1994 Spider-Man Double Review-“Shriek of the Vulture” and “The Final Nightmare”

A classic Spidey villain makes his debut as the Vulture flies into Spidey’s life in an attempt to…STEAL HIS YOUTH?? The Neogenic Nightmare ends here!

Credits
Story By: John Semper, Gilles Wheeler and Evelyn A-R Garbai
Written By: Evelyn A-R Garbai
Music Composed By: Shuki Levy and Kussa Mahchi 
Story By: John Semper and Sandy Fries
Written By: Sandy Fries
Music Composed By: Shuki Levy and Kussa Mahchi
Animation Services By: Toyko Movie Shinsha (TMS)

THE PLOT: In an effort to circumvent Norman Osborn from inducing a hostile takeover of his buisness company, Adrian Toomes, the man seen at the end of the last episode, dons a green flying suit and dubs himself the Vulture. He flies around stealing the youth out of people through technology gained from the Tablet of Time. Through battles with the Vulture, Spider-Man is left unawares when Toomes gets the drop on him. Vulture yanks the youth right out of his veins and Spidey is now an old man!

LONG STORY SHORT: Spidey turns to Doc Connors in an effort to regain his youth. But the Doc’s cut off by not only a mutating Vulture, but the Scorpion as well! Vengeance and violence are abound in this season finale! 

MY THOUGHTS: Initially in the first draft of this review, I had just merely said that the final two episodes of this second season were “okay”. Nothing bad, but nothing to write home about either. But in re-watching the episodes due to scheduling conflicts in getting these reviews out on a regular basis, This two-parter does serve as a very fitting finale to the Neogenic Nightmare arc. It’s not the best of the season, but it is enjoyable.One of the key factors that make this finale work is the strong use of Peter’s supporting cast. We’ve not seen much of Flash, Debrah, MJ or Harry all throughout the season, but at the same time they all have been there, furthering their own respective plots. In these episodes though they get a chance to shine, and it’s a definite plus. We get the most character development out of Flash than we have in the enitre series as a whole, and even with Debrah we see about as much of her as we saw in “Night of the Lizard”. They all helped further the plot, and it was remniscent of the Conway/Wein/Wolfman days on ASM. There are certain times during those runs, Wein’s run especially, where the super villain plot just isn’t as interesting as what’s being developed with the supporting cast. I felt a lot of that working here. While a budding romance between Flash and Debrah is a bit unexpected, it’s not unwelcome. The love triangle with Peter, MJ and Harry is certainly interesting, especially considering the fact that Peter’s relationship with Mary Jane has always been in the background of the episodes in this season from the very beginning. That’s something this show has to be given credit for, the gradual maturation of the romance between the two. 

Comparing those aspects with the role of the villain, Vulture, and it’s not hard for me to pick which I enjoyed better. I’ve said elsewhere on numerous occasions that if there’s no super villain whom I just have no love or patience for, it’s the Vulture. The same feelings apply in the episode, with good reason. Vulture’s depiction and characterization in this two-parter does zilch to change my mind about him as a whole, and while I honestly don’t go out of my way to intentionally hate on certain characters, this guy was asking for it. One of the biggest flaws to the Vulture here is that his plot just makes no sense, if he even has a plot. Let’s see if we can straighten this out: so Norman Osborn proposes to buy out Toomes company TOOMES AERODYNAMICS after Osborn yells at him through speaker phone, and because of this Toomes decides to take his revenge by stealing people’s youth in order to…get…Osborn. That’s it. If that’s truly his plan, it’s easily the most convoluted, ill-concieved plan seen in the show. For one thing, as much of an unlikable person as Osborn is, he never did anything unethical or discredit Toomes. He rightfully pointed out Toomes’ uselessness in the business industry when Toomes didn’t show up for the board meeting, which was entirely Toomes’ fault. It’s not even as though Toomes is shown to be as old and feeble as, say Silvermaine. He can still run around with the best of them. The reason he wasn’t at the board meeting was because he was too busy trying on his stupid green costume so he could go fly around and youth-mug young New York skateboarders. So by way of the episode’s own directing and writing, Vulture basically decided to kill Norman Osborn without Osborn really doing anything. He doesn’t even have anything of Osborn’s to gain, as it’s not as though he were to take hold of any of Norman’s businesses. He apparently has corporate spies everywhere according to his expositionary dialogue upon attacking Harry.

Continuing from that, we never see anyone working at Toomes’ company besides Toomes himself. It’s one thing that this random business apears out of nowhere and is suddenly this big and important industrial company which of whom everybody apparently is aware of. But not a single, solitary sould is shown to be working at this place nor for Toomes at all. How hard could that have been? There didn’t need to be any ridiculous scenes of Toomes in his younger self posing as a younger man who worked at the company, which by the way served to accomplish nothing other than upsetting Flash Thompson by uselessly flirting with Debrah.

But seriously, if we’re expected to assume that Toomes either wants eternal youth forever or wants youth in order to kill Osborn for no real reason, we have no legitimate basis to work with. Not only that, but we already had an annoying plot about an annoying old man wanting to become young again which ended annoyingly. No one was clamoring for that to be done again.

