In 1977, Universal Television had the rights to several different Marvel Comics characters, and Kenneth Johnson was given the opportunity to develop one of them. Johnson had come to prominence as a writer/producer on The Six Million Dollar Man, and he created the character of Jaime Somers, who was later spun off into her own series, The Bionic Woman, for which Johnson was the show-runner.
Inspired in part by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Johnson decided to take on the Hulk.
Johnson made several changes due to a stated contempt for the comics medium, including changing the character’s name from Bruce Banner to David Banner. (Stories vary as to why it was changed; the most popular is that Bruce was deemed “too gay” by the network, but Johnson himself said in a 2006 interview that he wanted to move away from the Stan Lee trademark of alliterative names, e.g., Reed Richards, Peter Parker, J. Jonah Jameson, Scott Summers, etc.) Many of those changes made for better television, particularly in the late 1970s on a budget: the Hulk was less powerful than his comics counterpart, and the accident that changed Banner was a low-key lab experiment rather than a test of an atomic bomb. (That’s as much due to the passage of time as anything. The Hulk was created in 1962 before the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed, ending above-ground bomb testing in the U.S., and 1977 was the height of the “no nukes” movement.) Johnson’s Hulk also didn’t talk, having the same grunt-and-growl vocabulary as the movie version of the Frankenstein monster. Stan Lee his own self approved that particular change, since he felt that the comics version’s “Hulk smash!” dialogue would sound silly coming out of an actual person’s mouth.
The Hulk’s supporting cast was also abandoned—no Rick Jones, no Thunderbolt Ross, no Betty Ross, no Major Talbot, no Doc Samson—with the only other recurring character being Jack McGee, a reporter who is obsessed with learning the truth about the Hulk. (There’s the Les Miz influence…)
Universal commissioned two TV movies to serve as pilots, which aired on CBS in the fall of 1977. They were sufficiently successful that it went to series in the spring of 1978. Later in syndication, these two movies would be added to the beginning of the first season as two-part episodes, with The Return of the Incredible Hulk given the title of “Death in the Family” for syndication purposes.
“It was me—and it wasn’t me…”
The Incredible Hulk
Written, directed, and produced by Kenneth Johnson
Original release date: November 4, 1977
We start with a montage of happy moments between a husband and wife: David and Laura Banner. Their connubial bliss is cut tragically short by a car accident. Banner is thrown clear of the wreck, but his wife is trapped inside, and despite the adrenaline rush brought on by the situation, he is unable to shift the car to get her out and she dies.
Banner is a physician, working at the Culver Institute with his med school buddy Dr. Elaina Marks on a project to harness the great strength that comes to people at such times as Banner’s accident. While he himself showed no signs of supernormal strength in the stressful situation, others have, and they interview bunches of them. One account is eerily similar to Banner’s own experience, except the mother was able to lift her car to save her son, where Banner was unable to do the same to save his wife. (The account triggers his PTSD something fierce…)
Meanwhile, a reporter from the National Register, Jack McGee, keeps trying and failing to get an interview with Banner or Marks. They refuse, viewing his tabloid rag as, well, a tabloid rag.
They can’t find anything common in the blood work all the way down to the cellular level, but one of their colleagues has been upgrading the equipment, and now they can examine DNA. So they do, and find a common marker in all the test subjects. They think it’s a major breakthrough, since Banner figures this is what makes him different from the others. But Marks suggests they check his DNA too, and sure enough, he has the same marker. There has to be another factor.
Gamma radiation interference prevents them from getting some information from Pittsburgh via satellite, and that triggers a notion in Banner. An investigation reveals that each of their interview subjects performed their feats of strength during a time of high gamma radiation in the atmosphere. Banner’s accident occurred during a time of very low concentrations, and he thinks this might be the key. He gets this brainstorm after hours; he calls Marks to share it, but she doesn’t answer her phone, and it’s 1977, so she doesn’t have an answering machine. So he goes ahead and irradiates himself.
At first, he notices no change—he still can’t lift the hospital bed in the radiology room—but on his way home in the rain, he gets a flat tire, and his frustrations with the process lead to him transforming into a giant, green, super-strong creature. He trashes his car, then wanders through the forest, scaring the crap out of a little girl and her father—the former fishing, the latter hunting. The father shoots the monster, but it’s only a flesh wound, and his shotgun jams before he can take a second shot.
