Episode #39 - Carnage
Original Airdate November 9, 1996

Spider-Man and Venom must put aside their differences and help Iron Man stop Carnage and Baron Mordo from releasing Dormammu.

Credits
Story By: John Semper
Written By: Stan Berkowitz , James Krieg and 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 Parkr, Robert Hays as Tony Stark, Joseph Campanella as Dr. Curt Connors, Hank Azaria as Venom/Eddie Brock and Scott Cleverdon as Carnage/Cletus Kassidy

Review: Concluding from were Venom Returns left off, the episode took a more mystical turn thanks to the largely unneeded presence of Dormammu. It also had a large number of fight scenes, although the story somehow didn’t suffer for it. The fights were always give and take in this series, some of them were pretty cool, despite the censors, whilst others were embrassingly bad, mostly due to some dodgy editing and poor timing. One of, if not the most annoying things about this show was that that when it was good, it was arguably the best show on TV. When it was bad? It was absoloutly terrible, almost to the point of being unwatchable.

The cast was especially large, considering we had Spidey, Venom, Carnage, Iron Man, Mordo, Dr Kafka and Dormammu to contend with, which is a shame because the symbiotes were the best part, and Dormammu and Mordo aren’t really all that interesting. I really don't think they had any place here. They worked well enough in Dr. Strange, because they're his villains. They're far too weird for Spidey. Stark's dimensional transporter gave them a good reason to return, but unfortunatly, Dormammu was the main villain here, which doesn't sit well with me. This episode should've been about Carnage, in my opinion.

One of the best scenes in the episodes featured Venom returning to the Daily Bugle and attacking Jameson. Spidey intervened, and for a few short minutes it was the Spidey versus Venom sequel we never had. Quite why Spidey’s most popular villain only had 3 appearances in the show is baffling, especially considering how good they all where. As I've said before, I would've loved to see the Island fight animated, but the series basically ran out of episodes. I think this would've made a great episode for an unotherwise mediocre season 4, which lacked any big villains, and featured the return of characters who were monstly B stringers.

The episode was actually well directed for a change. Despite the large number of characters, the fight scenes were pretty good, for Spider-Man’s standards. There was nothing here that was Night Of The Lizard worthy, but good all the same. I especially liked the Spider-Man/Carnage fight in the city.

Carnage wasn’t allowed to kill people on Saturday morning, so the crew had him suck the life out of people. The visual for this was actually pretty cool, it kind of inverted his design. I didn't think they did too bad a job of Carnage, especially as he was everything the series wasn't allowed to do. He had a great design, and the animation was actually very well done. I would've loved to see more of Carnage, maybe an episode without Venom, but again, the series was cut short. Ironically enough the sixth season premiere was proposed to be Spider-Man vs Carnage, whilst he searched for Mary Jane. Alas, not to be. A great shame.

Iron Man was cool in this episode. When this first aired, I had only seen season one of his show, so it was great to see Iron Man with a good design, and not have him run through exactly the same story every week. His design is one of the best the Spider-Man: TAS crew ever did. Hay's delievered, as always. I'm glad they brought him in instead of replacing him, like they did with the Fantastic Four crew.

The ending was pretty disappointing, if only for the fact it made it essentially wrote off the chance to see Venom and Carnage again. I thought Brock's romance with Dr Kafka was pretty lame to be honest, and to have the story end on that note was a little sour. I liked Spidey's little recap at the fairground, mainly because of some awesome animation, but it's still a big dissapointment that we never saw Venom or Carnage again.