Spider-Man (1967) Episode Twenty-Four: Criminals in the Clouds

Criminals in the Clouds

First Aired: October 5th, 1968

Synopsis: Peter Parker is trying to ask out a girl called Susan to the Harvest Hop, but she's more interested in Roy Robinson, the star of the football team and the son of the owner of a chemical company. Peter gets jealous enough of Roy that he decides to try out for the football team, but since the team is full, he's instead given the position of water boy. Meanwhile, a man named the Sky Master who lives in a blimp is planning to kidnap Roy so that he can blackmail his father for the formula to an invisibility serum. With it, he'll be able to create an armada of flying cities in the sky.

The next day, Roy's father shows up to football practice looking for Roy. Peter overhears that Roy is missing and that a ransom note from the Sky Master was left, and so he changes to Spider-Man to find Sky Master. He's able to do so when he notices a mysterious cloud which doesn't blow in the wind, and swings up to Sky Master's blimp. Spider-Man defeats Sky Master and his men, and in the process of the fight, the control panel for the blimp is damaged, leading to the blimp catching fire and going out of control. After saving Roy, Spider-Man takes him to the big football game that evening, and helps him win using his webs...but since he wasn't there as Peter Parker, he's fired from the position of water boy.

"Spidey Swinging to Pad the Episode" Montages: 4, by my count.

Webbing Does Not Work That Way:

• When Spider-Man spies Sky Master's blimp, he gets to it by just...shooting webbing at it and swinging that way. It's got to be, what, at least one or two kilometres in the air? That feels pretty implausible for webs to be shooting that far.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• In case you missed it in the synopsis, this episode features the first appearance of the classic Big Man on Campus of Peter Parker's high school, Roy Robinson. Wait, who?
• Sky Master has possibly my favourite motivation of the villains in this series so far: he hates the authorities because they wouldn't let him take a bunch of people into the sky, which he wanted to do because he hates that people live on the ground when there's so much sky around. Holy shit.
• Peter's intelligence is on great display this episode - after two montages of him swinging around the city, he suddenly realises, "I've been wrong, looking for Sky Master on the ground!" What was it about the name Sky Master which made you think he'd be based on the ground, Peter?

Review: Given the track record of original villains to this series, it's a surprise that I like Sky Master as much as I do. He feels like something out of a pulp story, and as mentioned above his motivation is batshit insane, matched in its audacity only by the first Green Goblin stories of this series. He's surprisingly competent when he wants to be - he wants Roy's dad to transmit the chemical formula to him via a private radio band, rather than taking it in person or something which would expose him - and yet he never really steps out of his weight class - Spider-Man is able to beat him pretty easily once he's on the blimp.

Villain aside, this episode also probably has the snappiest pacing of this season so far. Sure, there are some web swinging montages to pad it out, but everything felt like it corresponded to a three-act structure fairly well here. Sure, some of the animation still looks recycled from other episodes or shows, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for better pacing.

The weakest element, then is with the last third of the story. Sky Master's defeat definitely feels deserved, but it's also a bit anticlimactic. What does that leave us with for the climax then? Roy having to win the big game, of course! It's at this point that I start snoozing - there's a half-hearted attempt to make it about Spidey by having him contemplate playing himself but ultimately letting Roy do so, but even then Spidey helps Roy win so easily that it's even more anticlimactic than the fight against Sky Master. If the third act was tightened up this could be a pretty good episode, but as it is, it ends up being pretty mediocre - about what you'd expect of an average episode in the first season.