Stan Lee: Rock Star?

I saw this ad and had to know what the hell this “Reflections of a Rock Superhero” (or “Rock Reflections of a Superhero” — take your pick) thing was. I’ve seen a couple of variations of this ad, and finally my curiosity overwhelmed me.

To keep it succinct, it’s Spider-Man-as-Rock Opera. Good or bad, that about says it all.

For your listening pleasure, here are some clips — the second one even has that distinctive Stan Lee narration:

Pretty awful, but maybe it spoke to youths of the 70’s. John Romita’s image from the advertisement, with a hangdog Peter Parker and Spider-Man in the mirror, was actually the album cover, and that’s about the only thing that would get me to buy this thing.

I can’t think of any comic book hero “rock” albums from my youth — the closest equivalent my generation had was the Rock-n-Wrestling Connection from the mid-80’s World Wrestling Federation. I actually owned — and forced my parents to play in the car cassette player during trips — The Wrestling Album II, which featured wrestler-sung hits like “Piledriver” (a song that compared the act of love with, you guessed it, a piledriver) and wrestling’s equivalent of “We Are the World,” “If You Only Knew”:

I think the wrestling stuff is funny. The superhero stuff kind of sucks, though I have to admit the “Doctor Oc-to-pus” chorus is catchy. Wrestling wins in this battle. Sorry about that, Spidey.