 a closed-to-business amusement park, and Spidey is vindicated, to the hapless chagrin of Jameson.
The Kingpin, the Sky Master, and Mugs Riley.
Season 2 was in several respects the most imaginative and in that regard the most laudable of the three seasons. Unlike in Season 1, Spiderman was not always restricted to the metropolis of New York City or to the United States of the 1960s, villains were not all peculiarly garbed or animal-hybridised men with robbery or a personal vendetta against Jameson or someone else as their sole motivation, and unlike Season 3, there were few "cheater" episodes, only two in fact, in the run of fanciful Spidey outings. Each episode, many of them as vast in scope as imagination allowed, was conceived and constructed solely from the writers' minds, without a remit that footage, apart from the web-swinging sequences, needed to be extensively reused.
"The Origin of Spiderman" is the logical episode to begin any Spidey television series, and it is a mystery why it was not produced, albeit in the first season mode of storytelling, to open Season 1. After the first season was starting, in its final group of episodes, to look like it was thread-bare in the ideas department with the format that it had, Bakshi, on attaining the mantle of creative producer, came to a quite logical decision, to go to Spidey's roots and to tell some stories about Spiderman's early days, of when Peter first acquired his amazing powers and of how those powers and attendant crime-fighting responsibilities affected Peter's life as a teenager among his peers at school. Doing so would open the door to some compelling conflicted characterisation for young Parker, and a change to mainly full-episode-long single stories with more elaborate, wide-ranging threats posed by the villains than mundane robbery (though robbery- of an unusual technique- was still committed by some), allowed for more contemplative scenes for Peter/Spidey than were possible in the tightly structured formula of Season 1- in addition to reducing the need for and cost of creating different villains and surroundings in every half-episode.
The how-Spidey-came-to-be story could not reasonably be better told than it is in "The Origin of Spiderman". This episode, perhaps one of the best of all three seasons, covers all necessary bases without becoming very melodramatic or very cloying, and without liberties with the storyline first outlined by the colourful pages of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Peter Parker is wearing his ultimate Spiderman suit when he is performing for hopeful profit, whilst he talks with the impresario from whom he wishes to be paid a large sum of money, and when the fateful robber runs past him, unlike in the 2002 live-action Spider-Man feature film wherein Peter is dressed in a different, less advanced costume during profit-seeking demonstration of his abilities and is uncostumed and therefore identifiable during the scenes with the show business promoter and the fleeing thief. The treatment of these scenes is rather more sensible in "The Origin of Spiderman". Few potential holes in episodic story structure.
Spiderman- "The Origin of Spiderman". Stylish, supremely effective, decidedly definitive, and arguably quite superlative.
Moreover, "The Origin of Spiderman" is not encumbered with a love story or with rather gratuitous scenes of Peter fighting and defeating a school bully before countless spectators. Peter's awareness of his super-powers is shown to grow in quiet introspection in the streets of New York City and during and after an inadvertent encounter with a pair of street toughs with whom he has no prior or later acquaintance. These developments are completely outside of the school environs- and beyond the view of anyone who can easily identify him. The tragedy of Uncle Ben's murder by the same robber whom Spidey declined to assist in apprehending and Peter coming to terms with the responsibility that accompanies "great power", is performed in the characterisation of Peter with a perfect mix of pathos and dogged determination. There is no diverting strand of storyline with a girl-friend. The origin story does not need it. Peter is established as being interested in but removed from the opposite sex, his intellectual goals being highest. Romantic involvement does not happen until later episodes, and is then complicated again and again by Peter's secret identity and higher responsibility. Spidey is branded a solitary hero, his origin told to expert precision, the script never deviating from the prospectus proposed in Marvel Comics. The episode may be aptly criticised for being too indulgent with protracted web-swinging sequences, and there are a few technical production errors, such as the red and blue colours on Spidey's suit being reversed as Spidey is leaping out of the Parker household's second-floor window for his first ever web-swinging and one or two recycled backgrounds when Spidey is supposed not to be meandering but travelling directly to a location. On the whole, though, "The Origin of Spiderman" is arguably the finest filmed rendition ever of the advent of a Marvel Comics super-hero. A triumph for Ralph Bakshi and for the 1967-70 Spiderman.
