Spider-Man (1967) Episode Four: The Sky is Falling / Captured by J. Jonah Jameson

The Sky is Falling

First Aired: September 30th, 1967

Synopsis: J. Jonah Jameson is giving Peter a lecture in his office when the Vulture appears along with a flock of birds which he can control using his helmet. Peter changes to Spider-Man and tries to stop him, but is easily defeated. Shortly afterwards, he finds out that the Vulture is demanding a two million dollar ransom from the mayor of New York, or else he'll start terrorising the city. He attacks a construction site, where Spider-Man fights him, but once again Vulture is the victor.


Peter later hears from Jonah that the mayor has agreed to pay the ransom to the Vulture and that it will be happening at the observation tower. Spider-Man ambushes Vulture once he has his money and pretends to be knocked out. When Vulture lifts up Spider-Man to throw him off the building, Spider-Man drops a device on his helmet to jam it, snatches the money out of Vulture's hands, and manages to save himself from the fall. When Vulture tries to summon birds to stop Spider-Man, they all attack Vulture instead thanks to the jamming device, thus saving the day.

Miscellaneous Notes

• He's not identified by name, but judging by the helmet, Vulture in this episode appears to be Blackie Drago, rather than the far more familiar Adrian Toomes. At this time in the comics, Toomes was believed dead.
• Whenever we can see the flock of birds Vulture can control clearly, as opposed to them being animated as indistinct shapes, they're shown to be vultures (of course). I'm no biologist, but I'm pretty sure that vultures normally live in the desert. That helmet of Vulture's must be crazy powerful to bring them all the way to New York.
• How does Vulture want his two million dollars? Why, in the form of two one million dollar bills, of course! Which the mayor of New York agrees to (and we see before the end of the episode)! In my previous post I commented that Jonah tearing a bill in half to give to Mysterio wasn't how money worked. Between that episode and this one, I'm starting to wonder whether money really does work in a different way in this universe.
• Whenever we see Vulture, he is constantly grinning a very broad smile. Did the animators mix up a reference of him with a picture of the Joker, or was this some sort of attempt at cutting  down on the amount of lip synching that needed to be done?
• Betty Brant mentions that window workers are afraid to wash the windows because of Vulture. This gives Peter an idea. That idea? He'll pretend to be a window washer (while in his Spider-Man costume), and when the Vulture comes near him, he'll...throw a bucket of water on him. Slow down and save some ideas for the rest of us, Einstein!

Review: We're back to stories which are taking villains from the comics but using them for original stories, and as such this story feels remarkably similar to the very first one, with Doctor Octopus. Both of them have a villain making a threat to the city, both of them assume that we already know who the villain is and that we'll roll with it, and both of them have several fights with Spider-Man which exist more or less as padding.

In spite of those similarities, this story ultimately ends up being the better one, in my opinion. The threat of the Vulture is felt a bit more strongly as we get references to window washers being afraid to work and Jonah being terrified of birds by the end of the episode. Spider-Man jamming Vulture's helmet using a gadget may come out of nowhere, but it leads to a more logical victory than him suddenly being able to defeat Doctor Octopus just 'cause. Although it doesn't really go anywhere, there's also a subplot where Jonah thinks that Spider-Man is working with the Vulture, which leads to Peter trying to defend Spidey.

Overall, while the pacing is back to being all over the place and we have some scenes that could easily afford to be cut, the story manages to be watchable, if a bit of a let-down after the last two episodes. If the Vulture appears again, I'll be looking forwards to seeing whether they can improve from here, because we've still barely scratched the surface of what could be done with him.

Captured by J. Jonah Jameson

Synopsis: Spider-Man is swinging around the city when he's attacked by a robot. He gets away easily enough, but the robot shows up in the Daily Bugle office, being pitched to Jonah by its inventor, Henry Smythe. Peter convinces Jonah to try the robot as a joke, but after he's attacked by it again when he's Spider-Man, he realises that it might actually be able to defeat him. Spider-Man attempts to escape the robot by swimming away from it, but when he emerges at the shore, it shows up right behind him and captures him.