The creature trashes the camp site after breaking the shotgun in two over his knee, but he leaves father and daughter alive. He wanders a bit, and then calms down enough to change back into Banner. He stumbles to Marks’s home, where she treats the gunshot wound—which has already healed more than is possible in so short a time frame. Marks is livid that Banner went and performed so reckless an experiment without her, but she gamely works with him to figure out what happened.
The first bombshell is that the same tinkering that enabled them to examine DNA was also done on the machine in radiology. Banner thought he absorbed 3000 units over fifteen seconds, but instead it was two million. Because of this, the attempt at an X-ray reversal, which probably would’ve worked on 3000 units, doesn’t work at all.
They decide to experiment in a supplemental lab that isn’t in use, putting Banner in a capsule designed to withstand the ocean depths. All attempts to re-create the night of the flat tire fail. After a full day of this, Marks urges Banner to rest, but sleep brings on nightmares about his wife’s death and he turns into the creature again. He trashes the capsule and the lab, Marks dutifully recording what’s happening like a good scientist. She also manages to calm him down enough to change back into Banner.
The police arrive soon thereafter, having found Banner’s car trashed and abandoned. Banner makes up a story about the car having been missing, but he didn’t report it because he thought a friend borrowed it. McGee is there too, with a plaster cast of a gigunda footprint found near his car, and also mentioning the big green hulking creature that tormented a father and daughter. Banner now knows how he got shot.
McGee breaks into the lab when Banner and Marks aren’t there, but they return while he’s snooping. When Banner catches McGee in the storage closet, he accidentally knocks over a bottle of chemicals, which then leaks. Banner removes McGee from the building, which then explodes thanks to the leaky chemicals—with Marks still inside. McGee is knocked unconscious, and Banner changes into the Hulk again, pulling Marks out. However, she has breathed in too much smoke and chemicals, and she dies in the Hulk’s arms.
Both Banner and Marks are reported killed in the explosion. McGee regained his senses in time to see the Hulk carry Marks out of the flames, and he writes a story blaming the Hulk for murdering the two doctors.
Banner, now believed by the world to be dead, wanders down the road…
“People have lost things they love because of guilt.”
The Return of the Incredible Hulk
Written and produced by Kenneth Johnson
Directed by Alan J. Levi
Original release date: November 27, 1977
Banner is hitchhiking his way to Everett, which has a state-of-the-art radiology lab. Between hitches, he sneaks onto an orange orchard and grabs a fruit. He sees a young woman on crutches visiting a grave, who collapses. After they talk for a bit, she heads back to her house, but then she collapses again. Banner carries her back to the big house where she lives. Her name is Julie Griffith. Her father, who died in a boat accident—it was his grave she was visiting—ran the orchard, and now his second wife, Margaret, runs it. Julie almost died in the same accident, but some good Samaritan saved her. However, damage to her legs from that accident means she can no longer walk without crutches.
Banner is concerned, because the drug that the nurse gives Julie isn’t the right color for what it claims to be on the label. Margaret and Julie are both grateful to him for his help, and they urge the foreman, Denny Kayle, to hire him as a picker. Kayle is very reluctant to do so, but accedes.
Julie gets a visit from her physician, Dr. John Bonifant, who gives her another injection, and sneaks in something else as well. Banner sees this, and alerts Margaret. Unfortunately, Margaret’s in on it and tells Bonifant that this picker recognized that something’s up. She has Kayle fire Banner, saying she can’t do it because she’s in fear of him. That gets Kayle’s macho up, and he and two other pickers give him severance pay and toss him out. When Banner refuses to leave without talking to Margaret first, they start to beat him up. After they toss him out the door, he turns into the Hulk, trashing the bunkhouse and the people, then buggers off.
He comes across an old drunk named Michael living in a ramshackle hut in the woods. Michael tries to befriend the Hulk, but when the Hulk tosses his bottle of whiskey into the fire, it causes a big blowup that sends the Hulk running. A little bit later, a bedraggled Banner stumbles across the hut. Michael offers him a change of clothes, and also refuses to tell the sheriff about either Banner or the Hulk when he comes by asking about a big green creature that tore up the Griffith bunkhouse.
Banner is grateful for the clothes and the silence. Michael says he doesn’t like to get involved. He also wears a medal of valor around his neck, which he says is his now. Banner doesn’t pry, but goes off to the Everett Hospital. He checks to see that Kayle is okay, then (wearing a lab coat and pretending to be a technician from the company that made the machine) inquires about the new radiation machine. He learns that it’s not in use after midnight.
