From The Depths Of Time Wasting

Up until now we’ve seen glimpses of re-used materials from “Rocket Robin Hood”.. some backgrounds, and a little animation. But with “Phantom From The Depths Of Time”, we see an entire episode re-purposed as an episode of Spider-Man.

Somewhere on an uncharted, other-worldly island, The insect-like Dr. Manta ( Where exactly did he get his doctorate? ) rules over a community of slaves, who serve their master by mining something called “lavacide”. If the slaves get out of line, Manta plays a note on his pipe organ, and makes the “hills” come alive ( With the sound of music )! In other words, giant grasshopper creatures materialize and begin zapping the slaves into submission.  What this also means is, tons of animation that looks completely out of place in a Spider-Man cartoon.

The hills! They walk again!

One of the slaves manages to pick the lock on his neck iron and get free long enough to send off a distress signal that somehow Spider-Man is able to pick up with his spider-sense. Trying to figure out how to get himself to the island, he has an epiphany and remembers where he can score himself a rocket ship. Hey, he’s been everything else, why not be a test pilot? The controls are simple enough for a high school student to figure out, so Spidey blasts off!

Who else is in the rocketship? Why, it’s Spidey’s Merry Men, that’s who!

Dr. Manta’s right-hand man, the Quasimodo-esque slave driver, Igor, catches the S.O.S. sending slave red-handed, and reports back to his boss, who doesn’t seem to be concerned. After all, even if someone does receive the signal, how will they ever find the island among the “thousands of uncharted islands in the sea”. I’m pretty sure you can substitue the word “island” with “planet” and nobody would be the wiser.

Spider-Man thinks his spaceship knows which way to go.

Spidey’s lands his rocket plane and the vile Manta readies a welcoming committee to greet our hero. The green buggers surround the rocket and begin ripping it apart like termites eating through a twig. Spidey reckons the bugs are really robots, and manages to climb inside one. Luckily for him, the controls have a “manual” setting as well as “remote”, so he’s able to operate it as easily as he drove the space ship earlier.

All this science, Spidey doesn’t understand. It’s just his job five days a week.

The Web Slinger steers his robot bug into another one, causing an explosion, and sends the rest of the bugs scuttering away. Spidey figures that the king-sized cooties were being controlled by the big alien-looking castle sitting on top of the big alien-looking mountain..

Remember, this is still taking place on Earth.

Cut to Manta and Igor watching the shenanigans on a view screen, Igor says “They’re walking right up to the castle!”, which is a ridiculous line for a couple of reasons. First of all, what’s with this “They’re” stuff? There’s only one guy! ( Leftover dialog from RRH, no doubt ) Second, It’s Spider-Man. He’s not walking ANYWHERE. He’s swinging on his web! Moving on….

Spidey's ship is eaten by giant bugs. Remember this.

Manta plays a note on his organ, creating some sort of space-rhino out of a pile of rocks, which immediately starts charging after our hero. Spidey runs from it ( Sigh ), only the little running silouette is obviously meant to be someone else, not Spider-Man. Spidey comes to a cliff and exclaims that there’s no place left to go. Now, maybe this would be a prickly predicament for a regular guy, but come on. This is Spider-Man. You know, does whatever a SPIDER can? He seems to remember this at the last minute because the charging creature runs over the ledge, falling to his apparent death, while Spidey clings to the side of the chasm wall. Because he’s SPIDER-Man.

Let’s see some reject from Sherwood Planet do THIS!

Manta assumes the Wall Crawler is lying dead at the bottom of the gorge, so he orders Igor to have the slaves load the lavacide onto his ship and get rid of the witnesses! Meanwhile Spidey swings onward and upward to the castle. I like how Spidey theorizes that Manta will have some sort of warning system and that he should approach more cautiously, yet he advances the same old way, and gets spotted by Manta’s gargoyles. Sheesh! What a super hero!

Uh-oh. Looks like someone spilled their coffee on the background painting.

The same googly-eyed birds from both of the Mole Men episodes attack Web Head and knock him into the moat. A green aligator-serpent creature appears and Spider-Man manages to stab it in the head with a spear and kill it. Wait. WHAT? Is that really what happened? Did my eyes just see that? It sure looked like that’s what happened. It was animated awkwardly, with the creature attacking Spidey one minute, and Spidey fashioning a spear to wedge into the creature’s mouth to keep it from chomping on him, but the aligator pushes down, causing the spear to pierce the top of his head and blood to gush from it!

Damn, son. That’s brutal.

Meanwhile, in the castle, a gloating Manta has this exchange with Igor:

Elsewhere, Spidey is still making his way toward the castle. You can tell, because he’s swinging, and then the picture zooms in on a still background of the futuristic structure. Spidey keeps addressing the bad guy with “Okay, mister..” when he shouldn’t really know what he’s up against.

