Spider-Man 1967 - Season Three!

This is easily the weakest of the Seasons by far. As I said there's very little new here, but a whole lot of vintage stuff often squeezed into tighter timeframes and with little sense a lot of the time. Motivation for crime seems to be an afterthought as villains show up do really offbeat things, but then get captured and we get no background on them at all to explain why they adopted the method they did. That's the interesting part dang it. The first season of the series had been produced by Grantray-Lawrence, the same outfit responsible for the syndicated Marvel Super-Heroes show. But this third season as well as the one before were produced by Krantz Films, the outfit which would later bring us Bakshi's Fritz the Cat movie. 

This Season even reuses one earlier cartoon twice. The episode with the villain the Master Technician is re-worked, and he's made into a "new" villain from Atlantis (they added pointed ears and a fin on his head) who does pretty much the same thing save that instead of NYC getting lifted into the sky it gets dropped into the ocean. Later the "Master Technician" shows up again but renamed the "Radiation Specialist" he repeats his crime from before lifting the NYC skyline again. So essentially, we get the same cartoon three times in three seasons with slight variations.

Here is a list of a half-dozen things I learned watching this season (I cut it in half since the season was so short):

1. Snowmen are inherently angry, so you better not accidently bring them life. They want to kick your ass!

2. Comets have antennae.

3. Despite all aerodynamic principles, biplanes can still outfly jets and even shoot them down with rays and stuff.

4. Peter Parker will give anyone a lift, even villains.

5. Captain Stacey looks completely different, even in the same episode from scene to scene. Sheesh!

6. Mysterio is a hipster who wears glasses and though he lost his pointed ears from the First Season, his skin has gone green for the Third.

This set of cartoons also looked muddier on my DVD set. I assume that had to do with the original source materials as the rest of the disk is fine in that regard. It's only Season Three that has the slight glowing effect in the backgrounds.

I did like the episode culled from the Rocket Robin series, "Revolt from the Fifth Dimension". It was strange and had some great images, though as a Spidey tale it was pretty limited. The Mysterio story was dandy and I think is based on a classic Spidey comic though again Mysterio looks different. Mary Jane shows up but she's Captain Stacey's niece time. There is also a keen interest in the Universal Frankenstein movies, but I'll have more to say on that in a separate post.

One other thing I did notice was there was a lot of mind-gaming in these episodes. Whether it was the Swami (a somewhat pointed racial stereotype for the time) or Mysterio or Infinata of Dementia-5 or the Kingpin with his brainwashing, the human mind was getting twisted a bunch in these episodes. Surely this had nothing to do with the "high times" of that era. 

All in all, I didn't find this Season as much fun, though it had high points. After watching them all now, I have to give the nod to Season Two and despite its endless web-swinging, I still think it's the most compelling in terms of story and art.

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