Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends Episode Fourteen: The Origin of the Iceman

The Origin of Iceman

First Aired: September 18th, 1982

Synopsis: Peter Parker is telling Angelica and Bobby about a memory reading probe he's got access to at university when the three heroes see a fire truck go by. They change into costume and help stop the fire, but secret government agent Iceman's powers fail him at a critical time. Spider-Man suggests that they check Iceman's history to see whether his powers have failed him before, and so they go to university to use the memory probe. They see Iceman's origin, in which he hid his powers from people at school until he was found by Professor X, who had him join the X-Men alongside the rest of the original five. When Iceman saw a reward from J. Jonah Jameson for the capture of Spider-Man, he went for it, but after Spider-Man went along with it, he found out that the reward was a month's subscription to the Daily Bugle and an autographed photo of Jonah. With no leads found in Iceman's memories, the group stop looking at his memories. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, Videoman's arcade cabinet has been hit by lightning, and the villain has returned to life.

The heroes fight Videoman shortly afterwards, but he leaves and goes after J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle after a while, successfully transporting the publisher into a video game. The heroes follow but Iceman's powers turn off completely in the fight. After Videoman escapes, the heroes program in Videoman's details to their computer to predict where he'll attack next, but Iceman stays at home since he feels useless. While Firestar and Spider-Man fight Videoman at the power plant the computer predicted he'd attack, he brings several video game characters to life from a nearby arcade. When Iceman shows up, thinking that he can help, Spider-Man reveals why he lost his powers - Videoman absorbed electrical impulses from his brain, shutting them off, and he's started to do so to Firestar. Iceman tries to trick Videoman into giving him his powers back but is transported into a video game for his efforts. Spider-Man and Firestar are eventually able to trick the video game characters Videoman brought to life to attack him, and the three do a mutual kill, bringing Jonah and Iceman out of their arcade game, and restoring Iceman's powers.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Lovely bit of unintentional innuendo from Peter at the start of the episode - "I've got access to the probe every night this week!"
• When Iceman's powers fail him at the fire, he exclaims, "Don't tell me I've run out of snow!" Even in the Silver Age, has Iceman ever had an actual limit to the amount of ice he can put out?
• For those curious, the video game characters Videoman brings to life appear to be lawyer-friendly versions of Pacman and a UFO from Space Invaders.

Review: From the title, you'd expect this episode to be entirely flashbacks, or to maybe have a brief framing sequence at the start and end of the episode at best. It certainly starts out that way, but then halfway through it's like the writers went, "Man, Iceman's origin is really boring. Let's get an actual plot in here." While it's no doubt unintentional, it's actually a pretty great subversion of the idea of a flashback episode, and it leaves us plenty of room for a plot in the present, which works great for me. (For what it's worth, while a lot of Iceman's backstory is pretty predictable, there is an excellent bit where he tries to fix a refrigerator and accidentally creates thousands of ice cubes instead).

The other advantage to leaving room for a main plot is, well, it means that it takes away time that the main plot might otherwise have needed to fill with padding. Without Electro to guide him Videoman's pretty much a mindless monster at this point, and so there's no motivation or serious end goal he's got. (Although on that note, why did he intentionally go after Jonah?) An entire episode of him fighting the heroes and bringing video game characters to life would be boring, but when it's only got to take up half the episode it actually feels pretty well paced, particularly since we do get breaks between the fights.

All this does add up to a funny little quirk, however: in spite of the title, Iceman's origin is probably the most boring part of the story. The mystery of whether he's losing his powers (and if so, why) and the fights with Videoman are all a much greater draw here, and so it ultimately could have been cut back a little (or perhaps spiced up a little). Still, overall this episode managed to be a fair bit better than I expected given its title and premise.