Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends: The Bride of Dracula! (1983, Don Jurwich)

An occasional series where I watch and review works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Setting: Events begin at Empire State University in New York, then move via an airport and a transatlantic flight to Castle Dracula in Transylvania. It’s the modern day (1980s).

Faithful to the novel? This episode of a cartoon series uses Count Dracula – and a few other horror cliches – in a new storyline. Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was the third animated take on Marvel comic-book character Peter Parker, aka the crimefighting superhero Spider-Man. But there was a twist this time: after TV series in 1967 and 1981 that featured Spidey as a solo hero, this new version gave him two prominent allies. Bobby Drake aka Iceman, a mutant who can manipulate ice and water, was an established character from the comics. But when the producers were unable to licence Marvel favourite Human Torch, they instead created Angelica Jones (aka Firestar), a young woman who can likewise control fire.

Across 24 episodes shown from 1981 to 1983, the trio faced a wide range of threats as well as regularly teaming up with other good guys from Marvel’s stable. The heroes and villains who transferred from the pages of the comic books onto the small screen included Captain America, Doctor Doom, Doctor Strange, Colossus, Cyclops, Green Goblin, Hulk, J Jonah Jameson, Kingpin, Loki, Magneto, Professor X, Kitty Pryde, Red Skull, Tony Stark, Storm, Wolverine and of course Peter’s Aunt May and Uncle Ben. But there were several non-Marvel characters, too – including the world’s most famous vampire…

As The Bride of Dracula! begins, students Peter (voiced by Dan Gilvezan), Bobby (Frank Welker) and Angelica (Kathy Garver) are attending a dance party being held in the gymnasium of their university. There are streamers, balloons and throngs of people dancing to nondescript instrumental music. But while Peter and Bobby playfully bicker over which of them will get to dance with Angelica (‘Want to boogie?’), she’s distracted by a handsome older man (Stan Jones) who soon takes her outside, hypnotises her, reveals that she’s the woman he’s been seeking ‘for centuries’, and flashes his fangs…

Suspicious, Peter and Bobby look for their missing friend and discover that the stranger is planning on flying her to Transylvania – ‘Where all the vampires come from?!’ cries Bobby. Any doubt over the kidnapper’s identity is then swept away on board his jet-black private jet. He magically changes his appearance – greying hair, a goatie and a cape – and his accent, which now resembles Bela Lugosi’s fractured accent like so many other vampires of the 20th century. He’s Count Dracula!

Peter and Bobby – now in their superhero personas of Spider-Man and Iceman – need to follow Angelica, and their solution is to hold on to the exterior of another aeroplane at 40,000 feet during a freezing storm for the 4,600-mile journey to Romania. Meanwhile, Dracula arrives at his castle in Transylvania with his hypnotised prisoner. ‘Here, my darling,’ he tells her, ‘is where we will spend the next eternity…’ But his plan is scuppered when Spider-Man and Iceman show up. Soon Angelica is roused from his catatonia and can adopt her Firestar persona – ‘I’m too hot to handle!’ she quips to Dracula. Then, after a lot of benign fighting around the castle, Dracula is vanquished thanks to Firestar being able to create some artificial sunlight. Not only that, he loses all his memories of the kidnap attempt. Firestar is a little put out by this development: ‘A girl wants a man to find her unforgettable!’ she says in a hopeless line of dialogue that probably went by unnoticed in 1983.

Best performance: Voicing Bobby Drake is Frank Welker, one of *the* unsung heroes of popular culture. In a career that began over a half a century ago, he has worked on so many film and TV projects that one calculation put him as the third most financially successful actor in history. He’s provided the voices for Batman (in a Scooby-Doo special), various characters in The Simpsons, a young Kermit the Frog (in Muppet Babies), Garfield the cat (after Bill Murray had had enough of the role), Uni in Dungeons & Dragons, Ray Stantz (and Slimer) in The Real Ghostbusters, Jinx the robot in SpaceCamp, a galaxy’s worth of Transformers characters, whales in Free Willy 2, Martians in Mars Attacks!, and Darwin the dolphin in seaQuest DSV. In Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, once you clock that Bobby has the exact same voice as Welker’s most famous character – Scooby-Doo’s stoic pal Fred Jones, who the actor has voiced since 1969 – you can’t stop hearing it. (Welker’s also played Scooby himself since 2002.)

