Spider-Man (1967) Episode Thirty-Three: Neptune's Nose Cone

Neptune's Nose Cone

First Aired: December 7th, 1968

Synopsis: A rocket called the Neptune is launching into space, and its nose cone contains instruments which can measure the magnetic field of the Earth. J. Jonah Jameson isn't impressed by the launching, but when he hears from his reporter, Penny Jones, that the nose cone fell off and into the Antarctic sea, he sends Peter Parker and her there to get photos of it. When heading there, an intense storm grounds their plane on an uncharted island, which coincidentally turns out to be where the nose cone landed. Unfortunately, Penny is kidnapped by some of the natives, who are planning on throwing her and the nose cone into a volcano they worship.

Changing to Spider-Man, Peter fights various creatures native to the island before managing to make his way to the volcano where Penny's about to be thrown in. He uses his webbing to keep the nose cone in place, which somehow triggers rockets on the bottom of it. He then swings down and grabs Penny as she's throw into the volcano, shortly before the rockets on the nose cone break the webbing and launch it into space. When Penny comes to, Peter tells her that the natives are friendly now and can help them fix the plane. Returning to New York, Jonah is sceptical of the story since the nose cone ended up in space - he thinks they went off somewhere else. However, Peter has a present for Jonah which he picked up on the island - the egg of a giant flying worm-like creature he previously fought, which hatches in Jonah's office and bites him on the nose.

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

Miscellaneous Notes:

• The plane Peter and Penny take to the Antarctic ocean is the Daily Bugle's personal plane - it even says Daily Bugle on the side. I'm not sure how wide a region the Daily Bugle is distributed over, but even if it's going to all of America, it feels a bit unlikely that they'd have a personal plane.
• When the plane is in danger of crashing, Peter uses his spider-sense in a very un-spider-sense-like manner, saying to Penny, "Turn to the right, fifty degrees!" in order to find them a safe landing spot. My No-Prize explanation? His spider-sense was telling him that that was the only place where there wasn't danger.
• It's probably a coincidence, but given that the island they land on is in the Antarctic Ocean and has fantastic creatures there, it gives off a very strong Savage Land feel.

Review: After a pretty decent setup (while Jonah can often be an ass in this series, you never really notice how much you appreciate him until he's gone) and a surprisingly tense scene of Penny trying to find somewhere safe to land the plane, this episode falls into the usual bad tropes of this series. We've got Spider-Man fighting giant monsters that don't affect the plot, we've got a whole lot of padding, and we've got the plot of another genre that poor Spidey's been thrown into.

What makes this episode more frustrating than most is that there's a lot of ambiguity going on with what's happening, and it probably wasn't intentional. You might have noticed that I skipped over a good portion of what happened in this episode in my synopsis - that's because it's not only irrelevant to the main plot, but some parts of it were confusing as hell. Spider-Man runs inside a giant cavern sealed by a giant door (which I first thought was the volcano the natives worshipped), and after a bit of a montage of him swinging around it, he gets chased by a pair of eyes. He ends up shooting webbing up which stops the eyes...only to then be chased by a new, different monster, with a shadowy silhouette. At least, I think that's what happened.

Overall, while it's great to see Jonah again and the episode tries to end on one of the first season's "Everybody Laughs" endings, there's not a lot of substance here, and even less style. If the episode had less moments with me confused by what's going on (I'm not sure whether budget or time restraints are what affected the animation here, which I feel is the root cause) I might be able to give a vague, "It's fine but nothing amazing," recommendation, but overall this episode is pretty forgettable.