Spider-Man (1967) Episode Fourteen: The Golden Rhino / Blueprint for Crime

The Golden Rhino

First Aired: December 9th, 1967

Synopsis: At the docks, fifteen million dollars worth of gold is being moved from a ship, only for the truck it's being loaded onto to be attacked by Rhino and knocked into the water. Spider-Man appears and searches the water, but both the gold and Rhino are missing. Rhino takes it back to his hideout, a warehouse at the docks, and starts melting it down, planning to make a statue of himself out of it. When he realises that he doesn't have enough gold to make the statue, he attacks Wall Street, where Spider-Man fails to stop him.


Upon Spider-Man searching for the Rhino again, he ends up finding his base thanks to his Spider-Sense. They get into a fight, and Spider-Man is knocked out. Rhino leaves with his now-completed statue, thinking that Spider-Man is dead, but soon finds out otherwise when a report is run claiming that Spider-Man stole the gold. Rhino starts causing chaos to draw out Spider-Man, and is successful, up until the point that Spider-Man creates a webbing barrier which he can't break through. He flees into the sewers, where he's hidden his statue, but Spider-Man follows and webs him up. Afterwards, Spider-Man delivers both the webbed-up Rhino and the statue to the Daily Bugle.

Webbing Does Not Work That Way:

• When Rhino attacks Wall Street and bursts out of the building he's stealing gold from, bricks rain down on Spider-Man, who blocks them using an umbrella out of webbing he quickly spins up.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• When we see Rhino pouring the gold into the mould for his statue, it's clearly half of the mould, as you'd expect it to be, but during the fight with Spider-Man in the warehouse, out pops a fully-completed statue.
• I was all set to call out the show on getting the melting point of gold wrong, but looking it up, its melting point is 1,064 degrees Celsius (1,943 Fahrenheit). That's pretty damn hot, but more searching reveals that apparently the orange part of fire - as seen in the screenshot above - is around 1,100 - 1,200 degrees (or 2,000 - 2,200 Fahrenheit). It's probably unintentional, but good job, show creators!
• After Rhino finds out that Spider-Man is alive, Rhino states, "Spider-Man lives! Only he knows my secret! I must destroy him!" Has there been any mention of any sort of secret that Spider-Man would know of the Rhino's? (Is it that he's made a golden statue of himself?)

Review: No doubt about it, the weakest part of this episode is Rhino's goal - he claims that he wants to make a statue of himself because "only the great and strong deserve a monument to their fame", and that it has to be made out of gold because "I am the greatest and strongest!" Since when has Rhino cared about fame? What does he think is going to happen when he creates the statue, he can just plonk it in a park and people will start respecting him?

It's a weak plot, which is a pity, because the idea of Rhino going around and stealing gold works pretty fine on its own. You could easily have it that he's stealing it for the people who gave him his powers - either to fund them or, if he was stealing it in large enough amounts, to destabilise the economy - and it would actually work really well. The opening scene, before we know what he's up to, is pretty good on its own, and a lot of the fights and scenes in-between the bits with the statue are pretty competent, Spider-Man's unbreakable webbing ("I call it concentrated steel") notwithstanding.

Sadly, this never really hits a great level of quality, staying around average at best. The real disappointment is when Spider-Man simply webs up Rhino at the end - not only does it feel anticlimactic, it also also doesn't make a lot of sense given Rhino's strength. The only explanation I can think of is that Spider-Man's webbing here is also the concentrated steel he mentioned, but why didn't we see him mention it earlier, or brewing some up in a cutaway scene? The writers haven't quite gotten the hang of how to end Rhino episodes yet, but I'll give them this: at least Spider-Man didn't need to use pepper this time.

Blueprint for Crime

Synopsis: A mysterious bald man is giving instructions to two members of the Enforcers, Montana and Ox, to break into a vault. Spider-Man overhears them doing so and tries to stop them, but fails to prevent them from getting away with some blueprints. Spider-Man follows them and after going through a cafe full of beatniks, they fight once again. Spider-Man briefly gets ahold of the blueprints, but once again he is defeated. Upon the Enforcers taking the blueprints to their employer, he realises that one of them is missing, which Spider-Man still has.

When Spider-Man comes to, he works out a plan to find the crooks. Firstly, he stages a photo of himself as Spider-Man with the blueprint, and then gives it to J. Jonah Jameson as Peter Parker. When Jonah runs a headline saying that Spider-Man is a crook, the police start a manhunt of Spider-Man. The villains, realising that they can't let Spider-Man get captured before getting the blueprint back from him, capture him and take him to their hideout. There, Spider-Man fights and defeats them all before leaving them for the police. In the aftermath, Jonah realises that he was once again wrong about Spider-Man and is furious, but then wonders how Peter got the photo of Spider-Man if he was never actually a criminal.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• If you asked me to guess villains who would be appearing in this series, I would not have guessed that the Enforcers would appear! Although they don't show up in the comics very much anymore, I always like seeing them; they're fun villains.
• Throughout the entirety of this episode, Montana is called Cowboy. I like to think that he's still called Montana in this series, but everyone's giving him the same nickname. On a side note, we see him use a gun in one fight, something which I don't think we've ever seen regular Montana do in the comics - he normally uses a rope in combat.
• The bald employer of the Enforcers isn't given a name, although given that he's kind of on the short side, is it possible that he's a dramatic interpretation of the character find of 1964, Fancy Dan?
• When Spider-Man's getting away with the blueprints, Montana shoots at him rapidly. Spider-Man, at the top of a building at this point, sways for a bit before falling to the ground and getting knocked out. I have to wonder whether the original script had him getting shot and falling to the ground as a result; as it is it's a little unclear as to why he's falling, unless he's losing his balance while dodging the bullets.

Review: I mentioned above that I consider the Enforcers to be fun villains, and part of the reason for that is that they're very straightforward.We don't need deep motivations for them, we don't need complex, pulse-pounding fights where everything's at stake, we just need them to be there and to get in the way of whatever it is Spidey's trying to do. As far as this episode goes, it manages to pull that off pretty well - they're here to steal some blueprints, Spider-Man doesn't want them to. It works.

The downside is that you can usually get away with such a straightforward plot in the comics with some more interesting subplots, or having the Enforcers working for a bigger villain than themselves. By the nature of this show, we aren't going to get the first, and we already know that the latter won't happen since we see in the very first scene that the Enforcers are being hired by Unnamed Bald Man. As such, while the fights with the Enforcers themselves are entertaining enough, they need to carry the episode on their own, and it's ultimately not enough to hold up.

On top of this, add in a slightly convoluted plan to find the villains' hideout (parts of it were good, it was just a step or two too convoluted) and this episode starts out fairly well but loses its appeal as it goes along. If the final fight at the villains' base had been a bit more entertaining, I would probably have enjoyed this one, but once the unnamed leader started activating random electrical traps to stop Spider-Man...yeah, it's not exactly the best thing I've watched this evening. I'm hoping that with a bit of luck the  Enforcers will appear again in the future, with recycled animation and a stronger story to appear in.