After that, he breaks into Bonifant’s office, where he finds Julie’s medical records. Bonifant and Margaret arrive, and Banner hides in the closet, overhearing them talk about their plan to poison Julie—which was only enacted because Julie didn’t die in the boat explosion like she was supposed to. Bonifant also shows off his doctored X-rays of Julie’s legs that will “prove” that she has a fatal illness.
When they leave, Banner takes Julie’s X-rays, a bottle of the poison, and Bonifant’s keys, which he left on his desk. He steals Bonifant’s car and heads to the Griffith house. However, a delirious Julie doesn’t believe Banner’s story about her stepmother and doctor trying to kill her. The tenseness of the situation leads to Banner turning into the Hulk, and he picks Julie up and runs away into the swamp. Margaret orders her pet thugs to chase after them and make sure that they don’t leave the swamp alive.
Eventually, he reverts back to Banner. Julie is completely beside herself, but since she can’t walk, she has no choice but to go along with him. They go to Michael’s hut, where Julie recognizes him as the one who rescued her from the boat. Michael refuses to help her a second time, though he does give Banner another change of clothes.
Banner and Julie head toward the ranger station in the hopes of contacting the authorities. Banner stuffed the phony X-rays under Julie’s mattress before he Hulked out, and he still has the poison in his pocket. Eventually, Michael agrees to go along, and the three of them barely stay ahead of the dogs Margaret’s thugs are using to track them.
Unfortunately, they encounter a bear. Fortunately, the bear attacks Banner, which causes him to Hulk out again, and he tosses the bear across the lake. The Hulk then picks up Julie, and Michael leads them along—until he’s bitten by a rattlesnake. Julie is forced to treat the bite. While she does so, Michael explains that his son died in Vietnam—the medal of honor is the son’s—and Michael blames himself for filling his kid’s head with tales of the glory of war.
While Julie applies a tourniquet and sucks out the poison, the Hulk reverts to Banner. Michael, gimpy as he is now, offers to stay behind and misdirect the pooches while Banner and Julie continue to the ranger station. However, the Banner and Julie get stuck in quicksand, and while Julie is able to get out, Banner is not—and then in his agitation, he transforms again, which just makes it worse. Julie—whose paralysis is mostly psychosomatic, aided by the poison—manages to finally stand on her own two feet and pull down a branch that allows the Hulk to pull himself out of the quicksand. Julie manages to convince the Hulk to stay in the swamp while she awkwardly limps to the ranger station.
That does the trick, as Bonifant and Margaret and the thugs are all arrested. Michael moves into the Griffith house as Julie’s guest. She wants Banner to do likewise, but he can’t risk the Hulk hurting them. He has to keep moving. He does try to reverse the gamma radiation with the fancy new machine at the hospital (doing it after midnight with Julie and Michael standing guard), but he doesn’t have the facilities to see if it worked or not—he just has to hope that the next time he gets angry, he doesn’t transform. Julie gives him some money for the road and he hops on a bus. Meanwhile, McGee tries to interview Julie about what happened, but all she says about the Hulk is that he fell into quicksand.
“It’s like having a demon inside you.”
Normally, when a TV producer trashes most of the material from the comics source material, it doesn’t end well. Contemporary with Johnson’s adaptation of the Hulk were adaptations of Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and Captain America that deviated from the comics to ill effect.
But for all that Johnson changed or eliminated many elements of the Hulk’s comics story, these two movies—and the TV series that grew out of it—worked. Part of it is Johnson’s own writing skill. This is the same person who wrote several of the best Six Million Dollar Man episodes, and also developed The Bionic Woman and Alien Nation, two of the better genre shows out there, and created the original V miniseries.
Part of it is also that the essence of the Hulk was kept intact. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original comics were inspired partly by Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, and that duality of Banner’s Jekyll with the Hulk’s Hyde is very much intact here. In addition, Kirby has said that part of his inspiration for the Hulk was a story of a mother who rescued her son from a car—the very same tale told to Banner and Marks in their study in the first movie.
The best adaptations are ones that keep the spirit of the source material, and understand the basics of what makes the story what it is. Details can be changed or fixed, but as long as the story is still fundamentally what it’s supposed to be, then it can work.
Good casting helps, too, and a big reason why these movies work is the fantastic performances by Bill Bixby. His Banner is tormented, but still compassionate. He’s a good person who has had three straight tragedies—losing his wife, becoming a monster, and losing his best friend. Now he’s on the run, but he’s still, at heart, a good person, who got into medicine to help people. And while he can’t really be a doctor anymore, that need to help people is still there, which is what leads to his helping Julie in The Return of the Incredible Hulk. Bixby makes Banner into a real person about whom you care a great deal, and for whom you root.