Best bit: The Bride of Dracula! is obviously aimed at children, so the more salacious elements of the Dracula mythos are breezed over. While Count Dracula talks about wanting Angelica as his wife, here that means kidnapping and imprisonment. Nothing genuinely violent or sexual ever creeps into the storytelling – no neck-biting, no blood-drinking, no turning-people-into-the-Undead. But the creative team still have fun peppering the episode with horror-flavoured embellishments.

Castle Dracula is a ruin perched on a mountaintop, first seen with the requisite flash of lightning. (There’s no runway anywhere nearby, so Dracula uses his nebulous magic powers to turn the plane into a bat-shaped craft that can land like a helicopter.) It’s a place of coffins and Gothic architecture and flaming torches and cobwebs – and you really sense the writers and artists having fun with all the cliches. Dracula also has two henchmen with horror pedigrees. When he’s on his mission to bag a wife in America, the Count is assisted by a werewolf called Bruno (Steve Schatzberg). The character is referred to as Wolf-Thing and is modelled after the 1940s Universal Studios character of the Wolf Man. He’s also a skilled creature – we see him chauffeuring Dracula around and then piloting the vampire’s private plane back to Europe. When they reach the castle, we then meet the Count’s other helper – Frankenstein’s Monster, complete with neck bolts and lumbering walk, who acts as a kind of butler.

Review: The Bride of Dracula!, which came early in the show’s third season, was written by Jack Mendelsohn. An artist-writer with a strong reputation in comics and animations, his CV encompasses many big-hitters of American pop-culture TV – Abbott and Costello, Rowan and Martin, Carol Burnett, the Flintstones, The Addams Family, Scooby-Doo, Hong Kong Phooey, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – and he was also one of the screenwriters of the Beatles animated film Yellow Submarine. Here, he cooks up an enjoyably silly slice of superhero nonsense, which uses Dracula and horror tropes to keep thing fun. The less said about a middle-aged man wandering into a university party, waltzing off with one of the female students, and no one other than her two friends noticing, the better.

Seven secret identities out of 10

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019, Jon Watts)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

While on a school trip to Europe, Peter Parker teams up with a new superhero to battle rampaging Elemental creatures…

The world is in mourning and the students at New York City’s Midtown High School have put together an in-memoriam video. After the events of Avengers: Endgame, several of the planet’s biggest superheroes are now out of the picture – including the late Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. As well as marking the start of a new phase in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series, the video also neatly reminds us of its recent ‘blipping’ storyline, which saw half of all life cease to exist for a period of time. Viewers who have only been following Spider-Man’s solo films would otherwise be justified in asking why the main characters in this sequel are still in school despite it being five years later.

Aside from not having existing for half a decade, not much has changed for schoolboy Peter Parker (Tom Holland). He still lives with his MILFy Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), is still attracted to his iconoclastic classmate MJ (Zendaya), is still best pals with the nerdy Ned (Jacob Batalon)… and is still splitting his time between studying and secretly suiting up as the superhero Spider-Man. But Pete can sense that a big change is on its way. With so many other Avengers now out of the game, Peter fears that he’ll be asked to step up and become a full-time protector of humanity. He’s even started to ignore phone calls from Avengers supremo Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson, in roughly his 700th MCU appearance).

A convenient distraction then arrives in the form of an overseas school trip. We’re launched into what could be described as Marvel’s European Vacation, which sees Peter, Ned, MJ and their friends travel to ‘Venice, Italy’. There’s wide-eyed sightseeing, musical montages, romantic hijinks, language confusions, and a trip to the world’s least-well-attended opera. As with Tom Holland’s first Spider-Man film, it’s all very light on its feet and likeable – the only blemish being the overly goofy teacher characters who fail to raise a smile. Holland himself is breathlessly energetic and endearing. But just as everything is going nicely touristy, disaster strikes. A huge water monster rises out of Venice’s canals and begins to cause carnage. Peter knows he should leap into action to help people – and helpfully, Aunt May has remembered to pack his Spider-Man outfit – but he can’t risk revealing his identity. Then another hero arrives on the scene and deals with the threat…

The newcomer, who soon acquires the suitably cool name of Mysterio, is the film’s main guest star and is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. At first he appears to be a derivative mish-mash of previous MCU characters – the look of Thor, the abilities of Doctor Strange, the nobility of Captain America – and the way he bests the ‘Water Elemental’ is via a typically busy, noisy, slightly cartoony and over-scored flurry of action, stunts and CGI. We’ve seen all this before, haven’t we? Well, yes we have. Many, many times. But there’s a postmodern sting in this tale…

After the chaos has subsided, Nick Fury arrives in Venice and introduces Peter to Mysterio, who says his real name is Quentin Beck and he’s from a now-destroyed version of Earth in an alternate reality. ‘This is Earth 616,’ he tells Peter. ‘I’m from Earth 833.’ The notion of there being several parallel Earths has long been a staple in superhero comic books, which have used the idea of a multiverse to present fresh takes on the same characters as well as team-up crossover events. The MCU film series has actually sourced some of its stories and ideas from more than one of these ‘realities’, while the concept has been a big feature of both the animated Marvel film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the various TV shows in DC’s Arrowverse franchise.

