Ol'Skool Classic
Well-Known Member
IIRC, Disney/Marvel got back the TV rights for Spider-Man during the 2nd season of "Spectacular Spider-Man" (Fall '09) and that was the reason "Spectacular Spider-Man" was cancelled. Sony produced "Spectacular Spider-Man", so Sony still owns the show. Just like Warner Bros. still owns the "Blade" trilogy films & FOX (pre-Disney purchase) still owns the "Daredevil" & "Elecktra" films even though Disney/Marvel got the rights to those characters back.
As far as Disney being able to air the older pre-2000's Spider-Man cartoons, that's because Disney bought the rights & library to all the pre-2000's Marvel cartoons back in 2001, years before they ever bought Marvel, as part of a bigger deal. Here's an old article on that deal:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304001329/http://www.saban.com/html/press/010723.html
Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saban_Entertainment
Already knew Disney had the rights to the majority of the Marvel characters & properties that were owned by by other companies besides Fox & Sony. Didn't know that Sony produced Spectacular Spider-Man , so as far as that goes it more than likely wouldn't be on Disney + any time soon.
Movie and TV rights deals are some funny things. Sony can hold on to the movie rights to Spider-Man literally forever as long as they put out some kind of Spider-Man related movie every few years whether shitty movies or not. Same reason Fox keep churning out X-Men movies & attempted to reboot Fantastic Four prior to the buy out in order to keep the movie rights. That's why a majority of people think Sony will be the big loser when it comes to not continuing the Spider-Man share deal because if their solo Spider-Man movies doesn't match up to the level of MCU movies it's game over.