Asteroid? Um, last I checked you were on a planet.

Next, we cut to Manta saying that he and Igor plan on leaving this “desolate asteroid in a space ship of priceless lavacide!”. Cut to Spider-Man, standing there, saying “Don’t count on it!”, even though we didn’t actually see him enter the castle, or have no idea how he got in. Manta and Igor are surprised to see him, and a little concerned for their moat dwelling friend. Spidey reassures them, and demonstrates his total badass-ness by letting them know the aligator “developed a sudden loss of appetite”, in a cold-as-ice tone of voice that’s totally uncharacteristic for Spider-Man, especially in this show.

Take THAT, you evil CHAIR!

Manta swears he will win, even if he has to bring himself down in the process. He tickles the ivories once again, only this time his sonic onslaught brings a mountain monster…back…to…LIFE!! Ooh, scary stuff, kids! Spidey determines that Manta’s chair is the REAL threat, instead of Manta himself, and webs it up. The Webbed Wonder then recalls seeing Manta’s ship & lavacide on the roof, and makes a run for it. What, Manta doesn’t have some other sort of mutant creature guarding the ship?

Spider-Man battles Clayface.

The ship takes off, presumably with Spider-Man at the wheel, and flies around the mountain monster a few times before ultimately crashing into it, causing a huge explosion and mushroom cloud. Spidey parachutes to safetly, although it’s unclear how he survived the destruction. I assume the explosion resulted in the destruction of the Mountain Monster, the space ship and lavacide cargo, Manta, Igor, and a castle full of mutated zoo animals. Oh, and one pipe organ.

Duck and cover, kids.

After trying, and failing, to explain the gist of what has happened to the newly freed slaves, as well as the viewers at home, our hero sees the futility of his efforts and instead figures he should high-tail it out of there. He returns to his spaceship, which was thoroughly trashed by giant bugs earlier in the episode, but seems totally fine now, and flies home to the big city. I wonder, when he returned to New York, if Spidey informed the authorities about this bizarre uncharted island with an entire civilization of people enslaved by some alien organist with a penchant for turning inanimate objects into mutated creatures, or, if he just kept the whole thing to himself. My money is on the latter.

If you're watching this episode on the Buena Vista DVD set, you get a bonus. They left in a bumper from the middle of the episode...

And the "Next Week" clip from the end of the episode, where Spidey tells us what to expect on the next episode.

These bits have been edited out of the rest of the episodes in the box set.

Why couldn't THIS shot have been edited out of the episode?

Here are a few more screenshots to remind you that this is an episode of "Spider-Man" and that it takes place on EARTH...

And THIS is supposed to be Spider-Man. Oookay....

This epiosde was brought to you by the makers of Lavacide, and other fine made-up products.

By the way, Dick Thomas was a background painter for Hanna-Barbera back in the day, but he also worked on Rocket Robin Hood. Chances are some of those paintings were probably re-used in this episode.

NEXT: Revolt In The Fif—er, I mean, The Evil Sorcerer.D

Foul Ball!

In this episode, Peter Parker is trying out as pitcher for the school baseball team.

Let’s clear something up. Peter Parker is not a jock, and shouldn’t care about sports. He’s an academic. A “science nerd”, if you will. The writers seemed to get this in the “Origin” episode, and touched upon in others, like “Home”. At this point in the series, it’s clear Bakshi’s staff still didn’t have a handle on how the character of Peter Parker should act.

“A bonafide, true to life bookwor--, er, I mean, athlete.”

Another peculiarity about these earlier episodes is the order in which they originally aired versus the order they were intended to air. Henry over at the Spidey Jazz Yahoo forums theorizes that these first few episodes were meant to air in a different order, and that the threat level of each villain that Spidey faces was meant to ramp up with each episode. Makes sense to me.

Tell us about your “hard one”, Petey.

Pete only has eyes for your “tight spot”, buddy boy!

They scrubbed so hard their nipples fell off!

Master criminal, Shakespeare, briefs his men, dressed in gorilla suits, on their latest caper. Their plan: Steal the Optimo Gem, a diamond, coincidentally the size of a baseball, from the Cosmopolitan Museum. From there, I guess they plan on hiding out in the gorilla cages in the nearby zoo. I guess nobody would suspect an ape wearing a bowler and smoking a cigar.

Must be some high tech ape costumes, even the mouths move when the crooks talk.

A shadowy figure enters the city zoo ( Re-using the Master Technician's sillouette from “Swing City”. What? They couldn't draw a couple of new frames of a SHADOW? ), and sets loose a large gorilla. All hell breaks loose, the same crowd of six people runs by a few times, and Peter Parker now wearing a brown jacket, instead of the blue one he was changing into in the locker room earlier, arrives on the scene.

