Spider-Man (1967) Episode Twenty-Nine: The Evil Sorceror

The Evil Sorceror

First Aired: November 9th, 1968

Synopsis: Thousands of years ago, the evil magician Kotep was trying to enslave the world, but was turned into stone by magic. In the present day, a college professor thinks that he can bring back Kotep with magic, and after he is fired for teaching lessons about Kotep, uses his magic to summon Kotep. Kotep attacks the professor with a demon, but shortly afterwards is attacked himself by Spider-Man. Although Spider-Man gives him a good fight, Kotep ends up teleporting away. Once Kotep is gone, he tries summoning demons to help him take over the world, but they say that they'll only work for him if he can defeat Spider-Man.

The injured professor, now regretting summoning Kotep, says that there's only way to defeat Kotep, but we cut away before we hear him tell it to Susan, Peter Parker's love interest for this episode, as a giant web has appeared in New York, and Peter has gone to investigate it as Spider-Man.When he touches the web, he's teleported away to another dimension, but not before Susan arrives and tells Spider-Man that Kotep's weakness is his sceptre. Unfortunately, Spider-Man can't hear her properly. In the other dimension, Spider-Man heads to Kotep's castle, and is attacked by giant spiders Kotep summoned. When Kotep mentions his sceptre, Spider-Man realises that that's what Susan was trying to tell him about, and smashes it. With it destroyed, all of Kotep's magic is undone, including the spell which brought him to the present. When Spider-Man returns to New York, again thanks to the magic being undone, he finds out that the professor has been given his job back as thanks for giving Spider-Man the information for defeating Kotep.

"Spidey Swinging to Pad the Episode" Montages: None, surprisingly.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• That classic nerd, Peter Parker, tells his love interest Susan when she says she'd rather study history than go to the beach: "The beach is a lot more fun than reading about all those mummies and pyramids!" Not that Peter's ever been shown being terribly interested in history or anything, but that feels insanely out of character for him.
• This episode, of course, features one of Peter's most famous love interests: red-headed, long-haired Susan. Wait, who?
• After Susan gives Spider-Man the advice about the sceptre, she calls out, "Watch out for that web! It might be a trap!" As opposed to, y'know, all of those webs Kotep created as artistic statements.
• The plot of this episode makes me think that between this one and the previous one, maybe I got my titles mixed up...except IMDB's titles and synopses match up perfectly with my episodes, so I guess we can assume that the creators screwed up the title cards.

Review: Given that this episode is about Spider-Man facing a magic villain, something he doesn't do very often, you'd think that this would be crap, but a lot of it works just fine. We get some classic Peter Parker moments as he tries hitting on a girl and is rejected, and the fights are all pretty much what you'd expect of this show. There's also a rare example of there being no swinging montages in this episode to pad the length! (There is one montage, but I give a pass to it since Spider-Man is travelling between two places).

Still, I couldn't help but feel that there was something bringing this episode down, and as I started writing up this post, I realised what it was. In spite of how powerful we're told Kotep is, and his aspirations to rule the world, he never really feels like a viable threat. Sure, we see him summon some demons, and he's probably not the kind of guy you'd want to run into down a dark alley, but world-threatening material? No, he's not really near that level, as much as the show wants us to believe he is.

I think the blame ultimately goes to the pacing of the episode. I don't know what show this animation was taken from, but between all of the exposition, Peter Parker scenes, and an extended flashback at the start of the episode showing Kotep's final duel in the past, there's barely any room left for proper fight scenes, meaning that Spider-Man has to defeat him quickly, which makes him look like a bit of a pushover. It's a bit of a pity, since you could do some really cool things with the demons he's shown to be capable of summoning, but he ultimately falls flat a bit. Still, this is far from the worst of the episodes in this show, and if you had to choose a villain to return in the future, you could do a lot worse than Kotep.