The Amazing Spider-Man (1977) s02e01 – The Captive Tower

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

A group of highly trained men takes over a state-of-the-art skyscraper. They are led by an enigmatic leader whose primary contact on the team is the computer wizard. They have rigged the roof to explode. They have thirty or so hostages on the thirtieth floor, and they are in control.

But there’s something they didn’t expect—they’re not in the pilot for “McClane,” which could’ve starred Tom Selleck in 1979—they’re in the second season premiere of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” and Nicholas Hammond is going to kick their ass. I mean, presumably Nicholas Hammond. While there are a handful of scenes you know it’s him in the costume, in most scenes, you know it isn’t him. Does it break the verisimilitude?

Yes and no. Captive Tower is a decent season premiere of an action stunt show. It’s very specific about how it works. Hammond (out of costume) hangs out in the first act, then is in and out for the rest of the episode. He checks in for exposition scenes and catch-ups with the supporting characters, but otherwise, it’s all costumed “Hammond.”

So it’s an action stunt show with a specific target market. Tween boys who are allowed to stay up at primetime, which is a weird advertising demographic for primetime. The Die Hard plot is so incontrovertible the show can’t help but be compelling. Even when the height of action drama is “Hammond” being woozy at the edge of the building.

Spider-Man’s lack of balance this end of the Spider-Verse also plays in when there’s a balancing on a tightrope sequence. Spider-Man’s bad at balance. What is even happening.

Basically, there’s just no promise of verisimilitude for it to fail. All the character work for the regular supporting cast stops before the halfway point. Chip Fields drops Hammond off at the assignment—presumably to borrow his new car (which will go on to be a regular on the season, but never a plot point). She does an exposition dump to help introduce new regular Ellen Bry, playing a rival photographer who can appear in the action plot but also be damsel and love interest at better rates than weekly ingenues.

Bry and Hammond bicker, touch a lot, then she’s background.

Ditto Robert F. Simon as J. Jonah Jameson. He gets a lot to do in the first act (though, at best, he’d just be setting himself up for an Ellis situation). But then he’s just around to tell the guest stars what to do. Like, literally. Either Hammond or Hans (David Sheiner) will tell everyone to do something, and Simon will tell people to do it. It’s busywork and very obviously where Tower proves the Die Hard structure needs, you know, some kind of artistic impulse.

Instead, the character drama is either about a terrorist’s fear of heights or the computer guy (Todd Susman) being in love with the computer. Does the computer talk to him? No. Is it visually impressive? No. Director Cliff Bole just gives Susman one shot after one shot about how much he loves the computer and how he’s got to seduce her into doing their… commands.

Sheiner’s bad. Susman’s bad, but not always. Hammond’s got his moments, and even though Tower features him definitely in the costume doing scenes with other characters—he talks to the other other agent Johnson—Spider-Man’s not a character who has any stakes. The cops aren’t even after him this season, apparently. The show replaced season one (and pilot movie) regular Michael Pataki with Bry for this season, only to bring in Ed Sancho-Bonet as a Pataki-like cop to negotiate with Sheiner.

Simon and Bry are both fine. Fields gets that opening scene to be charming and makes Hammond immediately better; he’s never better on the show than with her. If only she’d stayed past that actual opening scene.

But there’s more than enough “Spider-Man” action for the target audience.

And that Dana Kaproff score is dynamite.

Spider-Man: Photo Finish and Matter of State (1979, Tony Ganz and Larry Stewart)

I’d love to know the logic behind the episode arrangement in Photo Finish and Matter of State. Another “Amazing Spider-Man” compilation movie again puts the later episode first; while the series presumably didn’t have much in the way of season-long character arcs, it’s peculiar to see Nicholas Hammond and Ellen Bry’s relationship rewind in the second half. The movie has one an adjoining scene to tie the two together—they got Hammond and Chip Fields back, though not the sets—but the actual adjoining scene would be one explaining why Hammond and Bry went from near onscreen canoodling to asking their friends if the other one likes them in the second half. Well, practically.

