Spider-Man: "The Alien Costume" Recut

I have a real soft spot for the 90s Spider-Man show and this arc in particular, it turned me into a rabid Spidey fan for five minutes in the mid-90s before I returned to my otherwise 40-year DC obsessive streak. It was great to see PE tweak this three-parter into a more substantive mini-film that holds up much better to modern scrutiny. Venom was never going to be as cool as his build-up suggests, and his behaviour in the final act suggests a half-hearted stalker rather than the gravest threat our hero has ever faced, but at least we no longer have to endure "Venom, angry trucker" that we've all seen the .gif of.

On this re-watch I had to wonder if the decision to make the primary plot revolve around purely John Romita-created villains (Kingpin, Shocker, Rhino) was a coincidence, as if the lack of Ditko's deeply unsettling rogues gallery might not make for a strong enough contrast with Venom. Food for thought, anyway; but while the original story could have used a little less JR and a little more Todd McFarlane in its DNA, PE has still made the best possible version of this story sequence and as a nostalgia trip, it's a damn good one.

I can just imagine Problem Eliminator’s thought process well trying to fix all the technical errors ‘’YOU CAN’T ESCAPE ME I’ll EDIT YOU TO THE ENDS OF THE EEEEEEEEARTH!!!!!!!!!!!! joke aside his ability to remove most of the technical errors that plagued these three episodes is certainly impressive and the removal of most of the kiddish and cheesy lines of dialogue as well as the exclusion of characters illogical actions and phrases made this Alien Saga Fanedit an enjoyable, nostalgic and streamlined experience for me.

Saying that though there were a few things that detracted from my enjoyment of the edit the first being the flashback of Peter reflecting on how the symbiote has changed the way he’s interacted with others as he was about to crush Rhino as I feel like most people would understand the reason for his hesitation though as to how it could have been cut and worked around the scene when Spiderman says ‘’Can’t I’’ could have than cut to the shot of Rhino cowering in fear which would also have minimised the issue of being forced to use recycled footage just to move the narrative forward.

I also noticed various rectangular shapes at the top of the screen and some in other places of the screen with most of them being green while others are white and some are slightly faded into the background the first of them I saw was at this point 24:29 and from there they kept appearing at Irregular intervals soon after though I may have missed some from Part I and well not as persistent as those rectangular shapes I did notice a few small black dots occasionally appear on the screen.

I grew up watching the Spider-Man TAS show as a kid. I owned the VHS tape to all 3 episodes and would watch them very often. To see an edit such as this was very interesting to watch and prove that it could have been a straight to video movie! This edit proves that it could have easily been that.

Video: The quality of the video is as best as to the quality that has been released, so no Blu-Ray quality here, although I fully knew what I was into. The nostalgia in me thought it was fine, but it may seem low quality to some due to the dvd quality of the video from a 90s tv show. There are rumors that Spider-Man TAS may come out on Blu-Ray one day, where this edit would definitely be the better for it. Seeing this in full on Blu-Ray remastered quality would be spectacular!

Audio: Once again, the audio is as best as the quality that has been released yet. My feelings for this are the same for video, where a remastered version could one day benefit this great forgotten show hence better this edit!

Editing: I honestly didn't notice any changes since I was enjoying watching this edit too much. There were only a couple places where I noticed since there were some cringy dumb moments here and there in the original where I found that they had disappeared in this edit. Combining the episodes was seamless. Well done!

Narrative: No great immense changes here, but keeping it relatively the same with cuts here and there is truly enjoyable. Well done!

Enjoyment: Overall, this was a great edit where Spider-Man fans who remember watching the cartoon should give this a shot as it portrays the symbiote storyline as it was meant to be!