The Incredible Hulk is a very good introduction to this version of the green giant. Like many 1960s Marvel heroes, the Hulk’s 1962 origin is very much a product of its time, tied into nuclear testing of a type that had fallen out of favor fifteen years later, so altering the origin to something more low-key than an atomic explosion was wise. It also adds a personal touch, having Banner’s frustration at not being able to save his wife.
It helps that he has Susan Sullivan to play off of. Best known lately as Richard Castle’s Mom, Sullivan is simply radiant as Marks. Her banter with Bixby is superb, as the two act exactly like best friends, and they make a good team. She’s also a smart, strong character, and a good scientist—in fact, she’s a better scientist than Banner, whose grief is causing him to make mistakes and let his emotions get in the way. Not to mention the whole irradiate himself with too much gamma thing… (I am a little confused as to why at no point the word “adrenaline” is spoken in the movie, since it’s well documented that adrenaline adds to one’s strength, but whatever.)
The followup is less impressive. It does set up the show’s format well: Banner comes into town, gets embroiled in a local situation, the Hulk shows up, and eventually the day is saved, albeit with a certain amount of Hulk-induced property damage. It’s an anthology format that also served The Fugitive and Kung Fu well, and like the former, Banner even has somebody pursuing him in McGee.
But the pacing is horrible. There’s really only an hour of story here, and it would’ve been better suited to a regular episode rather than a movie. As it is, it just drags, with the endless chase through the swamp—there’s a bear! there’s quicksand! there’s a rattler!—and then the actual capture of the bad guys happens annoyingly off-screen.
However, these movies do what they were supposed to do, which is set up a good TV show, and at least the first one also works very nicely as a story on its own.
The TV show ran from 1978 to 1982. NBC bought the rights to the show from CBS and produced three TV movies from 1988 to 1990 that were, in essence, the first attempt at a Marvel Cinematic Universe, as we got the first-ever live-action versions of Thor and Daredevil alongside the Jade Giant. We’ll look at those three movies next week.
Keith R.A. DeCandido wrote a Hulk story back in 1998 called “Playing it SAFE” for The Ultimate Hulk anthology co-edited by Stan Lee & Peter David.
Trivia: Banner’s doomed wife is played by actress and Tor author, Lara Parker, better known for playing the witch Angelique on the original DARK SHADOWS tv series.
No discussion of Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk? Seems an odd omission…
The first pilot movie is a pretty fantastic piece of dramatic television, unlike anything that had ever been done in superhero TV before. The show became somewhat more formulaic after this, but this is a terrific beginning. The opening dream montage is poignant, and I love how Kenneth Johnson grounds David’s strength research in emotion and pain, both his own grief and the stories of deep personal need of the interviewees. It takes the fantastic concept and gives it an emotionally believable foundation. It even adds emotional resonance to the first Hulk-out, because we understand that David’s fury at his car is about something deeper than the frustration of a flat tire. I also love the naturalistic acting in the Culver Institute scenes. Johnson really made it clear from the start that this was a departure from its predecessor superhero shows. And a ton of credit has to go to Joe Harnell for his wonderful musical score.
The science, though, isn’t so great. The idea of looking at the mitochondria as the source of cellular energy was a nice touch, but that was about it. First off, you couldn’t learn much about a person’s DNA just by zooming in on one section of it optically; that’s kind of like trying to determine the entire contents of a library by glancing at one page. And having it be as simple as an excess of adenine and thymine makes little sense. Also, solar storms don’t make sense as the source of the gamma radiation, since gamma from space doesn’t penetrate the thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere. It gets absorbed and re-emitted as ultraviolet long before it reaches the surface. And why would what looks like a medical x-ray device for human use be configured to emit gamma rays to begin with? What possible pre-existing medical use could that have?
The scene with the little girl at the lake is presumably a Frankenstein homage, but it serves to show the Hulk’s instinctive heroism, how he tries to help those in need and only lashes out at those who threaten him or others. That’s pretty much the template for the series to follow. I find it interesting how recognizable Ted Cassidy’s voiceover grunts are in this scene. Cassidy voiced the Hulk in the first couple of seasons as well as doing the series’ opening narration (“Doctor David Banner, physician, scientist, searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have…”). After Cassidy’s death, the voice of the Hulk was done by Charles Napier, who also did two or three on-camera guest roles in the series.