The two episodes do share some similar themes. They’re about Peter Parker, News Man, which is how he describes himself throughout Photo Finish. It gets so gendered Robert F. Simon makes sure to explain—in 1979, mind—he supports “newspaper people,” not just news men. Hammond is covering a boring rare coin purchasing story—Geoffrey Lewis is apparently friends with Simon, which is funny on its own—when someone robs Lewis. Besides being about the freedom of the press, Finish and Matter are about how Hammond—despite his very obvious super-strength and accelerated healing powers—can be knocked unconscious like everyone else. Each episode’s plot depends on it. In the first half, I initially thought he was faking. By the second, I realized he gets the invulnerability from the suit.

Speaking of the suit… Hammond spends much of Finish in jail for contempt of court, yet he’s always changing into Spider-Man to bend the bars and go do adventures. Should we be asking where he keeps the suit?

It turns out Hammond’s passively participating in a frame-up—someone took a picture with his camera when he was unconscious, framing Lewis’s ex-wife Jennifer Billingsley for the robbery. The known villains are Kenneth O'Brien and Milt Kogan, playing a TV version of the Enforcers (Kogan’s the Ox, and I suppose O’Brien’s Fancy Dan, but they’d want to change it to make it more Irish). O’Brien plays his part like he’s auditioning for Lucky the Leprechaun’s evil brother.

Can Hammond unravel the mystery while staying ahead of the bad guys—who learn his secret identity (don’t worry, it goes nowhere)—and copper Charles Haid?

Obviously; there’s a whole other episode after the first one.

The second half has Bry in trouble; she snaps a picture of international bad guy Nicolas Coster while he’s doing espionage at the airport. He sends his goons, Michael Santiago and James Lemp, after her to get the camera. Then the film, then the negatives, then they’ve got to go kill her. Coster has to explain things multiple times, but it also pads out the runtime to a full episode.

Otherwise, it’s mostly just Hammond trying to get Simon (and Fields) to agree Bry deserves not to be murdered even if she does work at the rival newspaper. It’s also another episode where Fields and Hammond have much more potential romantic energy than Hammond and Bry, only for Fields to get dumped for the second half. And, given the events of the first episode, it introduces a strange, almost jealous vibe?

There are some great stunts—the finale has Hammond’s stunt man climbing the Empire State Building for an action scene (based on reused stock footage, both episodes also take place mostly around Times Square, Los Angeles County)—and Ganz’s direction of Photo Finish is downright good. Not so for Stewart’s direction on the second half, which struggles towards middling for a late seventies action show.

Lewis is a good guest star in the first half, something the second is sorely missing. The target demographic can’t pay attention long enough for Coster to explain all his international espionage stuff, so instead, it’s Hammond and Bry charmlessly bickering, which you’d also think the target demographic wouldn’t be interested in. Yet. Though trying to imagine what went so wrong between the two episodes for Hammond and Bry to be so awkward after seeing each other naked does keep the neurons firing while the movie’s not encouraging them.

The first half isn’t good but is fine. The second half isn’t fine. They really needed to finish with the better episodes.

But, again, Ganz. Ganz’s direction is excellent. Oh, and Billingsley is often quite good. Something’s very wrong with the editing on her scenes, or maybe they had to do a lot of takes, but she’s better than the show needs. Well, you’d think, but then the second half shows what happens when the show’s in need.

Anyway.

Ship Fields and Hammond. Always.

Spider-Man: Wolfpack and the Kirkwood Haunting (1979, Joseph Manduke and Don McDougall)

Wolfpack and the Kirkwood Haunting once again proves me very wrong in thinking these two-episode compilation movies were the way to watch the old “Amazing Spider-Man” show. However, that revision is less about the narrative packaging this time and more about the show itself. Independently or consecutively, Wolfpack and Kirkwood are stinkers. But the Wolfpack half is at least a fun stinker, whereas Kirkwood is mind-numbingly dull. Except when Spider-Man (Nicholas Hammond or his stunt man) fights a lion, and a bear; oh, my.

