[5.3/10] Oh man, Punisher just doesn’t really work in a kid’s cartoon. I can appreciate the writers trying to dance around the fact that his whole shtick is killing people, with his partner convincing him to use non-lethal force “just this once” but it comes off really strained, and turns Frank Castle into a generic, neutered action hero.
It doesn’t help that, like a lot of villain episodes, there’s heavy focus on him here, and the character as constituted isn’t really interesting enough to sustain that. They hint at his soldier background, and his battle van and equipment are toyetic as hell, but mostly he’s a big bland nothing whose only interesting quality is that he manages to get the best of Spider-Man.
It’s also an overstuffed episode, with all that Punisher material, the additional bits with Mariah Crawford, and all the continuing Morbius stuff. By the way, how stupid it is that so many people mistake Morbius for Spider-Man. They don’t even begin to resemble one another from a distance, so what’s the deal?
The one good thing in this episode is Spider-Man having to deal with his transformation. The fact that he’s lost the muscle memory to know which arm to use to fire his webshooters, or that he feels “like a heel” for not talking to Aunt May or Mary Jane in this condition adds some interesting human elements to the story. And the fact that he turns into a full-blown anthropomorphic spider in the end builds on the neat body horror element of this arc.
Overall, a disappointing outing given how dully Punisher is realized here, but there’s some decent Spidey material in it.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2018-02-17T00:06:39Z
[5.3/10] Oh man, Punisher just doesn’t really work in a kid’s cartoon. I can appreciate the writers trying to dance around the fact that his whole shtick is killing people, with his partner convincing him to use non-lethal force “just this once” but it comes off really strained, and turns Frank Castle into a generic, neutered action hero.
It doesn’t help that, like a lot of villain episodes, there’s heavy focus on him here, and the character as constituted isn’t really interesting enough to sustain that. They hint at his soldier background, and his battle van and equipment are toyetic as hell, but mostly he’s a big bland nothing whose only interesting quality is that he manages to get the best of Spider-Man.
It’s also an overstuffed episode, with all that Punisher material, the additional bits with Mariah Crawford, and all the continuing Morbius stuff. By the way, how stupid it is that so many people mistake Morbius for Spider-Man. They don’t even begin to resemble one another from a distance, so what’s the deal?
The one good thing in this episode is Spider-Man having to deal with his transformation. The fact that he’s lost the muscle memory to know which arm to use to fire his webshooters, or that he feels “like a heel” for not talking to Aunt May or Mary Jane in this condition adds some interesting human elements to the story. And the fact that he turns into a full-blown anthropomorphic spider in the end builds on the neat body horror element of this arc.
Overall, a disappointing outing given how dully Punisher is realized here, but there’s some decent Spidey material in it.