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Medicine Man Movie

Byline: will lee

Having recently hatched the most torrid craze on television this year, namely The Osbournes, MTV is now looking to take advantage of the public's newest film obsession with an upcoming series featuring the $100 million-grossing web slinger himself, Spider-Man.

Last week the music network announced that it had enlisted the help of two former teen heartthrobs and a famously bespectacled singer-songwriter to voice the characters in Spider-Man, a new animated version of the Marvel Comics serial. Neil Patrick Harris, best known to legions of twentysomethings as the lead wunderkind in the '80s sitcom Doogie Howser, M.D., will be the voice of Peter Parker and Spider-Man, while Lisa Loeb, the folk-pop artist best recognized by her dark-rimmed glasses, will lend her voice to love interest Mary Jane. The part of Peter's best friend will be voiced by Ian Ziering, last seen on Beverly Hills 90210.

Bill Carroll, VP/director of programming for Katz Television Group, says that MTV will successfully ride the wave of arachnomania, even later this year.

"I think if MTV is able to position the show well - and they seem to be pretty expert at that - then the phenomenon and enthusiasm will still exist," he said. "If Spider-Man had come out a year and a half ago and just now they were developing something, that would be different."

Carroll adds that the timing of the movie's video release, likely to come toward the end of the year, will also help the show's popularity.

MTV's Spider-Man is being produced by Columbia TriStar Domestic Television Family Entertainment, owned by Sony, which produced and distributed the recent movie.

This latest version of Spidey's adventures represents something of a return to animation for the Viacom-owned network, which had built a measurable part of its original programming voice in the '90s with such animated series as Beavis and Butt-head and Daria. In addition to Spider-Man, MTV will unfurl two other animated series in late 2002: The Freshman, a college-life satire, and Clone High, about a group of high school kids who possess the DNA of famous people.

MTV is no doubt hoping that its iteration of the superhero's story will fare at least as well, if not better than, some past versions. In all, four animated Spider-Man series have aired on television: The first, which made its debut on ABC in 1967, is probably best remembered for its groovy go-go theme song ("Look out!/Here comes the Spider-Man"). A second series aired during the early '80s, while a third, featuring such celebrity voices as Hank Azaria, Martin Landau and George Takei, premiered in 1995 and ran for five seasons. The most recent take, called Spider-Man Unlimited, landed Spider-Man in a parallel universe where animals rule the planet; it was part of the Fox Kids lineup until last year. (Only a scant few will remember the live-action rendition, which didn't exactly burn up the airwaves during its lone month on CBS in the spring of 1978.)

ABC Family, which airs the 1995 series every Saturday morning, will show episodes from all four animated series during a Memorial Day weekend marathon it is dubbing "Spidey-mania."

For Columbia TriStar Domestic Television, the TV production arm of Sony Pictures which last year decided to forego productions for broadcast networks in favor of producing for cable and syndication, Spider-Man will be yet another entrant into the cable programming fray, joining such shows as FX's The Shield, Lifetime's Strong Medicine and TBS's Ripley's Believe It or Not!

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