Review By Krankyboy, Media By Stu

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Episode #49 - Pardo Presents


Peter Parker takes his girlfriend Polly to a “gala premiere” presented by the mysterious Pardo, a green-skinned magician who is responsible for a series of robberies committed throughout the city.

Review:

One of the more bizarre entries in the series, “Pardo Presents” features one of the few instances in Saturday morning television that a superhero actually destroys his adversary (Superman would also knock off a few villains in his own 1960's cartoon series, “The New Adventures of Superman”). Needless to say, I hope you like your overgrown cats deep fried in electrical wires with stupefied looks on their faces.

Surprisingly, Pardo actually resembles Burl Ives (“The Big Country”, as well as the voice of the snowman narrator in “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”) after plunging into a vat of green tea, and he seems to be a hold-over from one of Ralph Bakshi's other efforts (recycled here due to budgetary constraints imposed by ABC television). The cackling villain certainly proves to be all that Spider-Man can handle, although some of the stock animation and slow pacing might be enough for viewers to reach for the fast-forward button on their remote. Even the cat's silhouette sometimes walks straight across the backgrounds, without its feet even touching the ground, in some of the laziest instances of bad animation in the series.

However, younger viewers and those of us who remember the show from childhood will find the episode diverting enough.

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