‘DIAMOND DUST’

Please feel free to comment on my review.

In this ‘Spider-Man’ episode, Spidey comes up against…Shakespeare! (gasps) What?! Spider-Man is fighting Shakespeare! What is it with people who want to make Shakespeare a villain?! First it was the ‘Doctor Who’ audio adventure called ‘The Kingmaker’, now it’s this 1960s ‘Spider-Man’ episode.

No, of course, it’s not William Shakespeare that Spidey fights against. Although I’m surprised this TV series didn’t go down that route. In fact, the Shakespeare in this happens to be a white suited gangster leader type of character. And he happens to have henchmen…dressed up in gorilla suits! 😮

And this was before ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ where it was suggested monkeys wrote Shakespeare’s play ‘Hamlet’. I wonder if Douglas Adams got that idea from watching this ‘Spider-Man’ episode. 😀 Anyway, Shakespeare and his henchmen hope to steal a diamond from a museum.

This involves letting out a real gorilla in a zoo in order to distract Spider-Man. And I have two issues regarding this in terms of animation and how it’s presented. First of all, the gorilla doesn’t sound convincing as a gorilla. It sounds more like a man who’s trying to act like a gorilla in a very lame way.

Second of all, we get too many shots of people running away from the gorilla. And it looks like the same shots of people over and over again. It matches to how the episodes in Season 2 of this ‘Spidey’ series have too many shots of Spidey swinging about in New York. Were the animators lazy?

Peter also has to take part in a baseball game in order to impress some girls at school. He often gets distracted when having to stop a gorilla causing trouble at school as well as stopping the criminals stealing the diamond. I’m not sure if a few of the Midtown High school kids were in another episode.

I’m not sure if the girl Peter was trying to impress was Sonya or Susan. I’m not sure if the friend Peter met up with at school was also in ‘Swing City’. It’s not made clear. There are a few decent action scenes between Spidey and Shakespeare in the episode’s conclusion, but it’s not clear either.

‘Diamond Dust’ was a decent ‘Spider-Man’ episode to watch. It’s better than some of the previous episodes I’ve seen, but there are too many shots of reused animation of Spidey swinging in New York as well as people running away from a gorilla. I do wish these episodes were more imaginative.

‘Diamond Dust’ rating – 7/10