Spider-Man has always been one of Marvel's most popular characters.  Not because he is the strongest or smartest hero, but because he is the most human.  He faces the same problems everyone has, and that makes people able to relate to him.  He has super powers, but not the rent money.  Like the comic book, MTV's Spider-man:  The New Animated Series makes sure the emphasis is on the person beneath the mask.  After releasing the entire first season of this show as a two DVD set, Columbia Tristar has gone back and released a series of 'best of' disc, each containing three of the better stories from the first season.

The three episodes on this DVD are:

The Party:  One of my favorite Spider-Man villains from the comics makes his appearance.  When Peter's friend Max is initiated into a fraternity, things go horribly wrong.  Max doesn't die, instead he turns into Electro, and tries to get revenge on the students.  I didn't like the way they designed Electro.  His look was very different from the comics.  He was blue instead of his classical yellow for one thing.  Aside from that, a good effort.

When Sparks Fly:  When Electro returns, he wants to transform the new woman in Peter's life, Sally, into a being like himself so they can live together forever.  The was a good episode.  Better than the first one.

Keeping Secrets:  Spidey is after a new villain who has been pulling a lot of robberies in the city, Talon.  Things get sticky when he learns her identity:  she's Harry's new girl friend.  I didn't like this villain too much.  The plot seemed a little old.  I wouldn't have chosen this episode to put on a 'best of' collection.

One of the tricks of the trade that animators frequently use is to spend more time and money on certain shots.   The theory is that if you make some parts look really, really good, people won't notice that you skimped on other aspects.  Mainframe, the company who did the computer animation, took this idea to heart, and it didn't work.  The scenes of Spider-Man webbing across town and fighting, heck in most of Spider-Man's scenes, he looks excellent.  His movement is fluid and lifelike, his costume is well lit, and he has a lot of detail.  That's practically the only thing that looks good.  Every other character, especially the non-villain ones, look horrible.  The movements are really jerky and unnatural.  When people move, it looks like they are having seizures instead of gesturing.

The backgrounds are poorly rendered.  Their surfaces look very uniform.  The whole side of a building will be the exact same color, with no shading or texture.  They look like painted cardboard boxes more than buildings.  The same goes for other background fixtures like cars and trains.  Even Mary Jane's clothes are bad.  She wears that exact same outfit in every single episode.  They didn't even bother to change the color of her top.  They should have put a little more effort into other aspects of the show.

There is such a huge disparity between the Spider-Man animation and all the rest, that it's jarring.  After watching for a while, you get used to the low budget animation, but when Spidey webs across the screen you realize how bad everything else looks.  I think that the show would look a lot better if the animation had been more even throughout.

The acting is not that great, but not bad.  I didn't think that Neil Patrick Harris, who voices Spider-Man, was able to pull off the lines of snappy banter that Spider-Man is always spouting while he fights.  The timing and inflection was just off.  Besides that he does an acceptable job.
 

Audio:

Unfortunately, they left off the the DTS soundtrack that the season set has.  This DVD only has a 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack. It sounds very good though.  There are very cool sound effects, like Electro's power blasts, that bring the sound track to life.  The explosions and crashes are very dynamic.  This is a great sounding DVD.

Video:

The anamorphic widescreen image was not as good as I was hoping.  I was surprised there were so many errors.  The fine lines on people's faces will grow and shrink when they aren't moving, and there is a good amount of aliasing especially in the background.  There is also significant banding (non-smooth color transitions) in many scenes, especially the sky.  I was really disappointed that there were so many problems.

The Extras:

This is a bare bones DVD.

Final Thoughts:

This show isn't great, but it's pretty good.  These episodes are about average for the show.  This really isn't a very good deal when compared to the season set.  This DVD retails for $15 and has three shows.  For twice that price you get over four times as many episodes, entire season of 13, and commentries, test footage, an outtake reel, a DTS soundtrack, and much more.   If you are interested in the series, I think the season set is a much better deal.  As far as this DVD is concerned, Skip It.