Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends Episode Eleven: Knights and Demons

Knights and Demons

First Aired: November 21st, 1981

Synopsis: The villainous magician Modred the Evil was banished to another dimension by the Black Knight and his Ebony Blade centuries ago, but a statue of Darkon the demon has recently been found which will come to life on the next full moon and free him. Peter, Angelica, and Bobby see the statue of Darkon at a medieval fair, and Peter does some research on the Black Knight. The three heroes are in a museum looking at an exhibition about the Black Knight when the full moon appears and Darkon comes to life. The three heroes fight him, but his appearance leads to the Black Knight appearing, as he is needed. He takes the Ebony Blade from the museum and fights Darkon, but when the heroes try assisting him he's so startled by them that Darkon gets the Ebony Blade off him and goes to Modred's dimension to free him. The heroes and the Black Knight start to follow him with the power of the Merlin Medallion, which can also protect them from Modred's magic, but as they're teleporting away Modred uses a spell to knock it out of the Black Knight's hand so they're left without it.

Once the heroes are in Modred's dimension, he teleports them away from each other, and imprisons the Black Knight in chains. Firestar is trapped in a cell which magically turns her heat into ice whenever she tries to escape, while Spider-Man and Iceman are attacked by monsters. They defeat their attackers, meet up, and free Firestar who then frees the Black Knight. Modred, meanwhile, is getting ready to leave the dimension with his demonic army, but the heroes intervene and only Modred and they are able to escape. While Modred fights the heroes back on Earth, Spider-Man finds the Melin Medallion, which Black Knight is able to use to banish Modred. Back in his prison dimension, Modred is attacked by his demonic army since he was unable to free them. Black Knight disappears with the Ebony Blade, saying that he's no longer needed, and in the aftermath the gang end up playing the popular tabletop game Sorcery and Serpents because they're a bunch of nerds.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• As all Marvel Zombies will know, there have been three major characters in the comics to use the name Black Knight: Sir Percy of Scandia, a medieval knight, Nathan Garrett, a villain who combined modern-day science with archaic weaponry, and Dane Whitman, an Avenger who inherited Garrett's gear. This version of Black Knight appears to be Sir Percy, with a lot of Dane's visual aesthetic.
• After having not had a single appearance throughout the entire series so far, we get a brief cameo of J. Jonah Jameson in this episode, complaining when he sees Black Knight. Thanks, writers!

Review: Contrary to what his 2015 series would lead you to believe, Black Knight can be a pretty cool character when written well. You can go for a few angles with him - the combination of modern-day science with medieval sorcery, the curse of the Ebony Blade, the legacy he has to live up to...heck, even focus on the fact that he's British if you want; half the Avengers can't claim that. Unfortunately, this episode doesn't really focus on any of those cool aspects, instead focusing more on the "he's from medieval times" aspect.

As you might expect, this leads to the show about superheroes being sent to another dimension to fight monsters, and, well...it's hard for this episode to not feel like a lost episode of the 1967 Spider-Man series. Watch a shot of Spider-Man fighting skeletons riding atop lizards and tell me that that doesn't feel right out of said show, albeit a bit more cleanly animated. Modred feels like just another generic sorcerer, and I can't say that I'm feeling the threat level he possesses when his big plan to get rid of the Merlin Medallion is to whip up some wind so that it's knocked out of Black Knight's hands.

I guess I've only got myself to blame. If I'd known that this episode was using Sir Percy, I probably would have lowered my expectations a bit, and while I don't think that it would have redeemed the story, it would probably have made it more tolerable. Admittedly, I can't say that there's anything offensively bad here, but still, it's hard to care about a lot of this.

P.S. The Black Knight is Zelgius.