Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends Episode Five: Swarm

Swarm

First Aired: October 10th, 1981

Synopsis: Angelica and Peter's science teacher is preparing to send a rocket probe into space with his class when they see through a telescope at the observatory they're at that a meteor is headed towards Earth. Angelica changes to Firestar and investigates the meteor after saving a plane from being hit by it. When it lands it irradiates a nearby beehive full of bees, which become a collective being known as Swarm. Swarm uses the eye lasers he apparently has to make his beehive gigantic and to turn a nearby farmer into a human-bee hybrid. When Firestar's unable to defeat him, she flies back to Peter and tells him she'll need his and Iceman's help. While Peter heads home to grab Iceman, Swarm creates giant bees and more bee people. Iceman, Firestar and Spider-Man all confront Swarm at his giant hive, and Spider-Man finds out that he's immune to turning into a bee person because of his spider blood. Firestar and Iceman aren't, however, and they're now ready to capture Spider-Man.


Spider-Man speculates that if he can get Iceman and Firestar away from the meteor, the radiation it emits will stop affecting them and will return them to normal. He leads them to a lead-lined room at the university and is proven correct. The three heroes return to the hive, this time disguising themselves as bee people, and manage to reach the meteor within its depths. Firestar flies it out of the hive, followed by Iceman and Spider-Man when they realise that they can't beat Swarm. At the university, Firestar places the meteor in the probe from the start of the episode, and although there are giant bees surrounding the university, they manage to launch the probe into space. Without the meteor Swarm dissipates since there's no radiation powering him, and all of the bee people and giant bees return to normal. In the aftermath, Aunt May, who was turned into a bee person, serves pancakes to the heroes and notes that she's craving honey for some reason.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Throughout the episode, Swarm and the bee people alternate between being able to speak normally and only being able to say Swarm's name. You can bet that gets annoying quickly.
• When bee-person Firestar raises her arms to fire a blast of fire at Spider-Man, there's a minor animation error where we can see a gap in her hair the exact same shape as the arm that was previously blocking it.

Review: And here I was thinking that we'd escaped the nonsense we were getting in the 1967 Spider-Man series. A meteor releasing space radiation that unites a swarm of bees, who can then turn humans into bee people? I could maybe accept one of those but combined together there's just no hope. If it weren't for the presence of Firestar and Iceman I could probably buy this as a lost episode of the '67 series.

Swarm is often treated as a joke villain in the comics, even though by all rights he should be absolutely terrifying. I've been stung by bees before and it's not a nice experience. I can understand that the writers can't exactly have Swarm stinging the heroes to death, but having him mutate people into bee people is a bit too far in the other direction. Given the inability of them to really make the most of the character (you'll notice there's no mention of his comics' origin in the synopsis, in which he's a Nazi scientist before becoming Swarm), it makes you wonder why Swarm was chosen as a villain at all. Easy to animate?

Even ignoring the ridiculousness of the plot there's not a lot here to write home about. I like the small touch of Iceman not having the same classes as Firestar and Spider-Man, and there's a hilarious moment where Spider-Man webs himself to a giant bee and just kind of hangs there while he thinks about how to turn Firestar and Iceman back to normal, but moments like these are few and far between. I'd love for this to be a silly episode that I can laugh at, but bee people is too ridiculous for me to enjoy. A quick check of the internet shows that this isn't the last time Swarm will appear in a Spider-Man cartoon. Let's hope that next time is a better showing.