One of the most bizarre pieces of Spider-Man history, Toei’s tokusatsu (sentai) adaptation, Supaidāman, is coming to the west. As promised, Phil Lord will include this version of Spider-Man in the sequel to ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’.
On Twitter, Lord responded to a fan’s offer to design this take on the character by declaring that it had already been done:
He’s designed!
— Phil Lord (@philiplord) November 5, 2019
Last year, Lord expressed that if ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ made over $200 million domestically, Supaidāman would appear in the sequel. Unfortunately, the film topped out at $190M in the U.S. and Canada, but Lord is still delivering the Asian Wall-Crawler.
In 1978, the Toei Company created a live-action series loosely inspired by Spider-Man. On it, motorcyclist Takuya Yamashiro was injected with alien blood in order to defend Earth from Professor Monster and the Iron Cross Army. He tooled around in the flying car, Spider-Machine GP-7, which would combine with the giant mecha Leopardon to battle his rubber-suited foes. This series predated Toei’s later ‘Super Sentai’ series, which would be adapted in the U.S. and other territories as the ‘Power Rangers’. The Japanese Spider-Man was introduced in the 2015 ‘Spider-Verse’ comic book that partly inspired the film.
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In another work of pop culture, the Leopardon played a pivotal role in the novel ‘Ready Player One‘, but in the Steven Spielberg film adaptation, it was replaced by The Iron Giant.
Just last week, Sony announced that the sequel to ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ would swing into theaters on April 8, 2022. The first film focused on Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), known in the comics as the ‘Ultimate Spider-Man’, even though the Ultimate Universe was destroyed. He was teamed with Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), an out-of-shape version of the most famous Spidey, Gwen Stacy a.k.a. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Man: Noir (Nicholas Cage), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), a young Japanese whiz-kid who pilots a mecha called sp//dr, and cartoon pig, Peter Porker (John Mulaney). The film also snuck in cameos from Spider-Man 2099, and the 1960s animated version.
‘Into the Spider-Verse’ won Best Animated Feature Film from the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, among many other accolades.
Are you excited to see the Japanese Spider-Man in the ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ sequel?
