Spider-Man The Animated Series: Secret Wars, Chapter 1: Arrival

Secret Wars, Chapter 1: Arrival

Madame Webb brings Spider-Man to meet her master, The Beyonder, who is preparing to put Spider-Man to the ultimate test. He sends Dr. Octopus, Dr. Doom, Smythe, Red Skull, and the Lizard off to destroy a peaceful planet and leaves Spider-Man to save it with his own selective team.

New storyline! Spider-Man in SPACE. I am interested that they went with ‘super assholes’ for Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm’s personality templates (Peter was like ‘I’ll just take the entire fantastic four for my team’), but there you go.

But who amongst us hasn’t needed a brief vacation of cosmic war between good and evil to recover from our wife evaporating in front of us?

It occurs to me that… maybe the Fantastic Four had a cartoon going on at this time? I know Iron Man did. So did Storm.

Good moments with the Lizard with Doc Connors’ mind in this. I like a thoughtful lizard man.

Cartoon dump

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Dogfight Days of Summer

With General Morando’s invasion of Earth imminent, Krel tries to stop the fleet’s advance with unwitting help from the kids of Arcadia.

In which a Flappy Bird knockoff saves an empire. Although I’m starting to wonder if it’s an empire worth saving, between Varvatos’ backstory and the events in Ill Gotten Gains.

Mother’s Day

Mother, the AI controlling the royals’ ship, reflects on keeping the peace between her quarreling family. Morando discovers a secret hidden on Earth.

Hey wait it turns out that those people they keep swearing for aren’t just flavour. Cool cool cool.

Ill Gotten Gains

Colonel Kubritz stages a phony quarantine of Arcadia High School in a ploy to capture the royals — and their advanced weapons technology.

Kubritz has my favourite voice actor in the whole series, and I like most of ’em pretty good.

Ducktales:

The Secret(s) of Castle McDuck!

On a family trip to Scrooge’s ancestral castle, Dewey tries to hide the truth about his mom as his brothers search for family secrets.

“Brace yourselves. We’re going to have a pleasant family dinner.”

I really like the Ducktales reboot. It’s funny. SomewhatEvilScrooge is my jam. I still cannot tell you which nephew is which even though they now have personalities though. My sister gave me a cheat sheet I’m going to make a post-it note of and put on the monitor. It’s ‘the evil one, the neurotic one, the blue one, and webby’ in my head so far.

Stuff about their mom though. It always kind of bugged me in the old series their parents were total no shows and all I knew about them from the comics is they’d been sent to live with Donald after hospitalizing their father.

Of course, Spider-Man finally addressed the issue of his parents and it turned into a Russian/WW2 spy drama, so sometimes that’s a mixed blessing. No wonder no one liked Peter at school.

Silver Surfer:

Learning Curve: Part 2

The Surfer must decide if obtaining all the knowledge in the universe is worth giving up his humanity and freedom.

Spoiler: It’s not. Although does he actually have humanity? Wouldn’t he have Zenn-Laity? He’s a funny little blob, anyway.

Nebula’s voice actress acted the HELL out of her ‘I am a tough lady’ role.

Innervisions

The planet of Harmony has its inhabitants in a dream state, unaware of reality. The Surfer must awake them before their planet is wiped out by Thanos.

So! Two things. For some reason the Korbinites are called ‘Whynnm’ in this episode and because for some reason my subtitles weren’t oh, I spent a bit of time wondering why Silver Surfer kept talking about having to warn the ‘women’ but then walked right past a female of the species.

Anyway, Thanos has his proper role in this cartoon: Sad statue dweeb.

Spider-Man (90s):

Six Forgotten Warriors Chapter 3: Secrets of the Six

The Six Forgotten Warriors are said to have 6 secret keys to unlock a dangerous weapon that could destroy the world.

Peter’s parents are Russian traitors! This is why no one likes you, Peter!

Six Forgotten Warriors Chapter 4: The Six Fight Again

Five of the Forgotten Six reunite and team up with Spider-Man to stop the Kingpin from activating the Dooms Day Weapon. But during the process of activating it, Captain America and Red Skull are returned.

Ugh fine they weren’t traitors. Also I enjoyed how often this cartoon eschewed the traditional origins of characters for Spider-Man.

Six Forgotten Warriors Chapter 5: The Price of Heroism

Red Skull uses the Dooms Day Device to transport power into his son and transforms him into Electro. As Electro begins to absorb more power, he becomes even too powerful for his father to handle.

That said, I question making Electro Red Skull’s bouncing baby boy. In the ~comics, he’s a electric pole worker (we call them something else where I come from, I don’t know the American name) who got struck with lightning to get his powers. Same origin as my grandpa’s powers, but the Americans wonder why we call him Hydro-Man. Especially considering the next episode.

The Return of Hydro-Man: Part 1

While on their honeymoon, Peter and Mary Jane are interrupted by Morrie Bench. Still obsessed with making Mary Jane his other half, Morrie kidnaps her.

Mary Jane gets arrested for fashion crimes. Or stealing a boat. One of those.

Features a frantic drive of a shitty van from Niagara Falls to New York. I have no idea how far that is and google maps is all effed up from the plague so I’m not gonna bother checking the driving time. It’s even funnier if he was afraid the van was going to die out after an hour’s drive.

“Thank god, tall buildings!” is a classic Spider-Man line though.

Rob Paulsen is the voice of Hydro-Man and when I was a little kid, he was absolutely my favourite voice actor ever. So that was nice.

Transformers (G1):

Megatron’s Master Plan: Part 1

The Decepticons convince the humans that the Autobots are the true enemies, with the help of a greedy candidate for mayor, named Sean Burger.

‘I could be mayor of this city or I could join with evil robots to rule the world’ is a pretty believable villain origin story, honestly.

Meanwhile the Transformers are going to be flung into the sun because they were like ‘welp, humans said we gotta go’

And I think Spike’s dead. I haven’t watched the next episode yet.

Gummi Bears:

Water Way to Go/Close Encounters of the Gummi Kind

“Water Way to Go”: Gusto encounters a mermaid named Aquarianne and wants her to pose for him but Sunni, jealous that he won’t paint her, lies that he plans to capture her. When she leaves, Duke Igthorn captures her so her sea-monster pet will follow her and attack Dunwyn. “Close Encounters of the Gummi Kind”: Gusto’s rolling sculpture of Gruffi to lead away ogres instead attracts not only Igthorn and his ogres but a group of humans who want to see the Gummis for a variety of purposes.

It’s Rob Paulsen again! With my favourite character type, ‘somewhat cooler loner character who only shows up intermittently!’. I loved Gusto. I do think Sunni was suffering a little from the only other boy bear being Cubbi. Are they siblings? I don’t know. Who is/are/was Sunni’s parents???

June Foray, with her signature raspy voice, is Grammi Gummi and *also* a small child in this episode which was frankly excellent.

I never quite understood the connection between this cartoon and delicious treats, but I enjoyed it as an adventure cartoon. Since it was usually split into two parts, even though I would miss half of it running home from school, I usually at least got to see the second episode.