Spider-Man (1981) Episode One: Bubble, Bubble, Oil and Trouble

Bubble, Bubble, Oil and Trouble

First Aired: September 12th, 1981

Synopsis: Spider-Man encounters Doctor Octopus stealing a ruby from a museum, and after a brief scuffle in which Ock gets away, Spider-Man notices that Octopus didn't steal any more valuable items. While doing research for his homework on landmarks of New York, Spider-Man later encounters Octopus at university, this time getting away with a chunk of quartz. Although as Peter Parker he wants time to do his homework, he ends up tracking down Octopus to his hidden sewer base. Octopus successfully traps Spider-Man in the base and then floods it with water before escaping.

As it turns out, the items Doctor Octopus stole allowed him to modify his tentacles. He uses the modifications, in addition to the aquatic vehicle he's in, to steal oil from a tanker, declaring that he'll do so to every tanker until he controls all of the oil, and thus, the world. Spider-Man, meanwhile, manages to escape, and goes after Octopus. After stopping him from robbing another tanker, Spidey ends up helping the tanker to get started from being shut down, and it drives towards Ock, enabling Spider-Man to web up the villain and leave him for the Navy. Shortly afterwards, although Peter has great photos to sell to J. Jonah Jameson of Spider-Man all over the city, he ends up instead using them to make a photo essay for his homework on the landmarks of New York.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Just like the first episode of the 1967 series, this episode gives no explanation for who Spider-Man, his supporting cast, or Doctor Octopus are, apparently either trusting audiences to already know or to pick it up through context. It's pretty interesting to compare to both the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie and The Amazing Spider-Man, which at times felt almost as if they had a checklist of items to establish before the plot could properly get started. (Both are great movies, mind).
• Unexpectedly, J. Jonah Jameson has a nephew named Mortimer, who appears to work at the Daily Bugle as a rival photographer to Peter Parker. Mortimer appears to be an original character to this show - to the best of my knowledge, Jonah's never been mentioned as having a nephew in the comics. (Or any siblings, for that matter).
• When Spider-Man tries to get into Octopus' vehicle, the villain comments that "Nothing can penetrate this atomic glass I created!" As opposed to, you know, all that glass that isn't made out of atoms.
• During the final fight, Spider-Man is temporarily knocked out by a sonic emitter in one of Octopus' tentacles, and he sinks to the bottom of the river. What happens next, you ask? Why, a freakin' shark appears and tries to eat him, of course.

Review: I don't want to make strong comparisons between different Spider-Man series too often, as I'd prefer to judge them on their own merits, but nevertheless it has to be said: something I greatly appreciated here in comparison to the 1967 series was how much stuff happened in this episode. I try to stick to two paragraphs for the synopsis since I don't want to get bogged down with details, but if I wanted to I easily could have stretched this out to at least four paragraphs. There's so much stuff happening here - Peter's attempts to take a break and do his homework, Mortimer going around in the Daily Bugle helicopter looking for photos, Spider-Man jet-skiing while webbed to a shark - and very little of it feels like padding.

As for the content of the episode itself, it starts out strongly enough, although there are a few questionable moments. The big one, of course, is Ock's plan to rule the world by systematically robbing every oil tanker. Why does he think they won't take measures to stop him once they're anticipating it, or to raid his oil supply? Why is he going after the tankers rather than rigs, or a bigger source of oil? It's a bit silly and if his plans were less ambitious, the issue wouldn't exist. Another small issue is a bottle of acid conveniently popping up to help Spider-Man escape from Ock's flooding base right when he needs it.

Still, overall, I can't deny that this is an enjoyable episode. The Peter Parker moments show that the writers get the character - between a scene of Aunt May almost walking in on him in his Spider-Man costume, as well as the running subplot of him trying to find time to do his homework, I feel that he's in good hands. You could definitely do a lot worse than opening with a simple Spider-Man vs. Doctor Octopus conflict - here's hoping the series can keep up the quality.