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.



Webbing Does Not Work That Way:

• Been a while since we've had one of these, huh? When Rhino's charging at Spider-Man in his hideout - the same Rhino who destroyed a train with this charge, let's not forget - Spider-Man shoots webbing at him, which pushes him back with enough force to slam him into a wall.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Rhino's motivation jumps around a bit in this episode. Early on in the episode, he says, "I must have more gold. And then - I will control the world!", which I guess makes sense if you figure that he's planning on manipulating the economy somehow. Later, however, he says that he's using the gold to make a statue as a monument to himself. I guess it's possible that he changed his mind about what to do once he saw how much gold he had.
• During the train scene, Spider-Man expresses bewilderment at who Rhino is, even though he saw him earlier in the episode (a day or two ago in-universe, at most?), and also wonders what he's doing there, in spite of the implication that he's on the train to protect it from Rhino.

Review: In case you couldn't tell, this episode is another one cobbled together by recycling scenes from previous episodes - in this case, Horn of the Rhino and The Golden Rhino. Judging by Rhino's shifting motivation for stealing the gold and Spider-Man's temporary amnesia regarding his foe, they also reused a lot of the recorded dialogue, too.

Really, what is there to say about this one? Most of it is a montage of Rhino stealing stuff, which works, I guess. Him making a golden statue of himself is just as ridiculous as the first time, and the ending is anticlimatic as all heck - whatever momentum this episode has is definitely lost in the last minute or two.

Worth your time? I guess, if you're a massive fan of the Rhino and need to see every one of his animated appearances, regardless of whether or not it's anything new. You might have some difficulty watching it though, as if that criteria fits you, I suspect you don't actually exist.

The Madness of Mysterio

Synopsis: Mysterio laughs over a model of an amusement park, and examines a camera-like device which he claims is his greatest weapon. Shortly afterwards, he appears on television and threatens to destroy the city if Spider-Man doesn't come and fight him where they first fought. Spider-Man does so, arriving at an abandoned movie studio. He fights Mysterio briefly, before Mysterio shows Spider-Man the miniature amusement park and activates the camera-like device. Things get blurry for Spider-Man for a moment, but when they clear, he finds that he's shrunken down and is in the miniature amusement park.

Mysterio tries to crush Spider-Man, who runs away into one of the park's buildings. After getting past some mirrors coated with poison and falling through a trapdoor into a river, Spider-Man ends up outside again. He notes that Mysterio hasn't given him an opportunity to think, and realises why. Swinging up to Mysterio, the villain disappears into a puff of smoke even though Spidey should pose no threat. This confirms Spider-Man's suspicions, and he searches the park to find the real Mysterio, hidden in a control tower. After Mysterio is knocked out, Spider-Man explains what happened - he wasn't really shrunken down, he was just placed into a normal-sized amusement park which was the same layout as the one on the table. It was all a trick by Mysterio to try and make him think he had shrunken. With Mysterio defeated, Spider-Man swings off.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• This issue is based on Amazing Spider-Man #66 - #67.
• Although Mysterio (and Spider-Man confirms) that the first time they fought was in a movie studio, he's incorrect on that - in both the comics and the show, the first time they fought was on the Brooklyn Bridge, a site which has otherwise never been used in any Spider-Man story ever. They did fight in a movie studio at the end of the episode/issue, but that causes another discrepancy - Mysterio says that only he and Spider-Man were there when they fought, but there were plenty of film members whom they were interrupting. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we should be grateful that Spider-Man didn't have to head to that beach from that one pirate episode for this fight.
• For reasons which I'm sure have to do with animation budgets, Mysterio's changed from his usual dome-headed, purple-and-green costume to the green-skinned jerk in the screenshot above. For once I'm not quite sure why - one of the neat things about Mysterio's look is that you don't have to lip sync, and aside from trying to smash Spider-Man while he's giant-sized, most of his actions in this episode are him standing around and gloating, animation they surely already had for him.

Review: You know how this goes by now - if the episode's based on a specific comic book issue, the odds are that it's probably a good story. And unsurprisingly, this one is! While Mysterio's look may be jarring and more than a little annoying, it hits all of the beats of the comic, only one of which feels a bit superfluous (specifically, Mysterio appearing in the street in a puff of smoke, then disappearing maybe thirty seconds later).

Probably the biggest flaw of the episode is that with the amount of time it runs, there's not much time for Spider-Man to explore the miniature carnival, and so it feels like a lot of setup for not a lot of payoff. While I wouldn't want ten minutes of Spider-Man wandering around, trying to work out what's happened, I feel that the opportunity to find a trap or gimmick with a few different stock amusement park rides was a missed one - it could have been cool to see how Mysterio alters them to be deadly. The same could arguably be said about the comic it's based on, but that had the advantage of some great art, angles, and narration to make the threats feel more serious. It also used some of its space to check in on Spider-Man's supporting cast, which this story doesn't really have the room to do.

Still, even with that flaw and Mysterio's ridiculous new appearance, I can't say I had that bad a time with this story. Looking ahead at the rest of the season, it looks like this might be the last good one in a while, as much as I hope I'm wrong on that, so the positives should be savoured while able.