Gwen Stacy was launched within the Marvel comics in 1965, changing into Peter Parker’s first main love curiosity. She was killed in the course of the occasions of “The Wonderful Spider-Man” #121 in 1973 after she was thrown from a bridge by the Inexperienced Goblin. Spider-Man tried to rescue her by taking pictures an internet strand, just for her neck to interrupt from the whiplash. It was a controversial second in comics historical past — recreated onscreen in 2014’s “The Wonderful Spider-Man 2,” the place Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy suffers the same destiny.

And whereas Marvel has since introduced the character again in quite a few varieties since that fateful 1973 concern, her loss of life has considerably overshadowed all the pieces to do with Gwen Stacy ever since. That is just about why John Semper determined to avoid Gwen when it got here time to provide his imaginative and prescient of Spider-Man’s universe. Chatting with Marvel Animation Age (by way of The World’s Best), Semper mentioned:

“I selected to go together with Felicia Hardy as an alternative of Gwen Stacy as a result of all roads with Gwen result in loss of life, which we could not actually do on [a] Saturday morning [cartoon]. However Felicia in our sequence was actually a totally new character. She wasn’t the Felicia of the comics in any respect. So I assume I can take some credit score for ‘creating’ the model of her that we used.”

A lot of the manufacturing of “Spider-Man: The Animated Sequence” gave the impression to be affected by outdoors pursuits. Toy gross sales managed the primary season, with its one-off storylines simply excuses to introduce new villains. However extra typically, Semper and his staff had been hampered by community censors and their necessities to maintain youngsters’s animation family-friendly. And so, Gwen, whose loss of life looms giant over her character, simply wasn’t the appropriate match.