The Mutant Ages

Who is Sadie Sink playing in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and why won't Marvel just confirm that the answer is Firestar? We take a minute to discuss this before diving into our review of "Spider-Man Unmasked!" in which the Spider-Friends go on vacation at the same place as Flash Thompson and decide to ruin his life (again). Because Peter Parker decides to change into his Spider-Man costume while hid...

This is Firestar's origin story, arguably a more accurate and official one than the (worse) one that she gets in the comic books later on because Angelica Jones was invented specifically for Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. We loved this origin story for her because it involves her pushing back against a sociopathic mean girl at school and, perhaps best of all, the X-Men are in this episode. St...

We all know Peter Parker's origin story, but Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was obligated to give it to us all over again, because this is Spider-Man's show. Before we get to the mandatory flashback depicting Uncle Ben's death, we get a modern-day story about a villain named The Shocker whose superpower involves vibrating people. We make all the jokes you'd expect us to make about that, but al...

Kraven the Hunter has hatched a plan to breed a dinosaur army that will help him take over New York, and the technology that he's using to do it requires Firestar's heat powers. To Bobby and Peter's chagrin/jealousy, Angelica is easily seduced by Kraven and doesn't realize what's going on until after he's kidnapped her and put her in an airplane hangar. But this isn't just any airplane hangar; it'...

Currently removed from Disney Plus, "The Quest of the Red Skull" is both offensive and poorly written. The Spider-Friends team up with Professor Hiawatha Smith, an indigenous American version of Indiana Jones who would be a really cool character if he weren't also a Noble Savage stereotype with magic powers based on "Indian lore." In this episode, Red Skull and a couple of Nazis are seeking out an...

Kingpin makes his debut on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and he actually comes off pretty well, devising a plan to brainwash Captain America and steal a multi-purpose ray gun developed in secret by the US military. The brainwashed version of Cap enlists Iceman to help him, and Iceman doesn't need any brainwashing in order to do whatever Steve Rogers tells him to do, including treason and murd...

Remember the Black Knight from the movie Eternals (2021)? The Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends episode "Knights and Demons" actually does a better job introducing this character. Prior to the events of this episode, the Black Knight banished Modred (not to be confused with Mordred) to the Land of Shades, so Modred sends an enchanted gargoyle statue to Earth to steal the Black Knight's magic swor...

Many miles north of Norway, a tanker crashes into an iceberg and it's all according to Loki's evil plan. Iceman gets a call from an old hookup and/or government contact to rescue the crew on the sinking tanker; he brings Firestar and Spider-Man along, even though only Firestar is useful at all. Thor shows up for maybe no reason, and it turns out that all of this stuff happened because Loki was try...

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends does a very strange send-up of the film industry in "Spidey Goes Hollywood," in which Mysterio has built an elaborate lair underneath a studio lot on which a famous director named Sam Hollywood is filming a Spider-Man movie. Mysterio kidnaps Sam and forces him to get the real Spidey to star in the film, but Spider-Man won't agree without bringing along his friend...

Todd, Ryan, and Maddy meet Video-Man for the first time (well, kind of) in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and we find out that he was originally created by the villain Electro, who may or may not be a video game developer. Either way, Electro lives in an underground lair beneath Manhattan, and he's been sending Video-Man arcade cabinets to select locations. That's because Video-Man has the po...

Ryan, Todd, and Maddy meet their new favorite character, the Chameleon, in "Seven Little Superheroes," the latest wacky episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. This supervillain is a gender-fluid shape-changer who has a grudge against Spidey, Iceman, Firestar, and also four other random superheroes (Captain America, Namor, Doctor Strange, and Shanna the She-Devil). All seven of these superh...

Ryan, Todd, and Maddy watch the Cold War-era horror story that is "Swarm," an episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends in which Earth is suddenly under threat from a mysterious object from outer space. The outer space object first lands near a beehive, which results in the bees transforming into a human-shaped swarm that has the power to shoot brainwashing beams at people to turn them into in...

Maddy and Ryan invite Todd to the wild ride that is Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, specifically the episode "Sunfire" in which, you guessed it, the mutant Sunfire shows up alongside his evil uncle. For some reason, his evil uncle from the comic books isn't in this episode but instead a new character named Uncle Genju is here, with a rather more kid-friendly storyline than Sunfire's uncle had...

