Before Tobey Maguire, friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man was Paul Soles
By Chris Lackner
The Globe and Mail
TORONTO (CP) — “My spidey sense is tingling.”
The voice of one of the world’s most popular superheroes is instantly recognizable — each word still layered with its trademark mixture of melodrama and determination.
Not only is this Spider-Man a Canadian, he’s also a former employee of the CBC and has graced Stratford’s legendary stage.
Long before Tobey Maguire was spinning webs, Paul Soles gave life to Peter Parker and his alter-ego.
Both characters were voiced by Soles in the campy, psychedelic 1960s Spider-Man cartoon. From 1967 to 1970, he battled the likes of the Scorpion, the Green Goblin and Mysterio from the safe confines of a studio in Toronto.
Today, the 73-year-old Soles has wispy grey hair and a trimmed, white moustache — they mark him an elder statesman of the crime fighting business.
While he has received acclaim as both a radio broadcaster and actor, Soles scoffs at the idea that his cartoon work is childish and of lesser importance.
“If you are connecting with an audience in a story — whether Shakespeare or a cartoon — the same methods are employed as an actor,” Soles explains.
Soles is in a good position to make the comparison.
He has performed in Stratford for the last three seasons, including productions of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Troilus and Cressida.
“Performing at Stratford is like performing the opera at La Scala in Milan or baseball in Yankee Stadium — there is no other place on earth as special.”
In the 2001 production of The Merchant of Venice, he received critical praise for his portrayal of the merchant Shylock. While he considers Shylock one of his greatest roles, Soles still holds a soft-spot for Spidey.
“I didn’t consider myself much the superhero type, so I had to do a little thinking,” Soles recalls of his time as Spider-Man. “I asked myself, ‘How does a superhero feel? How does a superhero sound?’
“But it was less about being superhero and more about being this superhero — Spidey remains unique.”
Soles admits he knew nothing about Spider-Man when he took the role, but his respect for the character has grown over the years.
“Spider-Man was special because he was an ordinary guy . . . flawed, reluctant and a nerd to a degree.”
In Soles’s eyes, Peter Parker’s character is defined by the death of his Uncle Ben, portrayed in both the cartoon series and the 2002 feature film. After a newly empowered Parker lets a criminal flee the scene of a robbery, the same crook later murders the teenager’s uncle.
“It’s a credible story about a youngster who feels a responsibility and remorse that haunts him,” Soles says.
Soles landed the role of Spider-Man because his cousin Bernard (Bunny) Cowan — also a popular radio announcer — was a co-producer of the show.
Toronto was a hotbed for English-speaking voice actors in the 1960s because it had the “best broadcast people in the world” thanks to the CBC, Soles explains.
Cowan’s troupe, which included radio stars Paul Kligman and Chris Wiggins, voiced programs such as The Incredible Hulk, Rocket Robin Hood and The Smokey the Bear Show.
“If you watched us in the studio reading these scripts, we were like little children in a sandbox ... it was fun,” Soles says. “People have conveyed to me over the years that the job I did was okay, because it did make an impression people and it endured. It was effective.”
Soles says voicing the show to pre-set animation frames placed time constraints on the actors’ performances, forcing them to deliver their lines within a certain number of seconds, depending on the length of the corresponding frame.
Toronto’s Grantray-Lawrence Animation produced the show in 1967 before the show was moved to New York City and placed in the hands of new executive producer Ralph Bakshi. The voicing continued to be recorded by Cowan’s Canadian troupe.
But the cartoon voicing was largely a side project for Soles, who became host of the Toronto-based CBC radio show Take 30 in 1962. Soles beat out Peter Jennings, who later became an ABC news anchor, for the position.
Over 16 years he was accompanied by four different co-hosts, including Adrienne Clarkson and Mary Lou Finlay. He also starred in the TV show This is the Law.
The voices in Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, were also performed by Cowan’s troupe.
“The cartoon business was quite large throughout the ’60s and part of the ’70s,” said Bernard’s son Elliot Cowan. “The Spider-Man sessions were part of a larger group of Marvel comics-based shows in which my father was dialogue producer and director, including Thor, Aqua-Man and Captain America.”
While Maguire’s performance in the original blockbuster film and its sequel coming June 30 has overshadowed the classic cartoon, Soles shows no signs of bitterness.
Although he enjoyed director Sam Raimi’s adaptation, Soles said the movie emphasized Peter Parker’s character more than the cartoon. Even when he donned his tights, Spider-Man retained his youth and inexperience in the film — a marked difference between Soles’s portrayal of Parker and his alter-ego.
“It differed from the comic book and cartoon version of Spidey as kind of a mature, swaggering superhero . . . but I think it still stays true to the character.”
In the cartoon, Spider-Man’s voice was noticeably deeper than Parker’s, Soles says.
At the end of June, Buena Vista Entertainment is releasing a DVD featuring all three seasons of the original Spider-Man.
Soles will appear in the Canadian premiere of Trying this September at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. Written by Joanna Glass, the play is based upon her personal experiences as the assistant to former United States attorney general Francis Biddle, the top American judge at the Nuremberg Trials.
(The Globe and Mail)
― el Huckle-huckle-Buck (Horace Mann), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 17:32 (twenty years ago)