The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is unarguably considered one of the most successful shows ever created by Marvel Animation. With a perfectly star-studded cast and a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the series showed the earth’s mightiest superheroes from the comics teaming up to form the Avengers and defeat evil.
But what fans do not know is that this very series would have almost revived one major fan-favorite character from the dead: Peter Parker from The Spectacular Spider-Man series. However, Drake Bell getting cast to voice the friendly neighborhood superhero in Ultimate Spider-Man eventually ended up ruining the plans, leaving fans robbed.
The Epic Spectacular Spider-Man x Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Crossover That Never Came to be
The Spectacular Spider-Man animated series was indeed one of the most interesting and true-to-the-source-material shows on the web-slinger before its unexpected cancellation after season 2. But even when he was put to rest, one other series had the perfect plot to bring him back, even if it was for only one episode: The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
According to reports by IGN, this would have happened in the episode Along Came a Spider… of the second season of The Avengers, which reportedly had Josh Keaton — the one who voiced Spider-Man in the 2008 series — on board to voice the character and bring him back from his dead saga. Unfortunately enough, that never came to be.
Since the episodes of The Avengers were being aired in Australia ahead of time compared to America, the Keep ‘The Spectacular Spider-Man’ Alive Facebook page owner Jesse Betteridge was quick to notice one rather peculiar thing. Instead of Keaton, as planned, it was Drake Bell who was voicing Peter Parker.
After Betteridge pointed it out on the page along with other fans, they were soon met with a response from Keaton in the comment section, which read:
“Wow, so they redubbed my audio. I recorded a few Avengers eps as Spider-Man and was looking forward to seeing them. Typical Parker luck I guess.”
As for why this happened, the only reason that Keaton could assume was that “it was done for brand consistency,” as the new voice hired for Spider-Man for the animated Ultimate Spider-Man series was none other than Bell.
Thus, just like that due to official reasons still yet to be known, fans were truly robbed of this epic crossover between two of Marvel’s best animated shows and couldn’t meet the web-slinger from TSSM until his brief appearance later in 2023’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
This Crossover Would’ve Allowed a Limited Degree of Continuation to TSSM
Years after Josh Keaton was snubbed from his Spectacular appearance in The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Christopher Yost, who served as a producer cum writer for the latter series, revealed via his X handle (@yost) that this crossover would have allowed TSSM to continue within a limited degree of allowance.
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Thus, it would have not only brought back Keaton’s reiteration of Peter Parker for a limited period and paid homage to the Spectacular web-slinger, but it would have further established the two masterpiece series as inhabiting the same continuity through crossover episodes. Sadly for what Keaton cited as “typical Parker luck,” none of it really came into action.
Nonetheless, you can still stream both The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and The Spectacular Spider-Man on Disney+ and Prime Video.