Wolfpack also has the much better guest stars. While Gavin O’Herlihy and Will Seltzer are fairly dull as Hammond’s grad school buddies, Allan Arbus plays the villain. He’s a shitty scientist turned middling middle manager who has been overseeing O’Herlihy’s grant from Dolph Sweet’s chemical company. When O’Herlihy accidentally discovers mind control mist, Arbus sees his chance to finally get rich. However, instead of robbing a bank or anything simple, he does things like getting O’Herlihy and his sidekicks to steal a Gutenberg Bible or brainwashing the local military base into helping him pull a heist.

Arbus is phoning it in, but with enough energy it’s fun to watch him seventies camp it in a Spider-Man. Chip Fields has been helping out O’Herlihy and Seltzer—in their unregulated human experimentation trials they’re all obviously doing—so she gets to be in the main plot, and she’s delightful. Even when the scenes are dull exposition full of fake science words for eight-year-old boys who talked their parents into letting them watch prime time, Fields is a delight. Other series regulars Robert F. Simon and Ellen Bry are around a bit—Simon’s a gruff old grandpa in this half, much different than his “We blue bloods need to stick together (with international arms dealers)” in the second. But Wolfpack treats Bry like garbage, as though her agent demanded they shoehorn her in, so her scenes are usually just Hammond telling her to go away because she’s not part of the main cast.

Bry does a little better in the second half (Wolfpack and Kirkwood are compiled in reverse order, presumably because there’s never any character development, so what does it matter). Simon has Hammond go check on his arms dealer friend’s widow, a suffering (the role) but earnest Marlyn Mason, who’s getting shaken down by psychic huckster Peter MacLean. Hammond’s supposed to suss out whether Mason is actually haunted or if it’s fake. Given the first scene with Mason seemingly unintentionally reveals it’s fake—MacLean’s sidekick, Paul Carr, starts the episode (sorry, half) as the medium but then becomes the sound van guy. It’s like no one can see him except MacLean. Wait a second… he’s just walking around like a regular person….

Anyway. Much like there being wild animals all around the mansion who terrorize Bry and Mason at various times but are never a danger to the actual villains, so there are no good comeuppance scenes, Kirkwood misses any opportunities it might (accidentally) have.

Manduke's Wolfpack direction is nothing spectacular, but it’s much better than McDougall’s attempts at sophisticated suspense. Though MacLean’s such a hack, Kirkwood never has a chance. Maybe if he’d brought some Arbus-level scorn to it, but no. Kirkwood tasks MacLean with more than he can handle.

Also, Fields is barely in Kirkwood, which is a bummer. While Bry’s better when she’s not just around for Hammond to clown on, Fields’s the closest thing to a breakout in Spider-Man. She’s at least got a personality.

There are some decent stunts, occasionally solid music from Dana Kaproff (and occasionally not), but Wolfpack and Kirkwood is bland and blah.

Spider-Man: The Con Caper and the Curse of Rava (1978, Tom Blank and Michael Caffey)

In a more modern context, The Con Caper and the Curse of Rava take on additional depth. First, there’s convicted state or federal senator (or congressman) William Smithers. He’s a white guy who once upon a time gave Black woman Chip Fields her first chance in the early seventies after she would’ve spent most of her life living during the Civil Rights movement. So being Smithers’s trusted sidekick would’ve meant a lot.

It’d sure be terrible if Smithers turned out to be a sociopath, just a charming one.

In the second half—Caper is two episodes of “The Amazing Spider-Man” TV show joined together for syndication and home video, which is how “TV on DVD” worked until… DVD—but the second half’s big eyebrow raise is how the show manages to be shitty towards villain Theodore Bikel while lionizing capitalist imperialism. Bikel’s from Kalistan, which is presumably based on someone in the writers’ room—Robert Janes (which I swear is a pseudonym in something) gets the credit for Curse—but someone heard of Khalistan, a still unsuccessful (going 300 plus years now) attempt by the Sikh to get their own homeland.

So, Curse is also a great example of how Hollywood media ransacked the cultures and histories of the entire world under the premise: Americans are too dumb to know, then they’re too dumb to care, then they’re just not watching the show–the great balance.

