I've been watching the DVD set in chronological order. Season 1 was OK, but when I started watching the season 2 Bakshi episodes, I got really excited. The backgrounds, the music, the new villains all had me really interested. Then I watched this train wreck and knew something was up.
The writing in these Bakshi episodes is the big problem. The stories are thin to non-existent, and there's so much padding (Spiderman swinging through the air monotonously forever)that it's excruciating to watch.
This episode starts off really promising, with some kind of insectoid villain that has captured human slaves and is forcing them to mine for him. After a great set-up, the story devolves into non-sensical garbage with tons of errors and plot holes that would insult even a five year old.
The problems: 1) Spiderman flies some kind of plane/rocket to an island where the action is taking place. Giant insect robots tear apart his ship, but he escapes. As I watched this, I was wondering how he would get back to NYC. Well guess what? At the end of the episode, the ship is in perfect condition and he uses it to get home. WTF!?! The robots tore the ship in half! I can just see a whole generation of children watching and scratching their heads as they were being dumbed down. 2) Spiderman continuously refers to the villain as "He". The problem is that Spidey has never seen the villain and doesn't know what's happening on the island. Spidey has been running around the island and battling monsters. The villain could be he, she, it, them, whatever! It's just another example of a lack of attention to detail by the writers. 3) The villain keeps talking about the place as being an asteroid. Huh!?! I thought it was an island... 4) When Spidey finally confronts the villain, he decides to run off and stop a rocket ship full of ore. He leaves the villain behind in the castle with his henchman, Igor. Spidey blows up the ship and comes back to the castle where he is calmly talking to a freed slave. Huh!?! Did I miss something? What happened to the villains? They were in the castle, where are they now? How did the slaves get free? We never see the villains again and get no explanation about what happened to them. All we get is a re-hashed montage of Spidey's previous exploits.
I read somewhere that another series called Rocket Robin Hood was also produced by Bakshi, and he decided to use a lot of footage from that series on Spiderman. He must've done it with this episode because it "just don't make sense"!
The writing in these Bakshi episodes is the big problem. The stories are thin to non-existent, and there's so much padding (Spiderman swinging through the air monotonously forever)that it's excruciating to watch.
This episode starts off really promising, with some kind of insectoid villain that has captured human slaves and is forcing them to mine for him. After a great set-up, the story devolves into non-sensical garbage with tons of errors and plot holes that would insult even a five year old.
The problems: 1) Spiderman flies some kind of plane/rocket to an island where the action is taking place. Giant insect robots tear apart his ship, but he escapes. As I watched this, I was wondering how he would get back to NYC. Well guess what? At the end of the episode, the ship is in perfect condition and he uses it to get home. WTF!?! The robots tore the ship in half! I can just see a whole generation of children watching and scratching their heads as they were being dumbed down. 2) Spiderman continuously refers to the villain as "He". The problem is that Spidey has never seen the villain and doesn't know what's happening on the island. Spidey has been running around the island and battling monsters. The villain could be he, she, it, them, whatever! It's just another example of a lack of attention to detail by the writers. 3) The villain keeps talking about the place as being an asteroid. Huh!?! I thought it was an island... 4) When Spidey finally confronts the villain, he decides to run off and stop a rocket ship full of ore. He leaves the villain behind in the castle with his henchman, Igor. Spidey blows up the ship and comes back to the castle where he is calmly talking to a freed slave. Huh!?! Did I miss something? What happened to the villains? They were in the castle, where are they now? How did the slaves get free? We never see the villains again and get no explanation about what happened to them. All we get is a re-hashed montage of Spidey's previous exploits.
I read somewhere that another series called Rocket Robin Hood was also produced by Bakshi, and he decided to use a lot of footage from that series on Spiderman. He must've done it with this episode because it "just don't make sense"!
