Spider-Man (1981) Episode Twelve: The A-B-C's of D-O-O-M

The A-B-C's of D-O-O-M

First Aired: November 28th, 1981

Synopsis: Doctor Doom is in a mountain fighting a bald man named Goron, who can shoot lasers from his eyes and teleport small objects. Doom stops the fight by proposing that he give Goron control over half of the world, which Goron agrees to. Shortly afterwards, world leaders are invited to Latveria to see Doctor Doom's latest invention - gigantic fruit and vegetables which can help solve world hunger. Although the American ambassador is suspicious of Doom, Goron shoots some sort of laser from his eyes at him which gets him on Doom's side. Later, Goron gives a public demonstration of the giant food which wows the audience - with the exception of Spider-Man, who is in attendance. When Spider-Man sneaks backstage, Goron has Spider-Man attacked by giant mushrooms, which he claims eat insects.



Spider-Man manages to escape by using a nearby fire extinguisher to freeze the mushrooms. In the meantime Goron has been allowed to go to a space center to use their resources to assist with the giant food, but he ends up locking up the scientists there and hypnotising someone into letting him into their computer systems. Through the computer systems, which connect to the defence industry's computers, nuclear missiles start to be activated, and will only be shut down if the world turns leadership over to Doom. Spider-Man appears and gets into a fight with Goron, which ends with Goron using his lasers in front of a giant mirror. They reflect back at him and hit him, turning him into a much weaker-looking man. Spider-Man then has only seconds to shut down the nuclear missiles, but is successfully able to guess the password Doom has set for them - D-O-O-M.

Subplots: It might be a little early to tell whether this is a subplot, but still...in Latveria, an old man discovers inside a factory of Doom's that Doom is making a robot duplicate of his son. (I'm fairly certain that there was a scene in an earlier Doom episode which had the son trying to escape Latveria and getting captured, but I'm not 100% sure).

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Why is the American ambassador so suspicious of Doom? Because he actually remembers what happened with Doom at the UN in previous episodes. Not a bad use of continuity, although it does make everyone else look pretty gullible as a result.
• When Goron sets the mushrooms on Spider-Man, he comments, "These plants eat insects!" Four words, and yet he makes two basic scientific mistakes with them - spiders aren't insects, and mushrooms aren't plants.

Review: Well, I hope you're all in the mood for the Goron show, featuring a random bald man with vague psychic powers, who we've never seen before and will probably never see again. The episode starts out strongly enough, intriguing us as to why Goron was fighting Doom and why he's ready to stop fighting quickly enough, but it quickly goes downhill from there.

For the majority of this episode, the focus is Goron, Goron, Goron. Spider-Man more or less only appears in two scenes - the public demonstration of the giant food and the fight at the space center - and it's hard to feel like the show's about him. I could handle a villain-centric episode if the villain were more compelling, or if there was a likable endgoal in mind, but who on Earth thinks that Goron's cool? He's such a blank slate, with so little that we know about him, that he almost feels more like a plot device than an actual character.

Even putting aside all of those issues...Doom's plan is to impress people with giant fruit, so that Goron can get access to a space center, so they can take over nukes. The nuclear missile endgoal is actually a pretty good one, and feels a bit more realistic than Doom tricking the UN into announcing him as ruler of the world, but the steps to get there are so slow, boring, and uninteresting that they don't justify themselves, any more than they do this episode.