Curse isn’t about Sikh homelands, of course. It’s about a cult of Kalistani dissidents led by dark pope Bikel (no, really, he’s the pope of the group) who want to steal their historical Rava statue—their god of destruction (while Rava’s scary looking, not cool, and buff, he’s also very male, even though—wait, am I getting made they didn’t use Shiva or something? Look at me retroactively enabling this shit).

Anyway.

The statue’s in New York City because the current Kalistan administration wants those American greenbacks, in this case, delivered (or couriered) by none other than Daily Bugle CEO and “Spider-Man” regular J. Jonah Jameson (Robert F. Simon). Simon’s dead wife was big into getting relics into their private blue blood museum, and he’s continuing the tradition in her honor. He’s a justified Karen in his imperialist looting.

Bikel threatens museum guy Byron Webster with telekinetic feats, pointlessly witnessed by closest-thing-to-a-love-interest Adrienne Larussa. She’s not an actual love interest for Peter Parker (Nicholas Hammond), but she fills the slot. She’s actually in an antagonist position for most of the episode.

Half.

Whatever.

Even though they use South Asian visual imagery for some of the protesting cult members—the ladies, the dudes are all just white seventies hippies—Curse isn’t sure how to write this made-up fantastical religion, so they add this anti-Muslim bent to it. Like some of Bikel’s dialogue. It’s a lot.

Even though Bikel’s barely in the episode. He’s a long-shot villain who stares at something until Hammond’s Spider-sense goes off.

All right, now. We’re mostly out of ways Caper Curse ages horrifically. There’s obviously lots of veiled and unveiled misogyny, and general weird classism, but I think the specifics are done. Now for the problem of tying these two episodes together. Con is Fields’s episode; she even sings a song. But it’s about Simon trusting Fields—he’s a shitty blue-blood Karen in the late seventies dealing with all these damn kids and their TokTiks—even after Fields was wrong to trust Smithers. Fields has to eat a little crow, but most of it’s internal. And Smithers turns out to have really broken bad. Not just a little.

But there’s also the Caper part. Everyone says “con” a lot; everyone says “caper” a lot. The writer—this time credited to Gregory S. Dinallo—wants to make sure the viewers in the audience who’d just learned to read title cards, know the episode’s called The Con Caper. It’s weird. The first half of Caper Curse is this seventies groovy with decent guest stars Andrew Robinson and Ramon Bieri as two prisoners who stage a riot in a ruse to get recently released and now prison reformer Smithers back into the prison. Only from the outside, obviously.

Apparently, traditional spoiler rules do not apply to compilation TV movies. But since Caper is from season two and Curse is from season one, the whole premise is a spoiler for Curse. However, no one’s really in danger in Curse. It’s mostly about Simons being falsely accused, so they can have vaguely amusing scenes with Simons yelling at Hammond from his jail cell. Then Michael Pataki also gets all these weird scenes with Simons where Pataki’s got to be suspicious of Simons because he’s reporting seeing telekinesis stuff. Except Simons clearly said no to doing the jackass scene on film, so Pataki’s always talking about the report Simons gave. So Pataki’s got to say the silly comic book shit. And he hates it. It’s not a good episode for Pataki, but it’s his most sympathetic. Having to put up with Simons’s Karening is too far.

There are some amusing changes between the episodes besides Pataki being gone in the first one (because he didn’t come back) and being around for the second. His replacement in season two is Ellen Bry, an annoying capable young woman who wants to hang out with Hammond for some reason. She works at another paper, so she’s also covering Smithers and the prison stuff. But Fields has a decently sized Afro in the first episode, which she doesn’t have in season one. She was very close-cropped in season one. Okay, wait, no… Fields’s hair can make sense.

See, she cuts it after episode one, which is from season two, then it’s super short in the bridging addition—which takes place on a sitcom family kitchen set, and you can practically hear someone say “Action”—then it grows back a little for the second episode.

Hammond’s hair is shorter in season two than in season one but even shorter than season two in the bridging scene. So it makes no sense. Also, whoever wrote the bridging dialogue either didn’t give a shit about Curse’s first act or was eye-rolling it.

