Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Background Music from the Original 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon

Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a pro­duc­er, arranger, and jazz com­pos­er. And while he’s best known for arrang­ing music for Bil­lie Hol­i­day’s Lady in Satin (1958), he also enjoyed a long career orches­trat­ing music for tele­vi­sion. Work­ing under a pseu­do­nym “Yvette Blais” (his wife’s name), Ellis com­posed back­ground music for the car­toon stu­dio Fil­ma­tion between 1968 and 1982.

And, dur­ing the late 60s, he notably cre­at­ed the back­ground and inci­den­tal music for the orig­i­nal Spi­der-Man car­toons. Above, hear Ray Ellis’ Spi­der-Man sound­track. The show’s talk­ing parts and sound effects have been removed as much as pos­si­ble, then “pieced back togeth­er into com­plete form,” by a YouTu­ber who uses the moniker “11db11.” All of the music from Sea­son 1 is includ­ed, plus many record­ings from Sea­sons 2 and 3.

It’s worth not­ing that the 52 episodes from the orig­i­nal 1967 Spi­der-Man TV series have been com­plete­ly restored. You can pur­chase them on DVD online. Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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