But again, I still liked these two episodes. For one thing, this show is very good at cliffhangers. Once again, a memory I had as a kid was Spider-Man getting jumped by the Vulture in the final 30 sec. mark and having been unmasked with his youth gone. That was a great ending. And even though it lead to more of Vulture’s villainous cliches (When he saves Spider-Man from falling into the fire “Did you really think I would let you go so easily” I yelled “…YES!!”) it was a great problem for Peter to deal with, and it lead to some great moments. The scene where he “saves” the woman from getting mugged, remarking “It’s the job…it ages you…” was pretty cool, as was the scene of him just dealing with the fact that his youth was gone by running out of breath just by running down the block. Now I am aware of the fact that this was a storyline told in Amazing Spider-Man during the 90s where, could you imagine, the Vulture did end up stealing Spider-Man’s youth. As of this writing I’ve not read it, so if the same story beats were done in those issues, then credit to David Micheline and Mark Bagely. But I did like the Aunt May scene where she doesn’t recognize Peter as an old man, but is still very nice. It’s a harmless scene in an episode with some very bad people doing terrible things. Speaking of which, we get the return of the Scorpion. This was…odd, especially considering Farely Stillwell’s role  here. Stillwell’s gone crazy after the events of “Sting of the Scorpion” and Gargan still wants to be a normal guy. I can understand Gargan’s motivations fine, but Stillwell’s role in this episode was a little bit out of nowhere. I get that he was suppose to show that the Neogenic Nightmare is offcially finished (he as much as says so almost verbatim) but its as though he was supposed to be a major player this entire time. His last line after walking away from the lab fire “You’ll never see me again…” is just weird, as though we’re supposed to care. We’ve not seen Stillwell since his first sppearance in the last season, and though he was referenced once at the start of this season, he certainly has not been anyone were meant to draw attention to. Maybe in the context of the show, but only to Connors. That whole bit was very strange to me. I did like him being hysterical over the dangers of science, that was funny.  But horray! The Neogenic Nightmare is finally over! As far as how this season rated compared to the previous one, it’s an interesting thing to look at. There was very much a connected, comic booky storyline throughout the entirety of the 13 episodes. Most times, it did work. They established that something was wrong with Spidey’s biochemistry, and they ran with it throughout the whole nine yards. They upped the ante with surprises and mutated him beyond belief.  I remain in the mindset I was at back in the middling of the season when I said that the saga should have ended, or at least gone a different route after the Punisher episodes. Up until then, you felt the danger and drama of what Spidey’s disease meant. After that, it just became a lost part of the plot. Sure he could always have transmutated again, but he never really does. It was also annoying that everyone and their mother either wanted the Neogenic Recombinator, or just Dr. Connors at the same time Spidey needed him. That got old fast, especially with the wave of kidnappings in the Tablet of Time arc.  This season continued the trend of adding guest stars to the show in order to expand the Marvel Universe. While the X-Men crossover was nothing more than getting the two hot Marvel cartoons together, it did suceed in being a very entertaing two-parter, and made sense in relation to the story. Even Punisher to a certain extent was a welcome addition, as the story kept him around for an extra episode, but didn’t make it about him. It was still about Spider-Man, but in a different way, and how he became involved in the plot was well done as well.   Conversely, Blade didn’t really need to be in this season whatsoever. By that I mean, he was fine for the Morbius episodes, but that was at a point in the season where Morbius just completely overtook the plot and it became ridiculous. I was so ready for that guy to go two or three episodes before he did, and while I liked it overall the fact remains that Morbius and Blade’s stoylines could have easily been in any other season. It just dragged everything down and off focus of what it wanted to be.

 I’ve already said more than necessary about the Tablet of Time arc, but the Vulture arc, annoying as the Vulture himself was as a villain, did conclude the season very well. It brought back the supporting character is Peter’s life, and the final battle was actually pretty cool. Spidey regained his youth and abilites without keeping the disease in a way that was somewhat plausible. Frankly, I don;t think anyone really cared if the logic of Connors having Toomes keep Spidey’s disease made any sense or not, because we all wanted to just see Spider-Man back in full form. And he really was, he came back in style with a very cheeky “I’m baaaaaack….”, and he punched Scorpion! Spider-Man got to punch somebody in this cartoon! Who woulda thunk it?

     But back to the season as a whole. Overall, I enjoyed it. I feel a tiny bit bad for being surprised in how much I enjoyed it. If the season could be divided up into three parts, then the first part (The beginning of the season to Spider-Man mutating) was very good. The middle part from the Morbius storyline to the Tablet of Time arc was less than spectacular. The final two episodes weren’t the best, but better than average.  And really, that’s pretty much how most runs of comic books go. Throughout twelve issues which span a year, some are very good, some are bad filler, and some wrap up things nicely and make good use of its continuity. This was a good season overall, though I have to admit to very much looking forward to the next set of thirteen episodes when by this time next season I’ll discuss easily the best episode since the pilot.

3.5/5 “MARY JAAANE!!!”s

Best Quote Contender-

Pt.1: Spider-Man: *Upon seeing Vulture escape all of a sudden* “Guess he had a cake in the oven…”

Pt.2: J. Jonah Jameson: “Robbie, why is it that a lack of responsiblity goes hand in hand with being young?”

All images taken from marvel.toonzone.net