Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends Episode Twenty: Attack of the Arachnoid

Attack of the Arachnoid

First Aired: October 8th, 1983

Synopsis: The Spider-Friends have a fight with Scorpion, who has a vial of a gas which can make villains. The heroes are able to stop him, but some of the gas escapes in the process. Meanwhile, a scientist named Zoltan has created a serum which will give him Spider-Man's powers, thus letting him commit crimes as Spider-Man. Spider-Man will get the blame, while he'll get money for his research. He injects himself with the serum and soon starts committing crimes, during which time he fights and defeats secret government agent Iceman and Firestar. The two heroes question Peter, who was sleeping at the time, and together they decide to try and find Spider-Man's doppelganger. Unfortunately, Spider-Man and Zoltan's spider-senses interfere with each other, and Spider-Man blacks out after getting a spider-tracer onto Zoltan. When he comes to, he finds himself under arrest for the crimes Zoltan committed.

Spider-Man refuses to reveal his identity in court, and through the legal work of Matt Murdock is locked up in jail but with his identity safe. Scorpion is in the cell next to his, and he breaks the wall between them to fight Spider-Man. Their fight shorts out the force field cell door, and they're soon fighting all over the island the prison's on. Back in New York, Iceman and Firestar track down Zoltan with the spider-tracer, but he transforms into a half-man, half-spider monster named Arachnoid and goes on a rampage. Zoltan's assistant gives them the cure for his spider-powers, wanting him to be human again. In prison, Spider-Man's eventually able to defeat Scorpion, and since Arachnoid's revealed himself to the public and was therefore the one committing crimes, Spider-Man is freed. He takes the cure for Arachnoid's powers, and after their spider-senses cause the two excruciating head pain again, uses the opportunity to get the cure to Arachnoid. In the aftermath, Zoltan's assistant is also arrested, and Iceman and Firestar apologise to Spider-Man for suspecting him of the crimes.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• This episode appears to be based on the Spider-Man (1981) episode The Web of Nephilia. Both have a scientist who tries getting Spider-Man powers, only to become a hybrid monster instead. Given that that episode aired nearly two years before this one, I have to wonder how much the similarities were intentional.
• When Spider-Man's arrested, it's mentioned that his handcuffs are adamantium, a nice little detail I wasn't expecting. 
• In this episode, Scorpion's tail is depicted as having a laser. I'm fairly sure that at this point in the comics, it was still solely used as a bludgeoning weapon (he didn't get upgrades until he started working for Justin Hammer in the 90's, right?) He's also got these adorable little snipping tools that retract from his wrists, which I'm fairly sure is unique to this show.
• The other supervillains shown in the prison Spider-Man and Scorpion are in consist of Fly, Electro, Blastaar, and Klaw.
• Was there a staff member with the nickname or initials of Xam? (Or alternatively, Max as their first name?) There's some graffiti in one scene that says "Xam rules!" and a newspaper can be seen with an article  titled "$50,000 Xam receives grat with open arms."

Review: As mentioned above, this episode is similar to The Web of Nephilia, and it's really interesting comparing the two. In the former episode the scientist who gets transformed is sympathetic and being manipulated by his lab assistant, while here the scientist is villainous and the assistant is the one with morals. We also get to see Zoltan use his powers as pretty much an evil Spider-Man, which is actually a really cool idea. Unless you want to count Venom, I don't really think there's an evil version of Spider-Man, unlike how, say, Steel Serpent is pretty much evil Iron Fist.

There's a bit of unintentional hilariousness in the way that Iceman and Firestar seemingly arbitrarily switch between, "Let's help Spidey! He must be innocent!" to "I can't believe he committed those crimes!" The intent seems to be that they think that the gas from the start of the episode made Spider-Man temporarily evil, but it was vague as heck. Not helping matters is that the narration described the gas as "making supervillains", which I interpreted as giving people powers for most of the episode.

Something that did please me quite a lot was the way that Scorpion was worked back into the plot, and ended up giving Spider-Man something to do. I was fully expecting him to only be relevant for the opening scene, but the fight actually ends up taking up a good chunk of the second half of the episode. Granted, it doesn't really contribute to the plot that much, but, hey...gives Spider-Man something to do, right?

Going back to The Web of Nephilia connections, I feel that while the former's episode puts a lot more emphasis on the villain's similarities and differences to Spider-Man, this one was ultimately probably a bit better paced - both because of having more characters to do stuff with, and, as mentioned, I loved the idea of Evil Spider-Man. The net sum of it all, I guess, is that both end up showing two totally viable interpretations of a similar concept. Not perfect, but not bad.