I understand that. That's cool. It's definitely quite important in the overall franchise sense.
I still think it's a fairly weak show overall.
The 90s was a big time for animation on TV. On WB, you had Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, you had Batman the Animated Series, then Superman, Batman Beyond, which continued into Justice League. Walt Disney had Darkwing Duck, Duck Tales'87 and other stuff like TaleSpin (which I think was late '80s). And of course this was the decade of The Simpsons.
I just don't think any Marvel cartoon in that time measures up to that. Whether it's Fox Spider-Man and for that matter Fox X-Men. The only ones that did came in the 2000s -- X-Men Evolution, and then Spectacular Spider-Man. 0
I honestly didn't care about it. I still think Spider-Man works best when it focuses on just him. The wider-Marvel Universe with its largely garbage-fire characters always needed Spider-Man more than he needed them.
The Fox Cartoon gave us a Punisher who uses laser rifles...I mean a Frank Castle who doesn't kill people, what's that all about that. You could have used Luke Cage if you wanted a non-violent vigilante who opposes Spider-Man only to become friends later since Luke Cage played that role once.
And even the Fox Cartoon didn't give people the Spider-Man in MU stories that's great...no Spider-Man v. Juggernaut, Spider-Man v. Firelord.
That's more or less why I liked Spectacular and indeed prefer it.I felt like the one thing that held Spectacular back was that it didn't have the rest of the Marvel Universe due to legal reasons
Spider-Man works best without the Marvel Universe. The less integrated he is the better his stories are. The MU always diminish him and rarely add to him.