10 Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About Spider-Man
4. Live From New York It's Spider-Man
The Marvel Team-Up series featured its fair share of wacky and outrageous pairings during its 150 issue run, but none were as silly and shameless as 1978's Marvel Team-Up #74.
Rather than team Spider-Man up with a random superhero or Marvel property du jour, the comic aligns Spidey with the Not Ready for Primetime Players, the cast of Saturday Night Live, which at the time included the likes of John Belushi, Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd. The cast finds themselves in hot water when Belushi receives a ring that the evil Silver Samurai is chasing after.
Truthfully, Marvel Team-Up #74 is harmless fun. But it also stampedes all over the fourth wall and can't be bothered to be consistent about what is fiction and what is reality in this self-contained universe. For example, Marvel's superheroes like Spidey and Thor are treated as living, breathing characters by the cast, but the host of this particular episode is Stan Lee, the co-creator of the fictional universe these characters exist in.
Perhaps it is best to just ignore these little plot holes and pretend this storyline didn't exist. That's clearly what Marvel did since Spidey and Stan's stint on SNL has never been mentioned since this comic was published.