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The Black Cat
Review by Amazing Spidey, Media by Kolbar

Episode #44 - The Black Cat
Original Airdate February 15, 1997

Doctor Octopus is blackmailing the mother of Felicia Hardy, and she begins to realize that her family has some dark secrets. A confession by Anastasia Hardy reveals that Felicia's father was really 'The Cat' a thief who got rich from the gains of an enormous heist. The Kingpin joins forces with Doc Ock to spring Hardy from jail, as Hardy holds the secret to the 1940s "Super Soldier" formula that created Captain America!

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


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 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.

Once again, Doc Ock is nothing more than a lackey, but 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 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 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 thier masks. Whilst I did find thier relationship entertaining, I found the ending to be as welcome as a fart in an elevator (thank you Mark Millar!)

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 2 episodes were quite easily the best Black Cat episodes from the show. Which unfortunatly, wasn’t too difficult.

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