and I was wearing a loincloth. I was one of the tribesmen at the end of the movie. I had to stay in this white paint all day, and they gave me a special chair with a sheet on it so I would get white paint on the regular furniture.”
While walking down the hall at the NBC studios, Hama encountered the musical guest for that week’s show. “This little guy goes by in the hall, and I turned to (SNL writer) Al Franken and said, ‘That guy looks like a miniature version of David Bowie,' and Franken said, ‘That WAS David Bowie.’”
Nicknamed “the Thin White Duke,” Bowie was expected to be taller than his actual 5’10” height. “I thought he was, like, six-foot-two,” added Hama, “but he was proportionate.”
Backstage at SNL, craft services had a table with snacks and pastries. and bagels. “There was this little guy with a cart full of danish, and a snow shovel, and he’d shovel danish onto this table,” Hama recalls. “The hired hands would descend on this table like locusts, and when they dispersed, the table would be empty.”
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