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.
- The Witching Hour: One of the goofiest plots yet and an interpretation of the Green Goblin which fans would disown if he showed up in the comics today, and yet it still managed to work for me, both in how audacious it was and in general plot developments. I could see people finding this too audacious and unfamiliar, but I loved it.
- Here Comes Trubble: The main antagonist was surprisingly humorous and entertaining, as well as having a believable and human motivation. Add in some cool Greek mythology and a great climax and you've got a solid story.
- Farewell Performance: While there's a bit of faffing about, getting to the end of the story gives us probably the most heartwarming moment I can remember in the show. If the fight portions were toned down a bit, I could easily see this being a back-up story in a modern-day Spider-Man comic.
- Return of the Flying Dutchman: A cool use of Mysterio which took me by surprise, as it well should. Some parts of the plot are definitely weaker than others, but the end product is ultimately strong enough overall to be worth the watch.
- Home: Carol wins three gold medals - for being the character in this show with the most potential, the one-off character who should have been given a recurring role, and the most competent female in the show. The episode itself also holds up pretty well - I'll always be a fan of Spider-Man realising that sympathetic aliens are a thing, as well as the rules.
- Cloud City of Gold: A giant golden Aztec warbird, the monstrous spider that lives inside a volcano, Spider-Man defeating bats by whistling at them, solid gold stalagmites...when the episode throws all of this at you without stopping to explain it, how can you not love it?
- King Pinned: While there are some pacing issues in the episode and the Kingpin's plot has a bit of a "Huh?" feel to it, he feels like the callous crime boss that he should be, coldly arranging for thugs to kill J. Jonah Jameson while simultaneously organising for a bomb to blow up the Daily Bugle. It's worth watching for him alone.
- Knight Must Fall: Carol from Home may win the gold medal for the character in the show with the most potential, but the antagonist of this episode, Sir Galahad, definitely wins the silver. Is he a delusional actor? An actual time-travelling knight? Is he doing what he is because he genuinely believes that it needs to be done, or because he's a villain? I would have loved to see the answers to these questions in the episode.
- Sands of Crime: I'm always going to like episodes which use classic comic book villains, and as far as original stories go, you could do a lot worse than this Sandman one. It's hurt a bit by the fact that Spider-Man is accused of committing a crime for the umpteenth time, but I think that in a vacuum it would hold up a bit better.
- The Sinister Prime Minister: The Sinister Prime Minister has to be one of the most Silver Age names you could get, but it's precisely because of that - as well as his various gadgets he keeps pulling out of nowhere - that it's pulled off successfully for me.
- Rollarama: The villain is a giant ball, we get more than just a few plot points that don't make sense, and the animation - in spite of being recycled - is absolutely terrible. If those aren't enough to convince you, I'll add in that the episode this is recycled from - Vine - also almost made it onto this list. It's that bad.
- Spider-Man Battles the Molemen: Again, we're recycling the plot and animation of another episode, and it really doesn't hold up - probably because the original episode was barely watchable.
- Pardo Presents: Pardo is an absolutely ridiculous villain, whose giant cat can seemingly do whatever it needs to in order to advance the plot (and is also maybe Pardo himself). Spider-Man murdering it with electricity should be a mercy, but it's just another bad plot point in a bad episode.
- Scourge of the Scarf: Another stupid villain, even Jimmy Olsen wouldn't have issues defeating the Scarf and all of his ridiculous gimmicks. The idea seems to be to create a villain who uses clever tricks and gadgets, but it just ends up making everyone look stupid.
- Blotto: The episode has far, far too much padding and the director who's behind Blotto is an absolute twit, given he creates the monster in response to being called a has-been. There's some genuine potential in the villain, but he's ultimately in the wrong genre.
- Fifth Avenue Phantom: Given that he appeared in another episode down the track, the Phantom feels like a villain that the creators might have been proud of, but he's really a bit of a mess. He's got no overall theme or gimmick, and the resources he does have don't really make any sense as to how he got them.
- Connor's Reptiles: As you can probably tell by now, I don't look kindly on episodes which consist of recycled footage and a weak attempt at creating a new plot from it. This story is one of the worst of the bunch, changing so little that it might as well be the original episode it comes from.
- Thunder Rumble: Spider-Man fighting the Martian god of thunder is a dubious plot already, but then we get ridiculousness like Spider-Man webbing him to all of the cars of the teenagers in the park, and said god engaging in that most popular of villain pastimes, stealing gold.
- The One-Eyed Idol: The racism and sexism here is bad enough, but even putting that aside, we've got a pretty forgettable plot which Spider-Man should have fixed in a few minutes, as well as a dull Not-Kraven for the villain.
- Diet of Destruction: I think that this was the first episode I saw that I had actual negative feelings towards. A giant robot appears...because? It wants to eat metal...because? It doesn't even have the excuse of being a second or third season episode recycling animation.
No comments:
Post a Comment