Spider-Man: The Animated Series Episode Reviews

Blade, The Vampire Hunter
Review by Stu, Media by Kolbar

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Episode #22 - Blade, The Vampire Hunter
Original Airdate: February 6, 1996

The vampire hunter Blade arrives in New York to destroy Morbius, but instead of killing him Spider-Man wants to revert Morbius back into his human form. When Spider-Man reveals that Morbius is the victim of a Neogenic Recombinator experiment gone awry, Blade decides to destroy the equipment. But before he can, Morbius steals it giving him the power to turn anyone into a vampire!

Credits:
Written By: Stephanie Mathison, Mark Hoffmeier & John Semper
Music Composed By: Shuki Levy and Kussa Mahchi
Animation Services By: Toyko Movie Shinsha (TMS)
Guest Starring: Christopher Daniel Barnes as Spider-Man/Peter Parker,Nick Jameson as Michael Morbius, Dawnn Lewis as Detective Terry Lee, J.D. Hall as Blade, Malcolm McDowell as Whistler and Joseph Campanella as Doc Connors

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Review: The whole Morbius angle was wearing a little thin at this point for me personally, and the introduction of a new character didn't really help it at all. This was the pre-Wesley Snipes Blade film, BTW, so he hadn't quite defined cool yet. If you're watching this episode expecting a cartoon version of Snipes, you're out of luck.

The mutation angle was still kicking in, however it shifted back to Dr. Conners rather than Dr. Crawford, which I personally liked, The Lizard's alter ego is a far better character than Kraven's main squeeze. It also helped convert the story back to Neogenics which allowed Morbius to play a greater part. Again, the censors made Blade a pretty useless character. He could barely use his sword or act violent in anyway. He resorted to fancy lasers and garlic bombs. His bike was cool and they got a great voice in J.D Hall, as well as the excellent Malcolm McDowell as Whistler, but at this point in the series, I felt I had seen far too much of Morbius and his embrassingly bad plasma draining motives. FOX made it clear they weren't allowing vampires on thier network. Even Batman: The Animated Series wasn't allowed to do Vampires properly and that show got away with 1000 times more than Semper was allowed to.

Again, I still thought Morbius was overexposed in this show. The next episode unfortunaly suffers from the same fate as this one. They really should've ended the Morbius saga after he was hit by sunlight in his first episode.

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