Of course, some re-used animation of Peter from “Origin Of Spiderman”

Pete changes into Spidey and swings all over the city, then back to the zoo where he just came from.

Seriously? He was already at the zoo! WTF!

After engaging the gorilla in battle ( No kidding! Really! ), the Web Slinger strikes a blow for animal cruelty when he punches the big ape ( In the nuts? ), and trips it with his web, taking Tall, Grey and Hairy out of commission.

Does PETA know about this?

We started with somewhat realistic sounding ape noises, probably from a sound effects record. This transitions into gorillas that sound like a constipated old man. And these are the real apes, mind you, not Shakespeare’s goon squad.

The zoo must have had some jumbo apes flown from Wakanda )

The next sequence was intended to be humorous, but ends up being funny for a completely different reason. As Shakespeare and his men are watching Spider-Man take on the ape, live on TV, the news reporter asks “Can he save himself?“. Shakespeare replies, “Yes, that IS the question!” and then the reporter says, “Well, let’s see!” as if he is responding to Shakespeare. Now, this was meant to be a clever bit, but it falls flat because the animators mistakenly animated Shakespeare’s mouth moving, along to the reporter’s dialog that’s supposed to be coming from the TV. Not that anyone besides me ever notices these types of things.

There wasn’t any picture on the screen anyway.

Another odd voice-over error is when a museum employee is leaving and asks the guard where all of his pals are. The guard replies “I’m the only guard left!” The employee responds with “Let’s hope there’s no monkey business” in a completely different voice. Weird.

Shakespeare’s gorilla suit wearing henchmen slip into the museum and take out the lone guard, and smash the glass case containing the Optimo.

I’ve always preferred the Intellivision Baseball to the Atari version.

We cut back to the ball park, and I assume that Pete made it back, because now he’s sitting in the bullpen whining. Pete gets sent after a fly ball that practically lands on the Museum steps. He goes to retrieve it & runs into the museum employee who now sounds like he’s 96 years old. The man tells him that the apes have invaded the Museum, and are rousing in the gem collection.

I’m surprised Pete didn’t call the man a “kook”!

Peter changes to Spider-Man to investigate, and here’s where things get kinda sketchy. Pete chases the ball that rolls to the museum. So the museum must be close by, right? So why does he need to swing all over Manhattan, and then back to the museum? Why not just change into costume in the bushes, scale the wall to an open window and climb in? At least in “Kingpinned”, all of the extraneous swinging made sense, it was a chase scene. Kind of.

The extended padding of this episode is ridiculous!

Shakespeare’s goons ditch their monkey suits and attempt to get out of dodge. Wait, I thought the point of the disguises was that nobody would suspect a gorilla of stealing a diamond! At this point, as far as Shakes and pals know, nobody’s spotted them. Now they’ve blown their cover and they plan on waltzing out the front door with the stolen jewel? Even for a kids cartoon, this plot is just plain ignorant.

This image almost saves the episode. Almost.

Spidey drops in on the crooks making their getaway and hilarity ensues. Shakespeare tries “gumming up” Spidey with liquid latex, which somehow creates a fog, under cover of which Spidey slips into a suit of armor. How he manages to do this without Shakespeare or his men knowing he hid there is beyond me.

Hint: Any time the protagonist disappears, and there just happens to be a suit of armor, 9 times out of 10 that protagonist is hiding in that armor.

Next, Shakespeare throws a smoke bomb, creating… Hey! Wait a minute! Was the line of dialog about the haze lifting meant to happen after the smoke bomb was thrown? Anyway, Shakes heads for the roof where he tries to make his escape, with Spider-Man in hot pursuit. He tosses the Optimo at Spidey who moves to catch it, but the distraction allows Shakes to knock the Webbed One off of the roof. Um, he’s SPIDER-Man, he sticks to walls. Duh. Spidey yanks Shakespeare over the side, and the “Prince Of Theives” is cuffed and stuffed by the authorities waiting below.

Spider-Man’s back looks quite bare. Certainly devoid of spiders…

Spidey swings across town, I mean, across the street to the ball park, changes into Peter Parker just in time to throw the winning pitch, only instead of the ball he supposedly went across the street for, he throws the ball-sized Optimo gem. Wouldn’t the catcher wonder why this guy is throwing a frickin’ diamond instead of a baseball?

The home team wins, and now Peter Parker is Midtown High’s star pitcher! What happens next? Nothing. Y’know why? Because this episode was stupid, made no sense, and was probably written for some other show. It’s obvious that this series has no respect for its own continuity. It’s like they had a five minute meeting to come up with plots for episodes and someone suggested sports themed stories. So they came up with one for baseball, basketball, and football. What? No tennis? Horseshoes? Shuffleboard?

Horrible.

NEXT: Rocket Robin Redux