Spidey Saturday takes us back to the 90s New York City and an animated Wall-Crawler. The three-parter introduces the alien symbiote (here found on the moon by astronauts in search of precious elements), gives us Spider-Man‘s (Christopher Daniel Barnes) run in the costume, and plays out one of the series’ long-running threads in the creation of Venom (Hank Azaria). The arc also gives us a pair of Spidey villains in the Rhino (Don Stark) and the Shocker (Jim Cummings), both working for the Kingpin (Roscoe Lee Brown) in retrieving the valuable moon rock which J. Jonah Jameson (Edward Asner) wrongly believes Spider-Man stole.
The first thing that stands out in these episodes is how great Spidey looks in that black costume which is terrifically animated here. It’s a little sad we see so little of him, but that plays into the storyline with Peter (and others) noticing his more aggressive behavior after acquiring the symbiote. Eventually he choices to extricate himself from the suit, wounding its pride, only for it to find an equally hateful Eddie Brock who is a far more willing host.
The other parts of the arc involve Jameson, jumping to the wrong conclusion again, putting a bounty on Spider-Man’s head, which only feeds into his anger, and the rock from the moon which Kingpin acquires and looses a couple of times before it becomes inert and useless. However, that’s all mostly filler, and it’s Spidey’s run in the costume, and to a lesser extent Brock’s, that are the highlights of the arc.
