I have to admit that at first I was reluctant to partake of this series as I found the character designs most off-putting. I know most cartoons go for the stylized route these days because it's cheaper, easier and quicker to animate when you don't get bogged down in the details, but the character designs were... off-putting. Spidey and his fellow supposedly high school aged teenagers looked more like little kids, which of course led me to suspect, rightly or wrongly that the show would be aimed at those younger than myself.
Turns out I was wrong. Once I gave the show a chance, it proved to be surprisingly addictive thanks to its combination of strong writing - should I expect anything less from Greg "Gargoyles" Weisman? ;) - and strong voice acting. Josh Keaton was alternatively touching and hilarious as Spider-Man/Peter Parker, and he had a solid cast of dependable voice actors to play off of, including, ironically, Steve Blum, the voice of Wolverine in recent X-Men ventures, as the voice of the Green Goblin.
In fact as far as writing is concerned, this series easily trumps the 1990s Fox series. I know it's cruel to still give the previous series a hard time about it's many writing flaws, especially considering it was Fox's ridiculous censorship at the time that hampered that series and its attempts to present the first truly serious adaptation of Spider-Man (an intention that was sadly undermined by the aforementioned censorship and just plain strange if not outrightly poor story telling), but when you compare the two series, TSSM easily trumps it both in writing and characterization. And I almost forgot - action scenes. Another pitfall of the 90s series censorship issues: stilted fight scenes that were more like ballet tussling than anything else. TSSM features some truly eye popping fights, putting the 90s fights to shame.
The one preference I will give to the 90s series is its character designs, specifically the designs for Mary-Jane Watson and Felicia Hardy/Black Cat. They truly looked beautiful in that series, in TSSM, sadly, not so much.
The other 9 stars however belong to TSSM for superior writing, acting, and action, and it is a shame that it won't be returning.
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