Spider-Man (1967) Episode Forty-Four: Super Swami / The Birth of Micro Man

Super Swami

First Aired: April 19th, 1970

Synopsis: On a hot day, the sun turns into a giant eye and shoots a laser at the Brooklyn Bridge. It disappears, but the cars upon it are unaffected by gravity. While Spider-Man tries to save the people on the bridge, the eye shoots more things around the city. In the mayor's office, a very racist caricature appears on the TV and declares that he is Koga, and that he is responsible for what's going on. He then creates a snowstorm. While Spider-Man swings through it, he gets buffeted about by strong winds, before somehow ending up in a glass ball controlled by Koga, before breaking one of the sides.

Examining the ball, Spider-Man discovers that the blizzard was actually dry ice. He continues through the lair he's in, encountering several other seemingly impossible things which all turn out to be illusions. When he confronts Koga, Koga claims that he never wanted to hurt anyone, before trying to shoot Spider-Man. Spider-Man swings around for a bit, for some reason tricking Koga into destroying three mirrors, before kicking him out a convenient hole and into the river. In the aftermath, he explains how Koga created his illusions, before making a terrible pun about how Koga's now up the river.

Seconds of Spider-Man being Buffeted by Blizzard Winds: Twenty-frigging-three of them. Arguably more if you count the bit after the break when the animation of it happening changes slightly!

Miscellaneous Notes:

• The bridge at the start of the episode is, of course, the Brooklyn Bridge. While it's fairly innocuous at this point, it won't be long before it's the site of one of the best Spider-Man stories of all time - Lives Unlived. Afterwards, of course, we won't be able to show the Brooklyn Bridge without Spider-Man angsting about the events that happened on it.
• At the end of the episode, when Spider-Man is explaining how Koga was vanishing everything back at the start, his explanation is "Mass illusion - subliminal cosmic suggestion. A beam from his transmitter." Translation: neither Spider-Man nor the writers have any idea how it was done.

Review: It's been a while since we've had a racist caricature on the show, hasn't it? As always, I'm not going to dismiss the episode as being worthless on this basis, but I do wish that there was a more nuanced take on a non-white person, and hope that this is the last one we see.

The racism aside, the biggest problem with this story is Koga's gimmick. Over and over again we keep seeing these deadly traps, only for them to turn out to be an illusion created through practical effects. Sound familiar? It should, because it fits Mysterio's modus operandi to a T, to the point that I was half expecting Koga to turn out to be a robot of his or something. By the time the story was over and Mysterio hadn't appeared, I had whatever the villain equivalent of blue balls is.

Still, in spite of those problems, there's a bit of a spike in quality here, at least in comparison with the last few episodes we've had. The sun turning into an eye and shooting everything is a delightfully random sequence, and the extended sequence of Spider-Man completely helpless in the blizzard is absolutely hilarious. After that is when the illusions aspect comes into it, and while it makes the scenes a bit predictable, there is some fun in watching Spider-Man absolutely tear through Koga's plan since he's worked out that he can't be harmed. It's not without its flaws, but the good parts would be enjoyable even if we hadn't just gotten through some pretty bad episodes.

The Birth of Micro Man

Synopsis: Professor Pretoris, an apparently infamous scientist, escapes from prison, and manages to get a lift from Peter Parker, who is driving home from a party. After Peter's dropped Pretoris off at his lab, he hears a radio report about how Pretoris has escaped from prison, and realises what happened. Changing to Spider-Man, he goes into Pretoris' lab right as the police come in. He points at a door Pretoris went into, and the police open it, revealing a cat behind it, even though Spidey swears he saw Pretoris go into it. While the police scoff at Spider-Man's story, he's told by the warden of the prison that Pretoris previously swore to activate his Kingdom Come machine, a device they've never been able to find.

Certain that he saw Pretoris go into the room, Spider-Man examines it, and finds that when he turns on the lightbulb the light causes him to shrink. Going through a crack in the wall, he finds a hidden area of the house, where a shrunken Pretoris and a monkey are working to activate the Kingdom Come machine. After Spider-Man uses his web to trap the monkey, he pulls a nearby lever which releases a rush of water, destroying the Kingdom Come machine and getting rid of Pretoris. Spider-Man later returns to his regular size using the light again, and comments that Pretoris' work is now all down the drain.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• As mentioned above, Peter doesn't know about Pretoris' threat until he hears it on the radio. While it's true that Pretoris wasn't being hostile to him while he was in the car, you'd have expected his spider-sense to have tingled at least a little bit.
• When Spider-Man approaches the lab, we get nearly a minute of Pretoris setting up his shrinking-ray-lightbulb, setting up the cat, and disappearing into the room, before Spider-Man comes in and shows the police where Pretoris is. There's an ad break, and then we get the entire sequence played out again. There's recycling animation, and then there's recycling animation.
• Spider-Man works out that the cat was deliberately placed behind the door with the impeccable logic of, "If I were eluding dogs, I'd put a cat in the place I disappeared from!"

Review: While inexplicably green-skinned villains became a bit of a bugbear for me around twenty or so episodes ago, this episode actually ends up being surprisingly solid. The dramatic irony of Peter giving a lift to Pretoris works pretty well, and the story does a good job at taking its time building up to a proper confrontation between the two without making Spider-Man look too incompetent. The shrinking lightbulb seems to come out of nowhere in my synopsis, but in the episode itself it's clearly foreshadowed when Pretoris goes out of his way to retrieve it from a drawer.

Unfortunately, by the time Spider-Man shrinks, there's barely any episode left. While I can't say I'd be that thrilled to see Spidey engage in shenanigans while shrunken down - there's a certain set of tropes that usually plays out when a protagonist does, and I think we've all seen them by now - I would have liked to see a bit of a better confrontation with Pretoris. There's maybe half a minute of Spider-Man swinging around avoiding the monkey (what the heck is that thing doing there, anyway?), which isn't very tense, and then the confrontation's pretty much over.

Still, other than that minor issue towards the end, this remains a pretty solid story, probably the strongest so far of this season. If Pretoris' skin colour wasn't green, it'd be easy to assume that he was an original villain to the show (well, he is, but you know what I mean). This means that either the episode he was originally in was more down-to-earth or that the animators got more creative with what they had to work with this episode. Let's hope that it's the latter, because that means we might get it again.