Mutants' Revenge
Story by John Semper & Michael Edens. Teleplay by Francis Moss & Ted Pedersen.
Summary:
Wolverine and Spider-Man realize Herbert Landon is the true enemy and
team up to stop him. As they invade Landon’s headquarters, Hobgoblin
uses Landon’s computer terminal to steal his mutant research. When
Landon pursues Hobgoblin, Landon falls into a vat of chemicals he
intended to use on Beast. The chemicals turn Landon into an irrational
monster. The X-Men arrive to help, but it’s ultimately Landon’s
assistant Genevieve who calms Landon down with her psychic powers.
Landon returns to human form, and Spider-Man and the X-Men part as
friends.
Continuity Notes:
-
Genevieve is revealed as the person who saved Spider-Man’s life by telekinetically holding the ceiling together in the previous episode.
-
Half of Landon’s body is now green and scaly after he reverts to human form. Visually, he’s now a doppelganger for Two-Face, a fact the producers had to be aware of. He sticks around the show for quite a while, confusing little kids all across the country, I’m sure.
I Love the '90s:
Landon’s computer interface is represented by a hilariously bad CGI
recreation of a woman. After Hobgoblin copies the info on to a CD-ROM,
he then programs his own CGI face into the computer to taunt Landon.
Review:
I had forgotten that the second chapter of this crossover is…not very
good. At all. Spider-Man and Wolverine aren’t allowed to have much of a
fight, due to censorship restrictions of the time (which were even
tougher on Spider-Man than on X-Men).
And after they do inevitably decide to stop fighting and team up, they
spend the next ten minutes fighting the same security guards over and
over again. By “fighting” I mean flipping them around like acrobats,
since no punches can connect, and by “the same” I mean that literally,
as the show recycles the same footage of two guards running towards the
camera approximately five thousand times. The guards look like a group of
middle-aged dads who were kidnapped outside of a bowling alley and forced
to wear goofy hats, pointless straps, ill-fitting pants, and
emasculating ‘80s shoulder pads. I can’t imagine why anyone thought the
audience wanted to see an extended fight scene with these losers in the
first place, but at the very least they could’ve had cool designs.
Couldn’t Landon have robot guards anyway, so Wolverine can cut
something up with no censor notes?
What’s
after the fight? Landon turns into a giant reptilian monster of all
things, the X-Men show up, looking slightly more anime this episode, and
the day is saved by…a peripheral character I barely noticed in the
previous episode. And Landon is now Two-Face, and somehow everyone was
just okay with that. I actually do like the twist that Landon has a
mutant working for him, one who believes that a “cure” should be made
available, I just think the revelation of Genevieve’s secret feels like a
copout. Genevieve, who I think is referred to by name only once during
the storyline, hasn’t been fleshed out at all, so allowing her to
suddenly save the day makes the ending feel even more noticeably abrupt. That’s the ending we’re stuck with, however, as Spider-Man
learns a lesson about friendship that inspires him to visit Dr. Mariah
Crawford, setting up the next storyline on his show. The X-Men return
to their fully-rendered, hand-painted world and never think of this
Spider-Man fella again. Except for Storm, who turns up with her
original voice during the show’s laughable Secret Wars adaptation, because Marvel wouldn’t pay to fly the entire X-Men cast from Canada. That’s the commitment to quality I remember from the ‘90s Spider-Man series.
Credit to http://marvel.toonzone.net/spideytas/ for the screencaps.
1 comment:
Never understood why Landon became the Kingpin's right-hand man for the remainder of the show. Landon may have been the "Mutant Agenda" storyline from the comics -- I don't know -- but he was hardly as well-known as Alistair Smythe, the previous scientific henchman (which is saying something). Why not use someone with more of a comic book history, like the Tinkerer?
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