The Ligeti-esque chorus used over the transformation scenes is an inspired and eerie touch. It would eventually evolve into a mix of vocal droning and instrumentals that would be used for the rest of the series, and which I think of as “The Startling Metamorphosis Chorus.” Also a nice idea to use the white contact lenses as a visual throughline to clarify that it’s the same person before and after the change.
The second half is surprisingly claustrophobic. It’s almost entirely David, Elaina, and McGee at the annex lab. There isn’t really a danger beyond the question of a cure and David’s anxiety about hurting someone, and there isn’t really a bad guy. McGee is an antagonist and he inadvertently causes the explosion, but he’s not out to hurt anybody, just trying to get the truth about a creature that he sincerely believes to be dangerous to the public. He’s basically Carl Kolchak without the snazzy hat. (And with a bit more smarm, though that gets dialed down over time.) I suppose the insular focus is to save money for the elaborate destruction and action sequences, but keeping it mostly a lab-based two-hander between the mutated hero and his colleague/love interest reminds me of one of the best monster movies, the original The Fly.
Ferrigno does a good job conveying emotion in Elaina’s death scene. He was good at giving the Hulk an empathetic quality and selling his emotions overall, not just his rage.
As for Return/”Death in the Family”: A couple of decades back, I really liked Laurie Prange in this and the fourth-season premiere “Prometheus,” both stories in which she played disabled, vulnerable young women who bonded with David and shared an ordeal with him. I thought she was very sweet and lovable and had a good rapport with Bill Bixby. I can still see a lot of that in her now, but in comparison to how female roles have evolved over the past few decades, Prange’s Julie comes off as kind of whiny and pathetic for much of this story. She’s at her best when she gets to be more confident, like in the snakebite sequence.
It’s nice that this pilot movie had the room to let a couple of guest characters get to know David as both himself and the Hulk. It was pretty unusual in the series as a whole that the guests got to connect with him on such a close level and really react to his situation. Usually they’d be clueless that David and the Hulk were connected, even in cases where the connection should’ve been obvious — for instance, when they leave David alone in an enclosed place and then the Hulk comes out a moment later, or when the Hulk is wearing a tattered shirt that’s recognizably David’s (occasionally with a visible nametag on the chest!). Over the course of the series, only about 19 people would discover that David was the Hulk, four of whom died at the end of the episode and one of whom died in his second appearance. Both of Laurie Prange’s characters are on that list (as are characters played by Mariette Hartley, Ned Romero, Mako, Rick Springfield, Bradford Dillman, Kim Cattrall, Diana Muldaur, Jeanette Nolan, Harry Townes, Michael Conrad, Bill Bixby’s ex-wife Brenda Benet, and a few others).
The villains here weren’t so well-drawn, though. “Come into my office, Margaret, and we’ll have a nice round of self-incriminating exposition wherein we go over our entire evil scheme. Lucky for us that nobody’s hiding in our closet to hear exactly what evidence he’d need to convict us.” And then there’s the kitschy wonder of the bear fight. You think the Hulk’s makeup rubbing off on the bear’s muzzle is funny, folks? Just wait a few more seconds for the giant teddy bear.
I was surprised that Everett turned out to be in California (per the sign outside the sheriff’s office). I always kind of assumed it was in the deep South. Where do they have swamps in California? (Although the exterior street they used for the establishing shot was the same location used for Ojai, CA in the bionic shows.)
A good write-up that took me back some. I would quibble, however, with the characterization of 1977 as the height of the no nukes movement. That movement didn’t really gain full steam until a few years later, with the release of the movie The China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. I remember it pretty well, because I was involved in some safe energy organizations and protests at the time.
@4/Steve: Wasn’t that more about nuclear power, though? Keith was talking about attitudes toward nuclear weapons research.
rickarddavid: Honestly, I didn’t have much to say. Ferrigno was fine, but I have the same issue with his Hulk that I have with Boris Karloff’s — the literary source material has the character actually speak and is therefore more interesting. Yes, the Hulk degenerated into two-year-old talk eventually, but in the early days, and later when they brought back the grayer Hulk as “Joe Fixit,” he was articulate, if not as smart as Banner. But mostly Ferrigno just stood there and growled or stared confusingly at people. *shrug*
Steve Schneider: That was when it kicked into high gear, yes, but it had been growing for some time. Having said that, I may have overstated it with the word “height.” But hey, it was 40 years ago….. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@2 – rickarddavid: I agree, it’s odd that there’s nary a mention of Ferrigno, or the Hulk’s make-up, effects, characterizations, etc. It’s all pretty cool for the time, even with Hulk wearing green slippers that were all too noticeable.