The first half’s totally passable late seventies mainstream groovy–so much music from Dana Kaproff. Everything’s got music. It’s awesome. Sort of. It’s fun. Or close enough to it.

The second half’s basically “Spider-Man” doing “Ghost Story.” Even when Hammond’s got a powered supervillain like Bikel, we’re years from a live-action superhero fight. It’s as if it took Westerns ten years to have actual horses.

The direct’s low middling. Technicals are competent.

If there’d been a better second episode—because you forget the transition problems fairly quickly thanks to Curse looking completely and utterly different, including film stock—Caper Curse probably would’ve worked out? Curse is just an unpleasant episode. The B plot is Simons’s jail arc. Oh, and Hammond stalking Larussa and mansplaining to her. He’s a jackass.

What a way to react to being kidnapped with your coworkers… growing your hair, digging out that suit jacket, buttoning your shirt, and being mean to people.

I’d said these compilation pictures might be the right way to watch the ever-unavailable “Amazing Spider-Man” TV show, but I’m reconsidering.

Spider-Man: The Dragon's Challenge (1979, Don McDougall)

Some of The Dragon’s Challenge’s problems are because it’s a TV two-parter stuck together then packaged as a theatrical. An overseas theatrical, but still a theatrical feature. The action in the first half takes place in New York, with some cuts to villain Richard Erdman making plans. He needs to get a Chinese official out of the way so he can build a steel plant.

When the Chinese official (Benson Fong) heads to New York, Erdman sends touch guy Hagan Beggs after him. Better to assassinate him in New York than Hong Kong.

Except Fong’s in New York with a purpose–get help from Robert F. Simon and the Daily Bugle. Enter Nicholas Hammond and, pretty quickly, Spider-Man. Fong’s got a niece, played by Rosalind Chao, who thinks Hammond’s a coward for running off. Little does she know he’s running off to change into his Spider-Man outfit and save the day.

The second half takes place in Hong Kong. Much of it shot in Hong Kong. When the Spider-Man stuntman is dangling alongside a huge Hong Kong skyscraper, Dragon’s Challenge delivers on something it hadn’t really been serious about. Even though director McDougall is clearly thrilled to be shooting on location in Hong Kong, nothing in Lionel E. Siegel’s teleplay sets anything up for Spider-Man. It doesn’t even set anything up for Nicholas Hammond. The Hong Kong stuff is entirely about the villains hunting Hammond, Chao, and soon-to-be government witness John Milford. Until they get attacked, however, it’s a travelogue with this odd trio.

Hammond and Chao have no chemistry. It’s Hammond’s fault. He ignores Chao in the first half, then condescends in the second. It’s because he’s sweet on her, it turns out. Milford’s fine, but not any fun. The travelogue still can get away with it because it turns out they’re on location.

There’s a car chase in Hong Kong and then a helicopter chase. Oh, and a boat chase. And Spider-Man lets the bad guys get away. For maybe the second time in Dragon’s Challenge. Hammond makes some bad superhero decisions throughout.

Series regulars Chip Fields and Ellen Bry don’t get anything to do and barely make an impression. Particularly Bry. Even though she and Hammond get a very romantic setup–using New York location shots–they don’t have anything going on in Dragon’s Challenge. Mostly because Hammond’s weird subplot about Chao not liking him infests the first half. It’s silly.

Chao’s good. She’s got lousy material and no energy from Hammond but she’s a great guest star. Simon’s got some strong scenes with Fong. Beggs is a fine bad guy, even if he is an idiot who whines about his inability to plot assassinations. It’s more amusing than when Hammond mopes about Chao thinking he’s a coward. Those scenes are just awful.

Hammond’s part in Dragon’s Challenge is thin. His job is to run out and become Spider-Man then have no excuse when Spider-Man gets done so everyone is an idiot for not realizing the obvious.

It’s nice to see Fields, even if it’s only for a few scenes.

Fine editing from Erwin Dumbrille and Fred Roth.

The Dragon’s Challenge has got some decent pieces and it’s far from unbearable; it’s still closer to unbearable than any good.