Spider-Man (1967) Episode Twenty-Seven: Spider-Man Battles the Molemen

Spider-Man Battles the Molemen

First Aired: October 26th, 1968

Synopsis: In New York, there's a mysterious earthquake. Once it's over, a bank disappears into the earth. Spider-Man briefly wonders whether it's Buggs Reilly up to his old tricks, but is sceptical nevertheless. Unbeknownst to him, beneath the Earth the leader of the molemen declares that they've been denied the sun and wealth for too long, and that they'll steal it from the surface people. Spider-Man, meanwhile, goes to visit a scientist as Peter Parker, who reveals he's been hearing radio signals from the molemen. Peter can understand them, and through them discovers that the molemen want to stop Spider-Man so he can't interfere with their plans.

The molemen activate some sort of device when Spider-Man is on a building, bringing him down below the Earth. After trekking through the caves and encountering some strange creatures, Spider-Man reaches Mole City, where he's promptly knocked out and captured. He escapes and defeats the molemen, but after he's seemingly tied up the leader of the molemen, the leader escapes and shoots at him with a gun. The blast misses and hits a generator, which apparently means that the place will explode. Spider-Man escapes to the surface and thinks that he sees the leader of the molemen, but it turns out to be nothing more than a costume in a store.

"Spidey Swinging to Pad the Episode" Montages: Three, by my count, but there are also some incredibly long shots of the camera panning down through the Earth.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Twice in this episode, Spider-Man mentions his spider-hearing. Obviously, this is a power he's never been shown using in the comics, and he'll probably never mention it again. Incidentally, one of the times is around the time the earthquake happens at the start of the episode - I'm not sure why they couldn't have had him mention his spider-sense instead.
• Let's talk about the moleman leader's stirring speech, where he talks about how the molemen have been denied both sun and wealth: Firstly, I have to question how well a race of underground-dwelling creatures would adapt to a life in the sun. Secondly, why would the wealth of humans matter to molemen? They can start their own economy and become as rich as they want.
• In spite of the fact that Spider-Man had a lengthy distance to travel from his entrance point to Mole City, when he gets there there's a large crowd of people who were all apparently in the building he was atop when it was captured. Did they find a shortcut, or something?

Review: I've never been a fan of clip shows (really, is anyone?), but watching this episode, with its heavily, heavily recycled clips from just two episodes ago really makes me crave one. I get it, producing an episode is complicated and you need to cut corners in parts. Recycling animation isn't anything new to this show, but taking the majority of the animation from another episode, shuffling some scenes around and trying to make something new out of it is. A clip show would at least give us some variety, and wouldn't be so blatantly trying to be something it's not.

Until this episode, I easily would have said that the worst story of this show was Diet of Destruction - it had a villain which came out of nowhere with no real motivation, and as such was incredibly boring to watch. It's still not a great episode, but it's leaps and bounds above this one - at least the villain is defeated in a somewhat clever way, and we have some variety in the scenes. In this one it feels like we've seen it all before, and with good reason.

Even ignoring the horribly-recycled animation, nothing in this episode makes any sense. The molemen are apparently being led by Buggs Reilly again, only he's not unmasked this time, so maybe it's their actual leader whose plans coincidentally are the same as Buggs Reilly's? We've got Hammond the reporter randomly showing up, we've got giant bugs which shoot lasers from their eyes, small goblin-like creatures who Spider-Man can't defeat - and let's not get started on the ridiculous way Spider-Man gets to the top of the building which gets pulled into the ground. It's horrible, horrible stuff, and I really hope this is the lowest the series gets, because I don't want to see how much lower we can go.