And the bear fight can’t be as bad as Schwarzenegger’s bear fight in Hercules In New York.
@6 – krad: I get that you didn’t have much to say, but you could have at least mentioned Ferrigno. And the make-up and effects, it’s a superhero film.
@5/ Chris:
Yeah, I thought of that shortly after I posted. The issue he was discussing is more one of nuclear disarmament, which was certainly a hot topic by then. “No nukes” as a popular term, however, applied instead to domestic nuclear energy programs. Still, I’m happy and willing to give krad that out, even if he’s already fallen on his sword by pleading our advanced ages. What are old-fogey friends for? ;)
Whether or not this was in Johnson’s thought processes, it’s also true that by 1977 we knew more about nuclear bombs and such than we did in 1962, so having a character survive a nuclear explosion is much harder to suspect disbelief about.<cough>refrigerator</cough> A medical experiment gone awry plus funky personal genetics (DNA is magic) probably made more “sense” in 1977.
Anybody know if there is a connection between the Hulk not talking and Lou Ferrigno having a deaf voice?
I’ve seen Lou Ferrigno in speaking roles (King of Queens, Con Man) and you’d never know he has hearing problems. Granted, these are post 2000 roles, and he could have gotten better since the 70s, but there’s no reason Ferrigno’s voice would have been an issue since they chose to dub his grunts. They could have just as well made Hulk speak and dub him over.
Lou Ferrigno eventually did get to play a verbal Hulk, in the 1990s animated series (with Neal McDonough as Bruce Banner, and ’60s Iron Man voice artist John Vernon as Thunderbolt Ross). He actually did a pretty impressive job — he managed to convey the same mix of fury and poignancy with his voice that he was able to achieve without his voice in the Bixby series. He’s also done the Hulk’s voice in the live-action features and The Avengers, though that amounted to one line each.
Ferrigno’s speaking debut was in an Incredible Hulk episode, “King of the Beach,” in which he played a dual role as the Hulk and a hearing-impaired bodybuilder (like Ferrigno himself) that Banner befriended. The episode preview (because back then, in those less spoiler-phobic times, episodes actually opened with a preview of what was coming up) began with Bill Bixby announcing to the audience that it was Ferrigno’s speaking debut. It was a self-indulgent but quite fun episode, and Ferrigno did a pretty good job. He and Bixby had remarkably good chemistry, considering that they had only acted together a couple of times before in the show (in a dream sequence and a drug-induced hallucination).
I would’ve liked to see an episode or two where the Hulk managed to retain enough of David’s intelligence to be verbal, and give Ferrigno another chance to act. But the closest we came was the “Prometheus” 2-parter, where the proximity of a gamma-emitting meteorite kept David in a verbal but intellectually challenged “demi-Hulk” form, with Bixby playing the role in close-up shots and bodybuilder Ric Drasin doubling him in long shots (where it was quite obvious that the face didn’t match).
Thanks for the info, Magnus and CLB! I have met Lou only once, and used sign language rather than English to communicate (he knows a little ASL), so I wasn’t sure whether it was related.
That’s odd, I haven’t met him… maybe he usually communicates in ASL and just learns his lines for shows? But he has elaborate conversations in the stuff I’ve seen him… was it an event where many people were deaf?
EDIT: Scratch that, I’ve seen him give interviews, and he speaks English and hears enough / could read lips, as well as having had surgery in 2012 to get a hearing aid implant: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lou-ferrigno-best-known-as-the-incredible-hulk-now-has-incredible-hearing–without-the-use-of-hearing-aids-152294945.html
@14/MaGnUs: Yeah, I’ve seen Ferrigno give interviews and such over the years. I briefly met him at New York Comic-Con five years ago, and I didn’t know that he’d recently gotten that implant, but it didn’t surprise me that we could communicate through speech, because I knew he was able to do that well enough before.
On the bear. Years ago, watching SABRINA, THE TEENAGED WITCH, I noticed that Salem the talking cat was played by a real cat and a fairly decent puppet, but when Salem was in the middle of physical mayhem which would hurt a real cat, he was “played” by the fakest of faked stuffed animals you could possibly imagine so that kids were reminded he wasn’t real and wouldn’t be upset. Since then, I’ve seen this happen over and over again in even more adult fare because real animals in danger or pain bother most of us. So, hence, the silly bear that The Hulk tosses.
I always felt bad about Jack McGee. I kept hoping he would find something to write a story about since he was never, ever going to catch The Hulk.
