Spider-Man (1981) Episode Twenty-Three: The Vulture has Landed

The Vulture has Landed

First Aired: February 13th, 1982

Synopsis: Spider-Man fails to save a scientist from being kidnapped by the Vulture, and shortly afterwards finds from J. Jonah Jameson that Vulture has been kidnapping several scientists. J. Jonah Jameson wants Peter Parker to get in touch with Harry Osborn for a quote about all of this. When Peter goes to see Harry, he's temporarily lost his civilian clothes due to some window cleaners removing the webbing he'd hidden them in, and so he first of all sneaks in and grabs some of Harry's clothes. Vulture appears at this point and, mistaking Peter for Harry, kidnaps him and takes him to his blimp in the sky. The other scientists have been forced to help Vulture, including making him robotic birds, and Vulture forces "Harry" to help him make his blimp invisible. With Peter's only other option being to be dropped out of the blimp, he agrees to.


After Peter successfully recreates Harry Osborn's invisibility formula and applies it to the blimp, he switches to Spider-Man while Vulture is gone, and saves the scientists. Vulture returns and drops Spider-Man out of the blimp, but he's able to save himself by making an ersatz parachute of an advertising banner a plane is flying. When Peter goes into the Daily Bugle, Jonah tells Peter that the Jupiter Probe is splashing down in an hour and that he needs to join them. Peter realises that the Jupiter Probe has rare space rocks and gems which the Vulture is planning to steal. Sure enough, the Vulture manages to grab the probe, and Spider-Man has to launch himself to the blimp via catapult. He manages to destroy Vulture's mechanical birds and get the probe out of the blimp. When Vulture escapes the blimp, Spider-Man follows him and webs him up, taking him to the police. In the aftermath, J. Jonah Jameson is looking for the probe, only to fall off the recovery vessel and into the water beside it.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• This series uses the Adrian Toomes version of Vulture, as opposed to the '67 series using Blackie Drago.
• I mentioned back in Revenge of the Green Goblin that there was no mention of Harry Osborn. Well, this episode confirms it - he definitely exists in this universe! (Although he doesn't make a physical appearance).
• Peter mentions that "if it wasn't for me, Harry Osborn wouldn't have passed chemistry!" When Harry first appeared, he was in university alongside Peter, and while he was definitely shown to have a harder time of it than Peter, he was also shown to be competent enough at science that later he was able to run Osborn Industries/Oscorp. The idea of Harry relying on Peter for science help is something that is often used (I definitely get Sam Raimi trilogy vibes when I think of it), but this might be one of the first times it's mentioned.
• When Spider-Man's swimming to the recovery vessel, he makes mention of Namor, the Sub-Mariner.

Review: This episode starts out quite strongly, with a good mystery as to why Vulture is kidnapping scientists, Peter amongst them, but it doesn't take long before it descends into some pretty silly stuff. Having Peter mistaken for Harry Osborn is a great plot point, and I honestly think that you could have gotten a whole episode out of Peter constantly trying to get away to be Spider-Man while on the blimp, but unfortunately the episode doesn't seem to see the potential in this, and soon we've got Spider-Man fighting robot birds (which at one point somehow manage to get him locked up in a cage).

The robot birds themselves are just silly enough that I think I find them endearing, but by no means do they redeem the episode, nor justify sticking with it. They're pretty much the last good point in the episode, actually - after Spider-Man gets off the blimp, it's pretty much just silly situations, one after the other. There's an extended sequence of Spider-Man dicking around with a small biplane on his way to the ground, Jonah telling Peter to join himself and Peter's best friend Robbie to get to the recovery vessel only for Peter to have to swim there for some reason, Spider-Man firing himself to the blimp via catapult...That's not to mention Peter jumping to the conclusion that "Jupiter Probe coming to Earth = the Vulture wants to steal from it". Wouldn't he have been embarrassed if the Vulture was off robbing something completely different?

If the momentum could have been kept up from the opening act, we would have had a pretty solid story here. Bring Harry Osborn himself into the story, maybe, have him wonder why his place looks like it's been robbed, why there are reports of him having been kidnapped, question why his clothes that would fit Peter Parker are missing. Instead, we lose all of that potential for a pretty forgettable story. Is it wrong if I say I think I prefer the '67 series Vulture at this point?