An admirable effort to further the character development of the nascent super-hero, "King Pinned" was a direct continuation of the events of "The Origin of Spiderman", with Spidey reaffirming his commitment to crime-fighting (to "avenge" Uncle Ben) as he seeks an income to support his Aunt May, following the death of Ben. And thus is Peter hired at the Daily Bugle as a "copy boy" by J. Jonah Jameson, whose first appearance in Bakshi's Spiderman is equally as irascible as Jameson in Season 1 but somewhat less a buffoonish hypocrite and easy target for humiliation by Spidey. Jameson also is anything but the coward that he is in Season 1 as he is shown to be holding firm to his journalistic conviction in a confrontation with the villain of the episode, none other than the Kingpin, the foremost Manhattan mobster lifted without any modification from Marvel Comics' Spiderman. "King Pinned" is another episode with some rather lengthy web-swinging as Spidey pursues a car containing Jameson who is being kidnapped by the Kingpin, and still more web-swinging as Spidey races to defuse a bomb planted by a Kingpin stooge in the Daily Bugle printing room. Unlike the first season villains, the Kingpin escapes capture by Spidey. Sometimes, proposes Bakshi, the web-swinger does not succeed at bringing the criminals to justice. And hence there is no need to contrive a jailbreak, as happens a number of times to explain a villain's return in Season 1, to lead to the Kingpin's next appearance.
With the Spiderman mythos, including J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle, even the organised crime boss, the Kingpin, fully introduced, giving to this television series a belated but appreciated logical starting point, Bakshi fully stamped his fantastic imprint on this television show with his next three episodes, involving weird and wonderful technological menaces overhead and underfoot. "Swing City" and "Criminals in the Clouds" are thematically similar in as much as their villains both harbour literally upward plans for the on-terrain-residing Manhattan populace. One of them has become able to utilise the atomic reactions in the generation of nuclear energy to lift a land mass high into the sky, and the other villain has the necessary hardware for permanent skyward habitation and has sought, with embittered frustration, to, "...free the Earth dwellers from their miserable existence, crawling like worms in the mud over the world when the skies lie open above." The police and the courts outlawed him, and now he wishes revenge, and with an invisibility serum acquired by foul means, he intends to achieve his vengeance upon the authorities of the surface world. Ransom and extortion are the tactics to be employed by both the villains of "Swing City" and "Criminals in the Clouds" to achieve their ambitions. And then, in "Menace From the Bottom of the World", the Earth's surface is targeted for siege of a different kind- bank robberies of a most fantastic methodology. And from beneath the ground rather than from above.
Pseudo-scientific extension of radiology is central to the storyline of "Swing City" in which is done something that Season 1 would not have posited in a million years: the levitating of the entire island of Manhattan by way of radiation emitted from Manhattan's first nuclear power station, hijacked by a green complexioned technician in a white coat. The episode is framed by scenes concerning Peter's love interest at school, a planned evening with a girl that is forestalled by the radiation specialist's unorthodox urban hijack. The scenes with Peter and Sonya add some humanity to a rather surreal and wild scenario. And yet, "Swing City" does not seem to be as engaging as its sequel, "Specialists and Slaves", because more happens in the latter episode with regard to the conflict between Spidey and his foe, who does more there than simply elevate Manhattan with "anti-gravity rays". The scenes at school and elsewhere in "Swing City" relating to Peter's love interest, while they yield a personal, i.e. Peter Parker, aspect to what is yet an early experience in Spidey's career, do pad and slow the principal part of the story, that being Spidey versus the specialist in a