@16/MByerly: Oh, Jack managed to get some pretty big stories here and there along the way, like in “The Hulk Breaks Las Vegas” where he got to expose a major mob corruption scandal. And he stumbled upon a huge story in “Prometheus,” when he discovered a massive, secret government, Andromeda Strain-like project formed to deal with the possibility of alien life (and somehow unable to figure out on sight that the Hulk was of terrestrial origin, or certainly his pants were). But he never got to publish that one.
YouTube has a nice documentary on the Hulk TV show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtCyyLKXFec&t=3139s
Probably one of the most downbeat superhero series ever, not least in the pilot where Banner’s life gets completely screwed up and never really gets better, despite the odd light-hearted episode. But it’s great and you do still cheer every time the Hulk shows up and starts throwing people around. But yeah, the second episode does demonstrate the beginning of a frustrating habit of not letting us see the utter scumbags that we’ve been wanting to see get theirs all episode have their comeuppance; partly because Banner often has to skip out the resolution to avoid exposure but logic doesn’t help the frustration factor.
(And yes, there are many occasions where someone really should twig that the guy they locked in a small box with no escape routes is the same person as the big green man that smashes out of it in full view seconds later.)
Still, the second episode does what it was intended to do, setting up the format of Banner as a travelling fugitive who can’t help but help out if he comes across someone in trouble. Even if they haven’t quite worked out how to integrate McGee into the plots yet, some later episodes would give him much larger roles. I believe Lou Ferrigno could lip-read perfectly and I don’t believe he was born deaf, he went deaf as a child, so he always spoke normally.
Have you considered doing a rewatch on the rest of the Incredible Hulk tv series (or The Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman ). Those were my favorite 3 shows as a kid and it would be great to see them get rewatches.
Great piece, Keith! I’ll have to send you the article I wrote for BACK ISSUE magazine, about the whole history of the series. I interviewed Kenneth Johnson, who was a wealth of information, and Gerald DiPego, who wrote the last two reunion movies and revealed what would have happened if they had made one more. One of my favorite articles that I’ve ever written. Plus I included an episode guide of the entire series! :-)
Something that was unusual about this show for its time was that even though it had an episodic format, events in some episodes would have impacts throughout the series. For example Banner getting married and losing his wife in the 2nd season opener. Although it was a common trope of tv shows in the 60’s and 70s for one of the leads to get married and become widowed by the end of the episode, the wife is never mentioned again. However, Banner thought about his second wife Caroline often throughout the remainder of the series, a couple of times having nightmares about the deaths of both of his wives. Also, the two part episode Mystery Man completely changed the dynamic of the show when McGee discovers that the Hulk is an ordinary man that transforms into a creature.
OMG sign me up for the Bionic Rewatch. I loved both shows as a kid!
Yes, I have very fond (albeit almost entirely lacking in detail) memories of Hulk and the two bionic shows.
@7 I really must learn to stop following links provided on tor.com comments, I think I broke something in my face trying not to laugh at that ‘Bear’ fight.
Bill Bixby was wonderful in this show, full stop. I didn’t love it on rewatching it again as much as I did as a kid watching reruns with my dad in the 80s, but man, Bixby really really was great.
Man….I remember watching this show on…Friday nights I think?…back when I was 4-5 years old. There was the shot at the end of the opening credits (I think) where they showed half of Banner’s face turning into a growling Hulk. Used to scare me every time, but I watched anyway. Didn’t this used to air on the same channel/night as Wonder Woman?
Ah..appointment television in the late 70s. You had to be there (and if you were me…you were the family’s remote back then)…
Yeah, the olden days. Remember when tv dinners were cooked in conventional ovens?
In my house, we didn’t even have a color TV until I was maybe 13. So for at least the first few seasons, I was watching a gray Hulk.
krad, how could you not even mention what is probably one of the most poignant TV credit themes shown? I think everyone of a certain age can hum Lonely Man by heart. I don’t think there are that many songs out there that SO sum up their character as that does. IMHO it is one of the underpinnings of our connection to the character.
@25 – ChocolateRob: I warned you it was cheap.
@27 – FSS: My brother still watches only appointment TV, every conversation we have I tell him “I don’t watch stuff the night it airs, except for Game Of Thrones” (and now Star Trek: Discovery.
@29 – Chris: Well, that was an accurate-to-early-comics Hulk!
Good recap of a great series opener — I don’t think I ever saw the second episode but I still remember the first one (and several others or at least bits and pieces of them). I think I may have gotten to know the Hulk from the TV series before the comics, I was mostly a DC kid back then (except for the occasional Spider-Man issue).
