Spider-Man (1981) Episode Five: The Sandman is Coming

The Sandman is Coming

First Aired: October 10th, 1981

Synopsis: Peter Parker and a fellow classmate of his, Sally-Ann Beaumont, are witnessing the landing of the first Mars explorer. Once it's landed, Sandman appears and steals the soil sample inside, which is irradiated and therefore gives him powers when he absorbs it into himself. When Peter switches to Spider-Man and fights him, his mask is ripped and he ends up fleeing so his identity isn't exposed. Back in New York, he receives a telegram from the school board saying that he has to show up to a disciplinary hearing at 4 PM or else risk being expelled. With little time left before the hearing, Peter switches to Spider-Man and starts web-swinging there, but on the way has to intervene in a bank robbery Sandman is in the middle of. When he confronts Sandman, Sandman is able to use his irradiation from the Martian soil to somehow knock out Spider-Man.

Spider-Man (1981) Episode Four: Curiosity Killed the Spider-Man

Curiosity Killed the Spider-Man

First Aired: October 3rd, 1981

Synopsis: Spider-Man is planning to meet Betty Brant at the Daily Bugle's New Years party, but when he sees the Black Cat breaking in he has to go in to stop her as she pickpockets the guests. Although he manages to capture her and carry her out of the party, she manages to escape. The next day, she returns to the Daily Bugle and tells J. Jonah Jameson to print an announcement that she'll steal the Maltese Mouse, a rare statue that's coming to America. When Peter Parker tries to stop her as Spider-Man, he's briefly waylaid by a decoy armoured truck, and has to quickly call up Betty Brant to postpone another date he has with her. He manages to make his way to the ship where the Black Cat is stealing the Mouse, and after an extended chase sequence, he manages to recover it from her, although she gets away. In the aftermath, he's offered a job to guard the Mouse when it appears on a host show that night.

Spider-Man (1981) Episode Three: Lizards, Lizards, Everywhere

Lizards, Lizards, Everywhere

First Aired: September 26th, 1981

Synopsis: A zoo has its reptiles mysteriously freed, leading to them attacking the civilians there. Spider-Man manages to save them, noting as he does so that he appears to be getting a cold. The reptiles all manage to escape, and it's revealed that the Lizard was the one who freed them. He steals a subway car and intentionally derails it, so that he can block off a section of subway tunnel to use as a breeding ground for his reptiles. When he tries to steal another subway car to block off the other end, Spider-Man hears about it, and although he doesn't stop Lizard from derailing that one, he does save the civilians that were onboard this train.

Spider-Man (1981) Episode Two: Dr. Doom, Master of the World

Dr. Doom, Master of the World

First Aired: September 19th, 1981

Synopsis: In his flying blimp, Doctor Doom captures Air Force One with the US President aboard. When Peter Parker, waiting at the airport to get photos of the president, hears the plane went missing, he changes to Spider-Man and manages to get a ride in a World War I-era plane with a slightly kooky old man. They coincidentally pass the blimp, and Spider-Man webs to it and breaks in. Unbeknownst to him, Doom is using robots to perform surgery on the president and insert a device which will allow him to control him. Spider-Man gets into a brief fight with some robots before Doom pulls a lever which drops Spider-Man and Air Force One out of the blimp. Air Force One continues to the airport, but not before Spider-Man takes some photos of the president from the outside. By the next day, Doom has finished performing surgery on everyone in the United Nations, and he plans on using them to declare himself the ruler of the world.

Spider-Man (1981) Episode One: Bubble, Bubble, Oil and Trouble

Bubble, Bubble, Oil and Trouble

First Aired: September 12th, 1981

Synopsis: Spider-Man encounters Doctor Octopus stealing a ruby from a museum, and after a brief scuffle in which Ock gets away, Spider-Man notices that Octopus didn't steal any more valuable items. While doing research for his homework on landmarks of New York, Spider-Man later encounters Octopus at university, this time getting away with a chunk of quartz. Although as Peter Parker he wants time to do his homework, he ends up tracking down Octopus to his hidden sewer base. Octopus successfully traps Spider-Man in the base and then floods it with water before escaping.

Spider-Man (1981): Before Watching

It's hard to sum up my feelings regarding going into the 1981 Spider-Man series, but overall, I'd have to say that I'm cautiously optimistic. It feels like when people think of the Spider-Man cartoon of the 1980s, their minds immediately jump to Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the show which comes after this (and which, rest assured, I will be viewing after this). Why exactly is that? Is this show bad, or mediocre, in comparison? Was it unpopular, and necessitated a retool into Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends to maintain viewer interest? Certainly Amazing Friends does feature Iceman and Firestar which gives it an identity of its own, but that doesn't mean that this series is necessarily going to be bad.

It's been over a decade by this point since Spider-Man last had a cartoon of his own. In the time in-between, he's gotten two new comic series, failed to save Gwen Stacy, been cloned, proposed to Mary Jane, confronted the burglar who killed Uncle Ben, and much more beyond that. How much of this is going to make it into the show? The 1967 show surprised me with how often it adapted comic issues, including ones which were pretty recent at the time. By now, is Spider-Man enough of a pop-culture juggernaut that a cartoon can't afford to alienate viewers by introducing some of the, shall we say, more out-there concepts of the later episodes of the 1967 series?

Spider-Man (1967): After Watching

It's taken almost exactly half a year, but the entirety of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon has been viewed and commented on. There were high points, there were low points, there were some points of surprising quality and points of wasted potential. Now that I've actually seen this artifact, how does the overall product look?

Well, as I've mentioned several times in the posts themselves, the quality drops notably after the first season finishes. While I wouldn't call the first season the best cartoon I've seen, there were a lot of episodes that fell into the "it's fine" camp when I was expecting them to be forgettable at best, horrible at worst. Episodes directly adapted from comic stories were, naturally, highlights, but there were also some surprisingly good original stories told in all. There's some goofy animation, sure, and some of the plots really shouldn't be thought about too much, but I'd be lying if I said that there was no entertainment value.

Once we get to the second season and third seasons, though...hooo, boy. I'm not going to say that every episode was bad by any means, but the quality of the writing dropped pretty noticeably, not to mention the animation quality. Worst of all were the episodes which recycled animation from another episode but told more or less the same story - I understand why they did it, but that doesn't make the episode automatically entertaining.

To finish off this brief summary, I'm going to present my top ten favourite stories of the series, as well as my top ten worst stories so that you, the intelligent reader, know what to look forwards to and what to avoid if you decide to check out this series. For fairness' sake, I'll be excluding episodes which are adaptations of comic stories, as otherwise the top ten list would probably be just them.