Flashback Friday: Spidey's "Spider-Man Unlimited" Costume

Each Friday, I take one of the entries from my old Super Posts and expand it into its own featured article.

This week: Spider-Man's Spider-Man Unlimited Costume!

In 1999, Fox Kids released an animated series called Spider-Man Unlimited, that had the strange premise of sending Spider-Man to Counter-Earth - a planet in the same orbit as Earth on the opposite side of the Sun created by the High Evolutionary, obvi - along with Venom and Carnage, and giving him a new, hi-tech suit. Partly this was to cash in on the success of the recent hit Batman Beyond, but it was also because a little movie you may have heard of called Spider-Man was in production, meaning Fox Kids and Saban Entertainment had to somehow make a Spider-Man cartoon without access to any of the classic parts of the Spider-Man franchise, including his costume. Which, as I'm sure you know, looks like this.

But in Spider-Man Unlimited, he looks like this.

Spider-Man Unlimited premiered in October 1999. The following month, Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man #13 (November 1999) was released with the following cover:

In the story itself, you discover that Spider-Man receives visions of characters from the Spider-Man Unlimited world, and then enters the Negative Zone, where his suit changes - for absolutely no reason - into the Unlimited costume. It's back to normal by the end of the next issue. As you can see from the footnote, this was just a way to promote the show and the tie-in series that was debuting the same month this issue came out.

Later, during Spider-Verse, we'd see this costume again. The Spider-Verse creators considered Spider-Man Unlimited and Spider-Man: The Animated Series to be the same reality, although that was not the show's intentions.