Spider-Man (1981): Before Watching

It's hard to sum up my feelings regarding going into the 1981 Spider-Man series, but overall, I'd have to say that I'm cautiously optimistic. It feels like when people think of the Spider-Man cartoon of the 1980s, their minds immediately jump to Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the show which comes after this (and which, rest assured, I will be viewing after this). Why exactly is that? Is this show bad, or mediocre, in comparison? Was it unpopular, and necessitated a retool into Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends to maintain viewer interest? Certainly Amazing Friends does feature Iceman and Firestar which gives it an identity of its own, but that doesn't mean that this series is necessarily going to be bad.

It's been over a decade by this point since Spider-Man last had a cartoon of his own. In the time in-between, he's gotten two new comic series, failed to save Gwen Stacy, been cloned, proposed to Mary Jane, confronted the burglar who killed Uncle Ben, and much more beyond that. How much of this is going to make it into the show? The 1967 show surprised me with how often it adapted comic issues, including ones which were pretty recent at the time. By now, is Spider-Man enough of a pop-culture juggernaut that a cartoon can't afford to alienate viewers by introducing some of the, shall we say, more out-there concepts of the later episodes of the 1967 series?

Spider-Man (1967): After Watching

It's taken almost exactly half a year, but the entirety of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon has been viewed and commented on. There were high points, there were low points, there were some points of surprising quality and points of wasted potential. Now that I've actually seen this artifact, how does the overall product look?

Well, as I've mentioned several times in the posts themselves, the quality drops notably after the first season finishes. While I wouldn't call the first season the best cartoon I've seen, there were a lot of episodes that fell into the "it's fine" camp when I was expecting them to be forgettable at best, horrible at worst. Episodes directly adapted from comic stories were, naturally, highlights, but there were also some surprisingly good original stories told in all. There's some goofy animation, sure, and some of the plots really shouldn't be thought about too much, but I'd be lying if I said that there was no entertainment value.

Once we get to the second season and third seasons, though...hooo, boy. I'm not going to say that every episode was bad by any means, but the quality of the writing dropped pretty noticeably, not to mention the animation quality. Worst of all were the episodes which recycled animation from another episode but told more or less the same story - I understand why they did it, but that doesn't make the episode automatically entertaining.

To finish off this brief summary, I'm going to present my top ten favourite stories of the series, as well as my top ten worst stories so that you, the intelligent reader, know what to look forwards to and what to avoid if you decide to check out this series. For fairness' sake, I'll be excluding episodes which are adaptations of comic stories, as otherwise the top ten list would probably be just them.

Spider-Man (1967) Episode Fifty-Two: Trip to Tomorrow

Trip to Tomorrow

First Aired: June 14th, 1970

Synopsis: While swinging around the city, Spider-Man ends up falling through the rusted roof of a train carriage where he encounters a young boy named Tom, who has run away from home wanting to be a hero. When Tom asks Spider-Man about being a hero, Spider-Man tells him about the time he fought Volton, the time he discovered Mysterio was behind the illusion of the Flying Dutchman, and the time he fought Kotep. Once he has finished, Tom leaves the train, deciding that being a hero is too much for him.

Spider-Man (1967) Episode Fifty-One: Down to Earth

Down to Earth

First Aired: June 7th, 1970

Synopsis: A mysterious meteor has been seen flying towards Earth, which some people think might be created artificially by aliens due to two large antennae-like protrusions on in. J. Jonah Jameson wants photos of the meteor, and gets a tip about where the meteor is set to land - the North Pole. He sends out Peter Parker to photograph it, along with a reporter. The two fly a plane there which ends up crashing, and upon Peter coming to, he finds that the reporter has disappeared. Exiting the plane, he sees a primitive tribe with the meteor, and works out that they want to throw it into a volcano, which will cause the North Pole to explode because the meteor is radioactive.

Spider-Man (1967) Episode Fifty: Specialists and Slaves

Specialists and Slaves

First Aired: May 31st, 1970

Synopsis: The villain from Swing City, now calling himself the Radiation Specialist, manages to take over a nuclear power plant. Knowing that Spider-Man might stop him, he uses a remote-controlled car to lure Spider-Man out of Manhattan with a recording which makes it seem that a hostage is inside. Once the Specialist has done so, he covers the city with radiation, which apparently makes it so that weak-willed minds can be controlled by him, and which somehow makes Manhattan float into the sky. Spider-Man reaches the car, but finds out how he's been tricked, and swings underneath Manhattan before returning to the city by crawling through a sewer pipe.

Spider-Man (1967) Episode Forty-Nine: Revolt in the Fifth Dimension

Revolt in the Fifth Dimension

First Aired: It would have been May 24th, 1970, but...

Synopsis: Spider-Man is staring at stars, which transitions into space where a red, cyclopean monster is destroying planets for "daring to probe the secrets of Dimension Five!" Elsewhere, two blue-headed aliens lament the destruction and blame themselves for discovering Dimension Five, while mentioning that the villain is named Infinata. One of the aliens copies the entirety of their library onto what's essentially a spherical USB Drive, and then flies off into space to get it to safety. Infinata detects the space ship, and sends his minions out to stop it. While the alien is able to temporarily protect himself, his ship ends up crashing in New York.

Spider-Man (1967) Episode Forty-Eight: Rhino / The Madness of Mysterio

Rhino

(Sorry, due to some technical issues there's no screenshot for this story.)

First Aired: May 17th, 1970

Synopsis: Spider-Man is swinging around when he sees Rhino charging into a gold depository. Rhino manages to escape with the gold, which J. Jonah Jameson later says to Peter Parker was supposed to go to Fort Knox. When Spider-Man is later riding on top of a government train, Rhino attacks that too, and steals the gold within it.

Rhino continues his robberies, stealing gold as the ship it's on arrives at the docks, and from a submarine arriving in the harbour. It turns out that he's trying to make a statue of himself with the gold. Spider-Man arrives at his hideout, and tries fighting him, but Rhino manages to get away. He hides the statue in the sewers, but Spider-Man follows him down there and anticlimatically defeats him by covering him with webbing.

Spider-Man (1967) Episode Forty-Seven: Rollarama

Rollarama

First Aired: May 10th, 1970

Synopsis: After a perplexing shot of a giant ball rolling down the streets of New York, we cut to Peter Parker and his apparent girlfriend Susan, investigating an old house it apparently came from. The house apparently belonged to Doctor Karl von Glutz, who hasn't been seen for years. Susan finds a smaller version of the ball, which is pulsing, and a mysterious glowing door. Peter recognises the door as being the Glutz machine, which apparently leads to the land of crystal creation. They find a manual for it that states that von Glutz found seeds outside a cave, which expand rapidly when exposed to air. They suddenly find that the smaller version of the ball has grown, and rolled towards the army base in town - but is teetering at the edge of a precipice, not having gone down yet. Peter decides, of course, that the only thing to do is to go into the Glutz machine as Spider-Man to find a solution to the problem.

Spider-Man (1967) Episode Forty-Six: Up From Nowhere

Up From Nowhere

First Aired: May 3rd, 1970

Synopsis: In the waters outside New York, a mysterious transport appears. Inside, its green-skinned occupant, Dr. Atlantean, comments on how he'll attack New York soon for Atlantis. At university, a lecture Peter Parker is attending talks about Atlantis, and how although Atlantis was thought to have been destroyed, their technologies were likely more advanced than suspected and they may have survived to the present day. Shortly afterwards, Dr. Atlantean activates a device from his base which causes violent shaking in New York, leading to buildings cracking in half. While people panic, Dr. Atlantean demands that all authorities disband so that Atlantis can take over.