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Review By Krankyboy, Media By Stu
Episode #44 - Diamond Dust
Tired of his role as a mild-mannered student, Peter Parker tries out for the college baseball team as a pitcher. But if he doesn't get into the game later that day, he won't make the team at all.
�Diamond Dust� is one of the rare occasions where the goals of Peter Parker and the need for Spider-Man collide during a single episode. Such conflicts were often commonplace in comic book stories and would later be fleshed out to a greater extent in Spider-Man: The Animated Series on Fox Television. But the storyline, despite having the trappings of a fairly weak villain in Shakespeare, works quite well.
For the first time, Peter gets to be something more than a soft-spoken college student or a beleaguered photographer for the Daily Bugle. Fans of the comic book won't be thrilled that Peter is momentarily a jock with a heck of a fastball (due to his spider strength) or that he seems pretty close to being the team's star (this also puts him in a slightly better position than his failed attempts at being a football hero in a similar episode, �Criminals in the Clouds). Ralph Bakshi might not have been an expert on the character of Peter Parker or Spider-Man in general, but in this episode, he certainly understands Peter's conflicts with his larger responsibilities in his role as Spider-Man. And that's not a bad thing for a series aimed at little kids.
Of course, there are places where the episode excels and fails. When Spider-Man is trying to web-swing his way to the game on time, he takes forever - a result of poor pacing and overuse of stock footage due to budget constraints. But there are a few fine bits of animation, including the rather Noir-ish moments where Peter's silhouette or shadow is thrown upon an alley wall as he changes into Spider-Man (which also briefly serve as a throwback to the �Superman� cartoon shorts of Max Fleischer).
One of the better episodes of the second season, before the series completely fell apart in the nearly worthless third.
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