Ryan, Maddy, and Todd celebrate the holiday season in the best possible way, which is reading the season finale of The Mutant Ages: The Comic Book. Our heroes finally confront the Council of Xaviers, with the help of Cloaky, Pluggy, and any number of our characters with an axe to grind against Professor X. Also, Santa is there, because this is a holiday special. The audio for the reading is ripped...

Ryan, Todd, and Maddy break open the listener mail vault and answer questions about de-aging Storm on X-Men Evolution and replacing her with a different teacher, the future of live-action X-Men adaptations and the legacy of X-Men (2000), mutants named after brand-new slang terms, what our personal drag names should be, and so much more. We refer to multiple articles in this episode, so here are so...

After a brief detour of Maddy and Ryan sharing some fun facts about Ms. Lion, it's time to get into an episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends that is hard to read as anything but gay: "The Fantastic Mr. Frump." The titular Mr. Frump is an old friend of Aunt May's who suddenly finds himself out of a job and down on his luck. Meanwhile, Doctor Doom has cast a magic spell on an amulet that bes...

Maddy and Ryan circle back to the pilot episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, which you'd think would set up the show's premise and characters, but it doesn't. Peter and Bobby go on a double date to a comic book-themed dance where everybody's dressed up as Marvel heroes and heroines, which results in the most confusing possible introduction of Firestar, who's dressed as Spider-Woman and d...

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981) was not created during a time period when Bobby Drake was canonically gay, but watching "The Origin of Iceman" sure has Maddy and Ryan wondering about that. Thanks to the return of Video-Man (who has his own origin episode earlier in this series), Bobby Drake loses his mutant powers. Under the pretext of researching why this could have happened, Peter Park...

Maddy and Ryan travel back in time to 1981, when Iceman was still closeted and also was one of the three stars of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. This show also introduced a new mutant character named Firestar who got added to comic book canon later on; she sure does look a lot like Mary Jane, who isn't present on this show. Also, she's only here because (once again) the show creators couldn't...

Ryan, Todd, and Maddy reconvene to discuss the second half of Deadpool 2 (2018), in which Deadpool and Cable do not kiss, to the chagrin of 2018-era Maddy. In 2025, though, we can all recognize what little gayness this movie could manage, which is Cable using his last bit of time travel juice to save Deadpool's life. Of course, after that, Cable would have to fight Colossus for Deadpool's affectio...

Maddy, Ryan, and Todd discuss the first half of Deadpool 2, which is thankfully an improvement over the first Deadpool movie, but it still has a lot of Vanessa and Wade's chemistry-devoid love story that should not be in the movie. Despite that, we finally get to bring back the long-missing "Who's Gay?" section, which says a lot about how much this movie sets up Colossus/Deadpool and Cable/Deadpoo...

Maddy, Ryan, and Todd convene to answer listeners' questions, including ones about which five X-Men should go on a cross-country RV trip together, which X-Men would be able to stand eating ten hot wings in 5 minutes (without using their powers), various X-Men novelizations, and even some more discussion of what Magneto was doing in X-Men '97. In our defense, one of you wrote us an email about it,...

Having finished both seasons of The Gifted, Maddy and Ryan get together for a big reminisce about what worked, what didn't work, and the larger legacy of this show as an X-Men adaptation. The disappointing series finale cast a shadow over this recording and our feelings about the show as a whole, but we nonetheless had plenty to choose from when it came to deciding on our favorite episodes and our...

The Gifted deserved a better finale for season 2 than "oMens," and it definitely deserved a better series conclusion than this, but "oMens" is nonetheless the final episode of this show before its cancellation. Unfortunately, it's anticlimactic and clunky. We get to see all the plot points you would expect, such as the Mutant Underground finally coming together to face off against the Hellfire Clu...

The second-to-last episode of The Gifted, "Monsters," is mostly about moving chess pieces around the board. That is to say, all of the characters need to be in the correct spots before the finale. The result is kind of boring to watch, and there are a few scenes that get wrapped up in ways that don't quite make sense. Lauren and Caitlin are on the run from the cops, but their escape ends up being...