Spider-Man (1981) Episode Seven: The Pied Piper of New York Town

The Pied Piper of New York Town

First Aired: October 24th, 1981

Synopsis: At Mysterio's nightclub disco hour show, there's an advertisement saying that Spider-Man will appear. Spider-Man does show up, suspecting a trap, and is proven correct when Mysterio activates hypnotic music which lets him get the attendees to attack Spider-Man. Spider-Man escapes, but the next day at university Mysterio activates the same music. As Peter Parker, he goes along with the crowd and pretends to be hypnotised, but has to switch to Spider-Man to save a similarly-hypnotised J. Jonah Jameson from falling off a building. Mysterio commands his hypnotised army to rob a bank, and when he reveals that he has music which lets him hypnotise Spider-Man too, Spider-Man is locked up in the bank's vault.

Spider-Man is able to escape from the vault, and heads to where the army of hypnotised people has headed - an army base, to take control of a nuclear missile. He webs over the speakers playing the hypnotic music from Mysterio's van, which frees everyone from the hypnotism. He then heads back to Mysterio's disco hour show from earlier in the episode, and while Mysterio tries to distract him with illusions, Spider-Man is able to find the real Mysterio and defeat him. Afterwards, as Peter Parker, he acts in a play for university which he was rehearsing earlier in the episode, which doesn't impress J. Jonah Jameson until he sneezes.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• The sign on Mysterio's disco hour show advertising Spider-Man's appearance is missing a hyphen. Poor job, Mysterio.
• In the first fight in Mysterio's disco hour show, Spider-Man is unable to break into Mysterio's office, as Mysterio claims that "That door is a special creation of my own - designed to keep out unwanted guests!" I have a similar thing on my own door; it's called a lock.
• Spider-Man comments that the reason he's immune to Mysterio's hypnotic music is because "My spider-nervous system isn't affected by Mysterio's beat!" Sure, let's go with that.

Review: If I had to sum up the problems with this episode in a word, I'd go with inconsistent. Let's look at Mysterio for an example: At the start of the episode, he's luring Spider-Man to his disco hour show so that he can have hypnotised attendees attack him, but the very next day he's decided to rob a bank, before moving from that to stealing a nuclear missile. It's like this guy is flipping through a supervillain handbook, trying desperately to find a good motivation to work upon.

That's far from the only inconsistency, however. If you're wondering why I keep referring to Mysterio's building as a disco hour show, well, that's because that's what the episode refers to it as, even though it's quite clearly some sort of nightclub. But if it is a nightclub, why does Spider-Man refer to unmasking Mysterio on-camera when he goes there? Why does Mysterio have a backstory mentioned by the attendees at the start of the episode? We also get the lovely line from Spider-Man of, "I haven't seen New York this empty since...come to think of it, I've never seen New York this empty!", implying that Mysterio has hypnotised all of New York...yet when we see the hypnotised people, the group has maybe twenty or thirty people total. It's all a bit of a mess.

Overall, this is probably the least threatening Mysterio we've seen so far (ironic, given how close he comes to stealing a nuclear missile). I'm wondering whether this episode was originally written to star Hypno Hustler - he'd been around long enough by this point, and hypnotic music fits his M.O. more than it does Mysterio's. Not that it would redeem the episode if Hypno-Hustler were the villain, mind, but at least Mysterio wouldn't have this embarrassing appearance on his scorecard.