The Amazing Spider-Stan Theme Song That Almost Was

June 2, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

Somewhere, tucked away on a server – perhaps on a Helicarrier adrift above Manhattan – are the doleful tones of Stan Lee singing “Spider-Stan.”

It’s likely we’ll never hear it, and really, we’re not positive it still exists, but we know that for one glorious moment in time it was a thing, a song sung to the Spider-Man Saturday morning cartoon theme music, created for the credits of LEGO® Marvel Super Heroes, and then killed off, as if by a single snap.

“We had a recording of Stan Lee singing ‘Spider-Stan, Spider-Stan, does whatever a Spider-Stan can,’ and it was just magic,” said Arthur Parsons, who was the creative director at TT Games for LEGO Marvel Super Heroes. “But we couldn’t seal the deal on that.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a game stacked with content from seemingly every facet of the Marvelverse would be home to a few hidden, even unreleased gems.

In the most recent episode of the LEGO Bits N’ Bricks podcast, Parsons is joined by Andy Dolan, who oversaw animation for the game at TT, and Chris Baker, who was the manager of licensed games at Marvel, to discuss one of the top-selling LEGO video games of all time and how it came together.

Parsons, who had just worked on LEGO Batman 2 and two Harry Potter titles at TT Games, said he couldn’t believe his luck when he heard that the studio would get to create a LEGO video game set in the Marvel universe.

More surprising at the time, perhaps, was that Marvel allowed the studio to create something from a blank slate instead of tying it to a single movie, comic, or television show.

Parsons led a small group of developers who spent months basically spitballing ideas, some of which he turned into an on-paper design document. That process started, he said, with the core team just listing out all of the characters and settings that they wanted in the game. Later, they carefully layered a narrative as well as a multitude of game mechanics.

At Marvel, it was Chris Baker’s job to go over every creation in the game to ensure it cleared brand compliance. That meant making sure, for instance, that Wolverine’s cowl looked right, that Silver Surfer was the exact right color of silver, and on and on.

That must have felt like a never-ending job, because TT kept adding to the game. When LEGO Marvel Super Heroes was released, there were 155 playable characters, each of which had to be minutely checked and rechecked. The studio later added another 14.

Ultimately, Baker used a spreadsheet to ensure that every design, script, and animation was correct as he played through the game multiple times.

“LEGO games are deceptively big,” Baker said. “You can beat them in like 8 or 10 hours tops, but you’re only like 20% through. The other 80% is about finding characters and all kinds of other stuff, and it takes a long time to do that.”

The teams working on character design and animation were constantly iterating and adding things, all the way up to launch.

“It was kind of a dream project for me,” head of animation Dolan said. “I’ve always been a big Marvel fan and a LEGO brick fan. We’ve worked on some big [intellectual properties] before, but when this one came up it was really – I mean, as an animator, the thing you really want is great characters, and Marvel is just full of great characters. The opportunity to work with them was something that I’d always dreamed of.”

It was the sort of immense project that kept the team at TT wondering if they would be able to pull it off, Parsons said. In the end, they did, and several reviews of the game called it a love letter to the Marvel Universe, something Parsons strongly agrees with.

“It’s so true on so many levels,” he said, “because of all of the content – whether it’s something from the Golden Age, something from the ‘70s Fantastic Four cartoon, whether it’s something from one of the movies, whether it’s something from a TV show – it was all amazing.

“I remember seeing [the credits] for the first time and it was like ‘Wow!’ It was almost to the point of bringing a tear to my eye.”

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.