Spider-Man: The Animated Series Episode Reviews

The Black Cat
Review by Stu, Media by Kolbar

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Episode #43- The Black Cat
Original Airdate: February 15th, 1997

With the super soldier serum in hand, Kingpin successfully tests it on Felicia Hardy, The Cat's daughter. Now the superpowered Black Cat, Felicia teams up with Spider-Man to rescue her father and stop Kingpin from using the serum for his own ends.

Credits:
Story By: John Semper
Written By: Marty Isenberg, Robert N. Skir, and Sean Catherine Derek
Music Composed By: Shuki Levy and Kussa Mahchi
Animation Services By: Toyko Movie Shinsha (TMS)
Guest Starring: Christopher Daniel Barnes as Spider-Man/Peter Parkr, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as Doctor Octopus, Jack Angel as Nick Fury, John Phillip Law as The Cat, Nita Talbot as Anastasia Hardy, Rachael Davies as Agent X, Jennifer Hale as Felicia Hardy/The Black Cat and Steven Jay Blum as Brace Huntington

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Review: This episode was one of those rare occurrences in a cartoon where everything simply fell neatly into place. All of the plot points were resolved by the end of the episode, and we got a great introduction to The Black Cat, who would become one of the major characters in the remaining episodes of the season. This episode easily stands out as her greatest appearance and a step up from the previous episode.

Once again, Doc Ock is nothing more than a lackey, but The Kingpin played a more pivotal role, and the plot revolving around his appearance is an interesting one. After testing that the super soldier formula works, he planned to create an army of them to do his bidding. There was times in this series when The Kingpin had ideas which were actually really, really stupid. The time he wanted the army of mutants to do his bidding, when any supervillain in the world was ready to work for him stood out the most.

The real story, however, as the title suggests, is The Black Cat. Her first scene was great, as was her fight with Spider-Man. The follow up, in which she uses the spider tracer Spider-Man gave his mother, was another nice little scene. She was a little arrogant, but Black Cat always has been. What I found most interesting about the Spider-Man/Black Cat relationship was that they didn't know who was under their masks. I've often wanted to see what would happen when they found out that they used to date before Peter was married, and how cruel Felicia often was to Peter. The relationship between them would've been much more interesting if it had ended because of their respective masks. Whilst I did find thier relationship entertaining, I found the ending to be a total dud.

The animation was especially pretty to the eye, and The Cat's plan for stealing the super soldier formula from Kingpin was great. It was a wonderful surprise for the viewers. Overall, these two episodes were quite easily the best The Black Cat episodes from the show. Which unfortunatly, wasn't too difficult.

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