Spider-Man (1967) Episode Thirty-Two: Cloud City of Gold

Cloud City of Gold

First Aired: November 30th, 1968

Synopsis: A plane Peter Parker is in while travelling to an unnamed country as an exchange student is caught in a storm. Peter comments that the clouds look almost as if they're made of gold, and his host says that there's a legend about the city of gold. Shortly afterwards, the plane crash-lands in the jungle, leading to Peter changing to Spider-Man so that he can guide the crew of the plane to safety. They end up travelling down the river on a raft and after dealing with a whirlpool, stalagmites, and bats in an underground river, unexpectedly find themselves at the city of gold.

The raft is attacked by a giant bird, which is called the Aztec Warbird, when the natives sic it on them. Spider-Man fights it and eventually manages to lead it to crashing into some snow, which causes it to freeze and then melt to pieces. He notes that it's made of gold. The rest of the party is about to be thrown into a nearby volcano, but Spider-Man ends up falling in first when his webbing is cut by arrows shot by the natives. He saves himself with webbing, and ends up fighting the giant spider inside the volcano. After beating it, a cannonball is shot at Spider-Man and goes into the volcano, which causes it to start to erupt, shaking apart the city of gold. Spider-Man frees his party and they escape in the confusion, heading all the way back up the river to their crashed plane. Shortly afterwards, a helicopter arrives which rescues them all.

"Spidey Swinging to Pad the Episode" Montages: None. Good job, writers and animators!

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Upon being sucked into the whirlpool which leads to the underground river, one of Spider-Man's party members cries out, "We're going down into infinity!" That's, uh, quite the hyperbolic statement.
• How does the party stop the bats in the underground river, you ask? Spider-Man mentions that they use radar (close enough) and starts whistling, which confuses them and gets them to start crashing into one another. Amazing.

Review: Given the track record of this season so far with Spider-Man in exotic locations, you might not be expecting this episode to be awesome, but honestly: it's absolutely kickass. The episode feels like a pulpy adventure straight out of Tintin or Indiana Jones, embracing all of the appropriate tropes. The show just rolls with its premise without stopping to think about any of it. The city of gold has gold buildings and weapons, as you'd expect, but it also has gold stalagmites on the way there and the absolute best, A GIANT GOLDEN WARBIRD!

On top of all of that pulpy fun, we've also got a lot of shifting scenes so things don't feel too drawn out as they did with, say, the previous episode. Some of them are admittedly padding, but at the same time I didn't feel as though any of them outstayed their welcome, which has probably been the biggest issue with padding fights or scenes in other episodes. Everything here is actually pretty well-paced, something even the best episodes of this series have had issues with.

Between this and the first season's stellar first Green Goblin episode, I think I've worked out what makes the more outlandish episodes of this show work: the ones that work just throw everything at you without bothering with an explanation, and it's audacious enough to work. The ones that don't work try for a bit of an explanation, like the Molemen episodes having the bank robber be the leader of the Molemen, or Vine giving us a tonne of unnecessary exposition about the plant monsters. Here, we're promised Spider-Man exploring a city of gold, and I'll be damned if it didn't deliver that.