Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Seventy-Five: Contest of Champions, Part One

Contest of Champions, Part One

First Aired: October 3rd, 2015

Synopsis: Peter finds Manhattan strangely empty and watches as Aunt May is teleported away before his eyes. He goes to the Avengers as Spider-Man to see if they know what's going on but finds the Executioner, Beetle, and Abomination instead. While fighting them he finds a force field surrounding Manhattan before being teleported away. He's in the spaceship of the Collector, who reveals that he's being coerced into playing a game with his brother, the Grandmaster, involving pitting heroes against villains. If Grandmaster wins the heroes get to take over the world, whereas if the Collector wins the New York civilians, who are being held in stasis, are freed. The Collector chooses Spider-Man, Hulk, and Iron Man for his team while the Grandmaster chooses Wendigo, Molten Man, and Kraven the Hunter for his.

The teams are beamed to Central Park to fight, but shortly into the fight the Hulk goes off on his own and is taken out by some powder of Kraven's. Spider-Man and Iron Man try going after Kraven since he's the leader but Iron Man gets defeated by Molten Man. Spider-Man manages to get some breathing room between himself and the villains and after musing that he'd like a team to help him, goes after the villains. He's able to lure Wendigo away and tase him, which defeats him, and then doubles back for the exhausted Molten Man. Spider-Man manages to get him to a lake and get him to burn through the dock, defeating him when he hits the water. Spider-Man then goes after Kraven, who's determined to win, but Spider-Man simply punches him out. Afterwards, Spider-Man is returned to the Collector's spaceship, but finds out that although he won, this is only the first round of the contest of champions.

Miscellaneous Notes:

• For those unaware, Contest of Champions was a comic book published by Marvel in the early 80s, originally designed to tie into the Olympics. While the premise - the Collector and Grandmaster have teams fighting each other - is the same as this episode, and presumably this arc, it notably featured only heroes fighting each other, not the mix of heroes and villains that this episode has.
• The Wendigo that Grandmaster chooses to fight on his side is referred to as being the king of the Wendigos, which makes me think that maybe the writers of this episode have no clue how Wendigos in the Marvel Universe work.

Review: I've commented before that I'm not really a big fan of episodes that are all fighting, all the time, but for the most part this manages to work surprisingly well. Once the episode gets going it's fun to speculate on how Spider-Man and his allies will win, and the fact that a character getting defeated takes them out of the fight permanently means that there are no second reprieves or characters getting back up after being defeated. The villainous team that they have to fight against has a good mixture of fighting styles, and I think that this is the first time in a long time when I've been impressed by something a cartoon Kraven has done.

Naturally, it can't all be smooth sailing though. Spider-Man defeating Wendigo with his taser webs is lazy storytelling, given that Wendigo should be able to withstand something like that. While I know this is nitpicking, there's no in-universe justification for why when Spider-Man's teleported to the Collector's ship, he's allowed to hang around with the Grandmaster and Collector rather than being put into stasis like literally every other character. Speaking of the Collector's ship, Spider-Man clearly recognises it and the Collector, when they've never appeared in the series before - I'm guessing that they appeared in either the contemporary Avengers cartoon or the Hulk one, and while it doesn't hinder the episode too much, it would have been nice to get a throwaway line giving some details of what happened last time Spider-Man met the Collector.

Still, this episode managed to work fairly well given its simple plot, and minus the stupid taser thing, all of the defeats in this episode showed some creativity that's often lacking in these fights, feeling justified as a result. If the whole arc can continue being this creative, it should be a pretty fun one, and a good way to cap off the season. I don't want to get too confident - the Spider-Verse started off well, don't forget - but this is a good start to the arc.