Spider-Man (1967) Episode Thirty: Vine

Vine

First Aired: November 16th, 1968

Synopsis: Peter Parker is going through his love interest Jackie's attic. Her house used to belong to Professor Smithers, who disappeared thirty years ago. Peter finds a strange seed and Professor Smithers' diary, which explains that the seed was brought from three million years ago via a time machine. Since the seed has been brought into sunlight, it turns into a giant plant monster and starts terrorising the city. Peter jumps into the time machine, which is in the attic, to go to the past since Professor Smithers will be there. As Spider-Man, Peter is defeated by a giant blue monster, who takes him to Smithers.

Smithers tells Spider-Man that the plant monster can be defeated by radium, which is emitted by gems, but that the only radium gems are in the Forbidden City. Furthermore, radium has mutated the plants of this time and made them sentient. Spider-Man heads to the Forbidden City and is ambushed in the temple where the gems are by the plants, defeated and taken into an arena. After defeating the large centipede-like monster there, Spider-Man manages to grabs the gems and take them to the present, defeating the plant monster. Talking to Jackie later as Peter, Jackie mentions that the time machine was damaged by the radium coming through it, but if Peter wants, he can come over and explore the basement with her.

"Spidey Swinging to Pad the Episode" Montages: One, by my count, but there are also some montages of the plant monster destroying New York and in one scene, of Spider-Man running away from a caterpillar-like monster repeatedly.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• First animated appearance this episode of one of Spider-Man's most iconic love interests: blonde-haired and a fellow college student, it is, of course, Jackie. Wait, who?
• Throughout this episode, Spider-Man constantly worries about taking too long and what damage the plant monster might do to New York while he's gone...all the while oblivious to the fact that he has, you know, a time machine.
• While it's not as iconic an image as Spider-Man swinging through the New York skyline, we've all seen images of Spider-Man with a webbing backpack to store his clothes and personal belongings, yes? This version of Spidey says screw that and just tucks the (very large) gems underneath his shirt.

Review: This episode starts out genuinely interestingly, with a quick setup of the mystery of the seed and the disappearance of Professor Smithers. In many ways, it's like a 1950s horror movie or monster comic, with the ordinary protagonists unintentionally unleashing a terrible threat on humanity, and having to undo their mistake. There's a great setup here for Spider-Man to have to try and stop the plant physically, or alternatively, to try and decipher Professor Smithers' notes or something and try and find a way to stop it through the power of science.

Why can't we see Spider-Man trying to fight the plant monster, failing again and again but not giving up? While I doubt that this show has the quality needed to pull it off, it could, in some ways, have ended up being a proto-"Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut". The idea of using the time machine to go into the past and find Smithers and something that can stop the plant monster should be a clever idea, but instead it's exactly what it appears to be - an excuse to recycle the animation of another show.

The second Peter steps into the time machine, the quality drops several notches. Once again we've got Spider-Man inserted into a different cartoon full of alien creatures and giant monsters, and the show is trying to shrug it off and act as though this is just another normal episode. I do appreciate that we see Spider-Man defeating the plant creatures in the past pretty easily, but that's about the highest praise I can give for it.