The thing is, though? It’s all a lie. The multiverse idea in Far From Home is just sleight-of-hand intended to disguise Beck’s true identity and motivations. After Peter and Mysterio become close and even fight side by side when a Fire Elemental monster roars through Prague, the movie pulls one of those bold plot twists that occur every now and again in the MCU series. The reveal comes at the end of a downbeat, confessional scene around the hour mark. Peter has been struggling with his destiny as the new Tony Stark, and Mysterio – still in his superhero get-up – offers kindly, avuncular advice while the two chat in a quiet Prague pub. However, once a pepped-up Peter has left, the furnishings slowly fade away, as do some of the patrons. The scene was a piece of theatre, refitting an abandoned building as a busy bar via hologrammatic projectors. Beck then breaks character and we realise that Peter has been had. He’s the mark in the kind of long con used in The Sting or Ocean’s 11.

But there’s more going on here than just a flip-flop story point. ‘Someone get this stupid costume off me,’ Beck cries to his team, now he can stop acting like a hero. That disparaging remark about the ‘Mysterio’ outfit is the start of a smart and self-aware deconstruction of the Marvel house style. It soon becomes clear that Spider-man: Far From Home is having some fun at its own expense. In fact, it’s spoofing the whole superhero-movie genre.

We’re quickly told the backstory and the team’s motivations. Beck *is* from Peter’s version of Earth, and was actually a colleague of Tony Stark’s. Furious that Tony stole some of his breakthrough work without adequate credit – and jealous that Iron Man’s mantle is now being passed on to a teenager – he wants revenge. He’s rounded up some similarly aggrieved people and devised a plan. The destroyed version of Earth in an alternate dimension is just a cover story, an invention designed to fool Peter and Nick Fury. In con-artist terminology, it’s the convincer. It also fools us viewers, because it’s precisely the kind of plotline that today’s superhero films dabble with. ‘A soldier from another Earth named Quentin fighting space monsters in Europe is totally ridiculous,’ sneers Beck to his minions. ‘And apparently the kind of thing people will believe right now.’ He’s talking as much about modern cinema-goers as he is about Peter and Nick.

We also learn that Beck’s team are using holo technology and covert weapons to stage the Elemental attacks. The monsters themselves are just part of the illusion. This means an extra level of self-aware tomfoolery, because we then see Beck reviewing the ‘special effects’ beforehand. He watches a rehearsal of the faux carnage behind closed doors, and asks for tweaks and changes like a movie director approving the work of his VFX team. The sequence is fun and unexpected, but it’s also ridiculing the artifice of modern blockbusters. That’s an admirable joke for a billion-dollar franchise to pull.

If there’s a downside, then perhaps it’s that the metatextuality draws attention to this version of Spider-Man sometimes not feeling very Spider-Man-y. The MCU approach to the character has been to mould him into a replacement Iron Man. The character’s original USP – a friendly neighbourhood crime-fighter – is being ignored in favour of him acquiring a can-do-anything cybersuit, a pair of hi-tech smart glasses and help from an AI voiced by a sexy female. There’s fun in the way Peter – sometimes inadvertently – uses his new tech to get the upper hand in his bid to date MJ, but the youthful, playful distinction of the original character is being blurred. Perhaps the MCU creative team have sympathy with Quentin Beck. After all, Beck and his associates want the power that comes from being the planet’s biggest superhero – and, as Beck says, if you have a cape and some lasers then everyone will listen to you.

Eight Night Monkeys out of 10

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017, Jon Watts)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

New York teenager Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, is disappointed not to be a fully fledged member of the Avengers. But he then stumbles across a gang trading in dangerous alien technology…

In the opening scene of this slick and vibrant movie, the villain’s entire motivation is justified in one smart, underplayed line of dialogue. It’s the immediate aftermath of 2012’s Avengers Assemble, and a blue-collar crew of workmen led by Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) are clearing up the mess left by that film’s climactic battle. But then a woman (Tyne Daly) turns up and says a new agency will take over and the crew are out of work. Toomes argues that he has a contract, but the woman won’t budge. “Come on,” he pleads. “Look, I bought trucks for this job…”

In a single beat, we get this guy. We understand his grievance. He’s been wronged and wants revenge. When a superhero script defines its villain so elegantly and so economically, you know you’re in for some good storytelling. Eight years later, Toomes and his crew are running an underground operation in salvaging, repurposing and trading in alien tech. Toomes has even built himself a mechanical pair of wings: “Business is good,” he says as he swoops into the workshop.

