Air Date: December 19, 1981
Rating: 7/10
While touring the science center to get photos, it’s attacked by a supervillain calling himself the Gadgeteer who steals their shrink-ray and shrinks Spider-Man down to size!
A decent adventure this time, especially considering the villain is just totally made up again. I guess I’d be more okay with that if the villains they created felt more in line with the others in the Spiderverse. I think I’ve figured it out though with this episode. With other villains that are already established in the Marvel comics, they don’t do origin stories because they assume everyone already knows who they are, but with people they just make up they can do origin stories. As they do here, but Gadgeteer is just a lame employee who wished his boss respected him more. So he becomes a supervillain? What?
Anyway, this was a pretty fun episode. It was cool to see where all those scenes in the opening of Spider-Man being tiny and batted around by a cat actually came from. This makes me wonder if this episode was created early in the series’ run, was received positively by test audiences, and then the execs decided this was because they made up the villain so they made them throw in more made-up villains? Okay, I’m going to try to stop speculating on that now.
SCORING:
+8: One with a self-contained villain that didn’t totally suck
-1: The villain was still kinda lame
