Per Marvel.com:
“We were inspired by things that fans had done on the internet with our old footage, and so we thought, ‘Well, what if we did some of that ourselves, but with a distinctive Marvel sense of humor,’” explains Vice President, Animation Development & Production Cort Lane of the series’ origins.
“We started on a pilot,” recounts Lane. “We decided ‘Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends’ is such an iconic, classic cartoon that that’s the first one we’re using. We will also be using the ‘Incredible Hulk’ series from 1982, and later on we’ll be using the ‘Fantastic Four’ series from 1978.”
“We just went at it, taking sections, re-editing them, trying to do dialogue with them, and we got in the booth with some amazing voice actors such as Tom Kenney, the voice of SpongeBob Squarepants and Doctor Octopus on ‘Ultimate Spider-Man.’ We even encouraged the voice talent to riff off of our script.”
“We’re doing eight of them, and they are focused on introducing kids to characters they’ll see in Marvel Universe block and want to know more about,” Lane divulges. “I can tell you that we’re doing them for Iron Man, Iron Fist, White Tiger, and even villains like Doctor Octopus.
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends is an animated series produced by Marvel Productions starring established Marvel Comics characters Spider-Man, Iceman and the original Firestar. As a trio called the Spider-Friends, they fought against various villains.
Originally broadcast on NBC as a Saturday morning cartoon, the series ran first-run original episodes for three seasons, from 1981 to 1983, then aired repeats for an additional two years (from 1984 to 1986). Alongside the 1981 Spider-Man animated series, Amazing Friends was later re-aired in the late 1980s as part of the 90 minute Marvel Action Universe (not to be confused with 1977's The Marvel Action Universe), a syndicated series that was used as a platform for old and new Marvel-produced animated fare (the newer programming featured RoboCop: The Animated Series, Dino-Riders and on occasion “X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men”, which was intended to serve as a pilot for a potential X-Men animated series).