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Ultimate Spider-Man
#9 - Freaky
Original Airdate - June 17th, 2012
Spider-Man and Wolverine must overcome their clashing styles and personalities to team up against super-villains Mesmero and Sabretooth. When they find themselves literally looking through each other's eyes, 'team-up' takes on a whole new meaning.

Ultimate Spider-Man stars Drake Bell (Drake & Josh) as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Chi McBride (Boston Public) as Nick Fury, Clark Gregg (Iron Man, Thor, The Avengers) as Agent Coulson, JK Simmons (Spider-Man) as J. Jonah Jameson, Steven Weber (Wings) as Norman Osborn, Greg Cipes (Teen Titans, Ben 10) as Danny Rand/Iron Fist, Ogie Banks as Luke Cage/Power Man, Caitlyn Taylor Love (I'm In The Band) as Ava Ayala/White Tiger, Logan Miller (I'm In The Band) as Sam Alexander/Nova, Tom Kenny (SpongeBob SquarePants) as Doctor Octopus, Matt Lanter (Star Wars: The Clone Wars) as Harry Osborn/Flash Thompson, Tara Strong (The Fairly Odd Parents) as Mary-Jane Watson, Misty Lee (Batman: Arkham City) as Aunt May, and recurring guest star Stan Lee (Spider-Man) as Stan the Janitor.

Guest starring is Steve Blum (The Super Hero Squad Show) as Wolverine, Dwight Schultz (The A-Team) as Mesmero and Peter Laurie as Sabretooth.

"Freaky" was written by Brian Michael Bendis and directed by Jeff Allen.

Ultimate Spider-Man is produced by Marvel Animation and carries a TV-Y7-FV parental guideline.

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Obviously the show still uses a lot of cut-away scenes and still has a few too many fourth wall breaking moments for me, but this time some of them were really good. For example, I loved the High School Soap Opera montage ("One Life to Web") though I was surprised they chose Dr. Doom in particular for a recurring role on the show - I'm probably over-thinking this. But you got to admit it was pretty hilarious. Another moment I found pretty funny was when Logan in Peter's body tries to wear the Spider-man outfit but puts his mask on backwards. For the most part though, the other "gags" weren't that humorous. The "We are experiencing technical difficulties" gag was used too many times, and I just didn't find it that funny. The show seems to use a running gag like this almost in every episode, and not one of them so far has really seemed that funny to me. But like I said, at least one gag made me laugh; it's the first time I actually laughed at an episode of this show, so that's something.

Looks like the show is finally getting a little better. Though obviously I could be wrong; one episode could be great, like this one and the next one turns out to be so bad you can't sit through and actually make it to the end of the episode. While I didn't find any of the previous episodes completely unwatchable, there have been some pretty bad ones where the story doesn't make much sense and which I won't be re-watching anytime soon. But this was probably the most fun I had watching an episode of this show so far. Since the chances of actually developing Spidey's team-mates on this show or actually have them do something worthwhile are pretty slim, I'm looking forward to more team-up episodes like this one. As long as they're done right, I'm guessing they can be entertaining enough.

Finally, I can say the voice acting was great in an episode of Ultimate Spider-man. Steve Blum as Wolverine is usually great, but him using a whiny voice similar to the one Peter/Spidey has on the show, was even better. Drake Bell using a voice similar to Logan's was also pretty great. I'm glad they didn't switch voices once they switched bodies in this episode, and instead had the regular voice actors try and emulate each others' voices. Not a lot of shows have done this in their body-switch episodes (the only other examples I can think of right now would be Justice League Unlimited's "The Great Brain Robbery" episode and from Marvel cartoons, the episode "Doomsday" from the Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes series). Other than that, it was nice hearing Peter Lurie voice Sabretooth again, reprising his role from the recent Wolverine and the X-Men show, and Dwight Schultz made for a pretty good Mesmero. All in all, this was the best episode yet.