Spider-Man (1967) Episode Three: The Menace of Mysterio

The Menace of Mysterio

First Aired: September 23rd, 1967

Synopsis: Spider-Man is seen robbing a museum by multiple eyewitnesses, which pleases J. Jonah Jameson, but upon hearing the news, Peter Parker is sure that he didn't do it. He investigates the scene as Spider-Man but is seen by the police and ends up having to flee from them. While this is happening, a supervillain called Mysterio calls up J. Jonah Jameson and offers to defeat Spider-Man in return for money.


When Peter Parker next heads into the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson has a headline to print, challenging Spider-Man to fight Mysterio. Spider-Man accepts the challenge, but is unable to defeat Mysterio and runs away. When Mysterio later shows up at the Daily Bugle, demanding money from J. Jonah Jameson for defeating Spider-Man, Peter puts a Spider-Tracer on him. He uses this to track down Mysterio to his day job as a stuntman, and fights him to a finish after getting Mysterio to admit that he robbed the museum whilst disguised as Spider-Man. Afterwards, Spider-Man gets J. Jonah Jameson to print a retraction about all of the things he said about him, but only by webbing him up and dangling him from the ceiling.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• This episode is based directly on Amazing Spider-Man #13. The extended sequence of Spider-Man fleeing from the police is entirely original to this episode.
• While it's probably a coincidence, in the first scene we see of Mysterio, there's a mask on the wall which looks awfully Green Goblin-esque.
• Spider-Man first fights Mysterio at the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a bit weird to view it here as just another set piece, given its importance in Spider-Man history these days as the place where the Green Goblin took Mary Jane, back in Marvel Knights Spider-Man #12.
• Out of his Mysterio costume, Quentin Beck looks remarkably similar to his comics counterpart...with the exception of the pointy ears he has here. Apparently someone looked at him in the comics and thought, "Oh, Mysterio's secret identity is Spock!"
• Mysterio is pretty demanding of J. Jonah Jameson giving him his money. A lot of Spider-Man villains are only in it for the money, but Mysterio is traditionally not one of them - he usually wants fame and attention.
• On the topic of Mysterio and money - when he visits J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle for payment, Jonah rips a $100 (!) bill in half and tells Mysterio that he'll get the rest once he's proven that Spider-Man is dead. That...isn't how money works.

Review: Another episode, another comic adaptation, and just like last episode, this episode is overall pretty enjoyable. While we lose some scenes with Peter Parker and his classmates as well as Spider-Man briefly visiting a psychiatrist, we gain a fairly lengthy scene of Spider-Man trying to escape from the police which genuinely works quite well. The highlight of it is by far a brief moment in which Spider-Man has his foot stuck in the train tracks as a train is approaching, and while it's obvious that Spider-Man will get out, it's still executed well, perfectly helped by one of the police officers who is trying to capture Spidey being unable to watch it as it's happening, certain as he is that Spider-Man is about to be killed by a train.

So, how about the flaws, then? There's a brief line where Peter wonders whether he robbed the bank as part of a Jekyll/Hyde-esque split personality, which goes absolutely nowhere, but to be fair, in the original comic it led to him visiting a psychiatrist, which then proceeded to also go absolutely nowhere. Mysterio's decision to defeat Spider-Man for some money from Jonah feels pretty weak, and once again, Spider-Man defeating a villain feels less like him overcoming an obstacle through determination or smarts, but because we're nearly at the episode's end. Do these sound like minor flaws? They should, because they are.

Last episode we saw that adapting a story from the comics helped to avoid the pacing flaws of the first one. This episode, we see that by expanding that into a full-length episode, rather than two stories in one episode, we not only get better pacing, but we give the writing team some space to create their own scenes to replace the ones that the cartoon won't adapt (in this case, most notably, some scenes in Peter's high school). As I've been watching this series of Spider-Man, I've been intentionally avoiding the low-hanging fruit, such as the animation quality or the voice acting. If we keep getting episodes like this, and to a lesser extent, last episode, I might have to start addressing those flaws, because this episode shows that the story quality of this series can actually be pretty decent when given the chance.