Spider-Man (1967) Episode Thirty-Eight: Cold Storage

Cold Storage

First Aired: January 11th, 1969

Synopsis: At midnight, the villainous Dr. Cool and an assistant steal some diamonds. They return to their hideout and declare that they will freeze them to absolute zero, which will somehow allow them to mix them in with ice and smuggle them. Spider-Man appears then, having followed them, and fights them, but is knocked out when Dr. Cool shoots the head of his cane off and it hits Spider-Man. Spider-Man is locked inside the nuclear thermostat, and it is turned down to absolute zero. Before Dr. Cool leaves, he tells Spider-Man that he'll probably start to have all sorts of delusions as his brain freezes.

When Spider-Man eventually does defrost, he finds that an unknown amount of time has passed, and that New York is in ruins and ruled by cavemen. Spider-Man fights them for a bit, and then fights a mammoth which he defeats by webbing it up, and then he drops a boulder on the head of a t-rex which kills it. He finds his way back to the cavemen, who are playing drums which makes Spider-Man see flashes of colour. It turns out that Spider-Man hasn't actually defrosted in the future - he's still in the freezer, but reacting badly to the cold. An ice delivery man stops by the building and turns off the freezer, saving Spider-Man. Since it's nearly midnight, Spider-Man knows that Dr. Cool will be returning soon after a robbery. When Dr. Cool does return, Spider-Man defeats him this time, and then quips that he beat him because he managed to keep his cool.

"Spidey Swinging to Pad the Episode" Montages: None, by my count.

Puns made by or about Dr. Cool: 12,677

Miscellaneous Notes:

• When Spider-Man's being put into the freezer, Dr. Cool mentions that it's going to go down to minus four-hundred and fifty-nine degrees, absolute zero. Someone must have cracked out a textbook for this script, because give or take .37 Kelvin, that's absolutely correct. Good job, writers!
• When the ice delivery man breaks out Spider-Man, he says that he knows his ice, and given how frozen over Spider-Man was, he must have been out for around twenty-four hours. But...given that it's only just coming up to midnight now, which is when Dr. Cool performed his initial robbery, and that it took time for him to get back to his hideout, as well as for Spider-Man to follow them, fight them, and get locked in the freezer...basically, what I'm getting at is that the ice delivery man is a hack.

Review: If you're going to be sending Spider-Man to an exotic, un-Spider-Man-like location, this is how you do it. It's easily the most realistic of ways Spider-Man's gotten to one so far (well, comic book realistic), and the out for Spider-Man not actually being in the future is clearly set up, so it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina. And, on a bit of an unrelated note, the episode gave me strong Future Tense vibes, one of my favourite episodes of Gargoyles.

In spite of the good setup, however, this episode has one major, glaring flaw. In the past episodes in which Spider-Man went to an exotic location, he usually had a goal there, even when that was simply "get out". Here, he's got no such goal - he doesn't have any thoughts of trying to find a way to return to the past, he doesn't have any plans for setting up a settlement, or negotiating with the cavemen. You can definitely justify it with his shock at what's happened (as well as the fact that he is, well, dying of cold), but from a storytelling perspective, it definitely gives his time in "the future" a random feel, that the episode is just killing time.

It's a bit unfortunate, as this also means we get no worldbuilding about "the future". We have no idea what supposedly happened to New York to destroy it, what caused humans to degenerate into cavemen, or anything else interesting, which might have helped sell that yes, this is really happening. (Not that we would have believed it even with those details, but you know what I mean). On top of that, the scenes with Dr. Cool are laughable, and not in a good way. Overall, a nice setup and execution of its first act, but this episode does ultimately fall a little flat.