Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends Episode Eighteen: The Bride of Dracula!

The Bride of Dracula!

First Aired: September 24th, 1983

Synopsis: At a party, Angelica goes off with a mysterious stranger into a garden, whereupon he hypnotises her and says that she'll be his bride. Peter Parker and secret government agent Bobby Drake see this, and get suspicious when they see him drive her to the airport. They follow him in their alter egos, but by the time they arrive he's already gotten onto a flight to Transylvania with her. Spider-Man and Iceman get on the outside of a plane which is travelling in roughly the same direction. The stranger turns out to be Dracula, who hypnotises the pilots of Spider-Man and Iceman's plane to get them to land. Once his plane arrives in Transylvania, a Frankenstein's Monster-esque robot takes her down to the basement of his castle, whereupon she's put into a coffin to sleep. Although Angelica snaps out of the trance she's been put into and tries fighting back against Dracula, he hypnotises her once more.


The pilot of Iceman and Spider-Man's plane snaps out of his hypnotic suggestion, so when the plane is flying over Transylvania the two leap off and make their way to Castle Dracula. The heroes briefly have to fight a hypnotised Firestar, but when the robot and Dracula's werewolf-like assistant attack them, they flee further into the castle. They find Dracula and Firestar once more, but this time Spider-Man mentions things from back home to Firestar, which snaps her out of the trance but knocks her unconscious. The heroes run away with her unconscious body, but end up trapped in a laboratory. Spider-Man manages to throw some chemicals which revive Angelica with their fumes, and she creates light, affecting Dracula. With him weakened, the robot falls apart and the werewolf turns human. Dracula reverts to a more human form, apparently having forgotten the whole thing. In the aftermath, the heroes are back in America, but this time when Peter and Bobby see Angelica dancing with a stranger at the party, they escort her away from him rather than trusting her to take care of herself.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• As seen in the above image, this version of Dracula has a beard and goatee. Something everyone always forgets about Dracula in the original Stoker novel is that he's got a moustache. (No hairy palms in this version, though).
• Yeah, Dracula can usually turn into a bat, which is cool I guess, but this version of Dracula has the ability to turn his plane into a giant bat. How cool is that?

Review: I do love me a good vampire story, and there's plenty of ridiculous stuff in this episode to laugh at, but at the end of the day, I can't say that there was much good in here. I think that a big part of what harms the episode is the apparent need to take the characters to Transylvania. Yeah, it's an established tradition, and I can see the appeal when you're writing a vampire story, but was it really worth it? We spend most of the episode just getting there, when we could have had a cool urban fantasy story if we'd just stayed in New York.

I'm also undecided on how I feel about Angelica in this episode. On the one hand, she spends most of the episode as a MacGuffin if you're feeling generous, a damsel in distress if you're not. She's not in control of her own actions for the majority of the plot, and there's very little attempt to show that she even resisted Dracula's hypnotism. On the other hand, when she is in control of herself, she kicks ass and is crucial to saving the day. I'm too male, I guess, to call this an offensive portrayal, but it sure is disappointing.

At the end of the day, the joys I got from this episode ultimately came not from the vampire or superhero aspects, but from the dumb stuff that happens. Iceman and Spider-Man decide the best way to get to another country is to jump on the exterior of a plane! Dracula knows who all of the superheroes are! He also has a pit full of crocodiles in his castle! It's too little, too late to salvage the episode completely, but it does at least bring some positives to it.