Meanwhile, teenager Peter Parker (a fantastic Tom Holland) is flying to Germany. We’re in the timeframe of Captain America: Civil War, the 2016 film that introduced this version of Spider-Man, and see Peter’s contribution to that movie via videos he shot on his smartphone. It’s a neat and fun way of recapping the story so far. However, two months after being co-opted by the Avengers, Peter is feeling ignored by Tony Stark and the others. He’s back to being a student in New York who fights minor crime in his spare time. So, instead of a superhero film, Homecoming mostly feels more like an 80s teen comedy. Peter’s school halls could be out of Pretty in Pink, though this school is a more diverse, working-class place than the WASPy, privileged Illinois of John Hughes’s world. Peter has a nerdy best pal called Ned (Jacob Batalon); fancies a girl called Liz (Laura Harrier); is bullied by a lad called Flash (Tony Revolori); and also knows MJ, an enigmatic girl who wants to keep to herself (Zendaya). The fact these five characters match up to the quintet from The Breakfast Club can’t be a coincidence. The bully even jokes that Peter has an imaginary girlfriend in Canada, a la The Breakfast Club’s Brian.

Peter is also trying to hide the fact that he’s YouTube sensation Spider-Man. Ned finds out by accident, but Peter’s guardian – Aunt May (an effortless Marisa Tormei) – is still in the dark. Peter then happens to see Toomes’s crew selling advanced weaponry on the black market, which leads to some fun action sequences (and a laugh-out-loud Ferris Bueller reference). It’s very enjoyable stuff: light on its feet, with freedom and playfulness. Every scene, in fact, has a sense of humour. This film hits the sweet-spot of taking itself just seriously enough. It also looks great, with bold colours for the teens’ world and a down-and-dirty, bodged-together vibe for Toomes and his gang.

If Spider-Man: Homecoming has a flaw, ironically it comes in the shape of the MCU’s brightest star. After his cameo in the Civil War recap, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) re-joins the story after 36 minutes. He acts as Peter’s kinda-mentor, though he wants to stop him getting too involved in large-scale crime-fighting. Despite this, he gives the lad a super-duper, hi-tech, all-singing, all-dancing Spider-Man suit that comes with a never-ending array of weapons and features and a sexy-voiced, female AI programme (Jennifer Connolly, a star of the pre-MCU film Hulk). In other words, we get another version of Iron Man. It’s not only repetitious but it jars with the film’s otherwise homespun charm. Peter works best as an underdog, a teenager using his wits, rather than someone being dragged along by cyberpunk technology.

But what is a huge success is Michael Keaton as Toomes. The actor obviously has superhero form (for this reviewer’s money, he’s still the best Batman), but here he turns his hand to supervillainy. Stand aside, Loki: Adrian Toomes is the best played, most interesting, most entertaining bad guy in this entire series. Like all modern genre films, Spider-Man: Homecoming is full of blockbuster action sequences and flashy CGI. It cost $175million to make. And yet the greatest special effect in the whole movie is Toomes staring at Peter in a rear-view mirror…

As we enter the third act, Peter plucks up the courage to invite Liz to their school’s homecoming. She agrees and, after some nervy prep with Aunt May’s help, he goes to Liz’s house to collect her. But her dad answers the door. And her dad is Toomes. As a plot twist, it falls neatly into the ‘well, I shoulda seen that one coming’ camp. It raises the stakes and leads to a fantastically edgy scene as Toomes drives his daughter and Peter to the party. Then it goes up a further gear after Liz gets out of the car: Toomes warns Peter, who he’s worked out is Spider-Man, to stay away from his business. And it’s chilling, like something from a Mafia movie.

A teenager being nervous because he’s taking a hot senior out on a date but then realising that her dad is the super-criminal he’s been hunting for? As a scene it’s pretty fantastic on its own merits, but it also encapsulates this movie as a whole. Homecoming is an excellent mash-up of the superhero format with teen-comedy conventions. Both elements feel equally important. A hoot.

Nine men leaning out of their window out of 10