Back at the Daily Bugle, Betty Brant sees this and pulls the power cord so that Jonah can't control the robot any more. When Jonah reconnects it and goes back to the monitor, Spider-Man has escaped, but the robot soon finds him and the chase continues. Spider-Man is eventually tired out enough that he crashes into a clock tower, and the robot manages to capture him again. As Jonah races to the location to unmask him, Spider-Man opens up the robot's chest, and manages to tinker with its circuits enough to escape. When Jonah arrives, he is humiliated by the replica costume Spider-Man has left with the robot, filled with his webbing. He's led away by a police officer, who insists that he's overworked and needs to get some rest.

Webbing Does Not Work That Way

• At one point during the chase, Spider-Man fires a strand of webbing an incredibly long distance from where he is to the top of the Empire State Building (I count it as at least five blocks). He then manages to swing off without any need to build up momentum. 

Miscellaneous Notes

• This story is based on Amazing Spider-Man #25, albeit with some scenes cut.
• The monitor Jonah uses to view and control the robot's progress shows it from a third-person perspective. I guess Smythe forgot to mention the robot camera he had programmed to follow the robot around.
• In the comics, Smythe's first name is Spencer, not Henry.
• At the end of the episode, once it's all over, Smythe says, "Oh well, back to the drawing board," and then casually picks up the robot and walks off with it. That robot that must weigh at least, what, three or four hundred kilograms?
• In the very last scene of the episode, Peter asks Betty whether he can see Jonah, but she quips that he's out all week since he was "stung by a spider." Seeing as how spiders bite people, not sting them, I guess that confirms that Betty's a high school dropout in this universe too.

Review: After a few good stories which adapted comic stories, this one manages to successfully burn away any optimism I had that comic adaptations in this series were more likely to be of higher quality than the others.

It's not that this episode is bad, per se, but it's hard to find the fun moments here, to the point that if I didn't know that this was based on a comic book, I would have had no doubt that this was an original story plotted for the cartoon. Almost the entire episode consists of Spider-Man running away from the robot, briefly getting into a fight with it, and then running away again. The comic broke it up with some antics involving the kids from Peter's high school (in addition to featuring a much more dangerous-feeling robot), and the first story of this show broke up its fights with scenes of Jonah at the Daily Bugle mixed in with Betty Brant looking for Peter. Here, there's no extensive supporting cast to draw on, and the scenes at the Daily Bugle are essentially the chase scenes since Jonah's so involved in them, so there's no respite from the monotony of it all.

On top of all of that, the robot is the goofiest thing in this show so far, and that's saying something. It doesn't unrelentingly roll towards Spider-Man, or try to shoot out steel cables to capture him; instead, it bounces and leaps around the city, then flails its arm tentacles in Spider-Man's general direction when it gets near. When it does capture Spider-Man, it's easy to find yourself asking what makes its gripping strength so great that Spider-Man has no chance against it. Between the robot and the moment of Spider-Man swinging face-first into a clock tower, part of me wonders whether this episode might have meant to have been intentionally comedic, but I ultimately don't have enough faith in the writers that that's the case.

There is one notable thing to praise in this episode, however. Astute readers may have noticed that aside from the first episode, I've barely mentioned Betty Brant at all. The reason for this is because most of the time, she's barely a character, hanging around the Daily Bugle to either hand Peter a piece of plot-relevant information or for someone for him to make quips to. In this episode, Betty does something plot-relevant, saving Spider-Man from being captured the first time by pulling the cord of the robot's control panel, and then shortly afterwards calling the police to ask them to help Spider-Man against the robot. (The police don't really do anything about it in spite of them claiming that they will, hence why I didn't mention it in the synopsis). Seeing Betty have agency within this episode is by far the highlight, and I'm hoping that this will be the start of her having a more active role in the show.