Hey folks! I’m going for my third-degree black belt this week, and the promotion testing is somewhat exhausting (as you might expect), so I won’t have the three Hulk TV movies of 1988-1990 up today. I should have them up here next week, though….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ganbatte.
Quoth myself: “Stan Lee his own self approved that particular change, since he felt that the comics version’s ‘Hulk smash!’ dialogue would sound silly coming out of an actual person’s mouth.”
Having now seen Thor: Ragnarok, Lee and Johnson were both wrong. *wry grin*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well, Stan Lee was always a bit ashamed of being a comics writer.
MaGnUs: What? On what are you basing that comment? Stan has never been ashamed of being a comics writer. In fact, there are few humans who have ever embraced it as joyously as Stan has.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
He’s he used to say something to the effect that he used a pen name for comics because he kept hoping he’d become “a real writer” someday. Of course, it ended up being his actual career, and he embraced it, Having doubts about his lines coming out of a real person’s mouth seem to point towards a lingering inferiority complex regarding his own work.
MaGnUs: He mostly used a pseudonym because Stan Lee would get more work than Stanley Lieber in the middle of the 20th century (also why Jacob Kurtzberg went by Jack Kirby). And that may have been true when he was younger and started using the pseudonym, that certainly wasn’t an issue by the time Marvel took off in the 1960s.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yes, he was obviously out that phase at least when they were making the first Hulk movie, but I can see how a certain attitude of downplaying the medium he works in could happen. The bit about him saying he saved his real name for more serious/literary work is something I heard from his own mouth (on TV), and that he’s said in his autobiography.
@40/MaGnUs: Just because Stan Lee was aware that society as a whole considered comics less serious and worthwhile than other forms of literature, that doesn’t mean he personally thought less of comics — it just meant he wasn’t deluded about how the rest of the world saw comics. I think Lee always saw the potential in comics to tell stories as worthwhile as those in any other medium, and he and his fellow Marvel creators worked hard to make it happen, bringing more complexity and sophistication to comics than they’d had before and paving the way for their further maturation. But Lee was also aware that there was traditionally a lot of corniness in comics writing, its own distinctive stylization that wouldn’t necessarily translate well to live action. For whatever reason, even while the intelligence and sophistication of comics writing was increasing, it was still deemed acceptable to write comics dialogue in an extremely stilted and long-winded manner that would never have gone over in prose or film or TV.
Yeah, but “Hulk smash!”, come on. They should have left that, it’s not anywhere nearly as cheesy as Ferrigno’s slippers.
I wonder if the fact that Lou Ferrigno had no prior acting experience at the time was also a consideration. Maybe they weren’t sure he could handle dialogue, even Hulk-style dialogue. Of course, if so, he proved them wrong a few years later in “King of the Beach,” and later still as the voice of the Hulk in the ’90s animated series.
Maybe his hearing problems, which he fixed later, were an issue. But still, come on, “Hulk smash!”, it doesn’t matter how bad of an actor you are, it’s still a guy in green paint and slipplers.
@44/MaGnUs: I think part of it was that even the name “Hulk” was too cheesy for Kenneth Johnson. It worked as a sensationalistic nickname coined by a tabloid reporter, but it was years before we heard David Banner refer to “the Hulk” instead of “the creature,” except in contexts where he was in conversation with McGee (e.g. “Mystery Man”) and echoing his usage. So I don’t think the producers would’ve wanted the creature to refer to himself as “Hulk” even if he could talk.
In general, the show strove to be more sophisticated and adult than other contemporary superhero shows. Having a green-skinned muscleman going on twice-weekly rampages was hard enough for ’70s audiences to take seriously as part of a sophisticated drama; having him speak like a toddler while he did so would’ve made it seem campier to them and been a much harder sell. Stan Lee was right about that.
And really, the comic-book convention to have characters narrate their every action doesn’t really translate well to live action. Why would the Hulk bother saying that he wants to smash something rather than just go ahead and smash it? Note that The Avengers only managed to work in the line by having Captain America say it as an instruction.
Well, Hulk is not too smart. Banner smart, but puny. :)
@46/MaGnUs: That’s another thing. If the Hulk had gone around talking about “puny Banner,” it would’ve been hard for David to keep up the pretense that he was actually David Bailey or Barker or Becker or Blake or Bishop or…
Yeah, we wouldn’t have wanted that.
One name:
Bill Bixby.
I was bingeing on some season 3 Hulk episodes recently. Less than ten minutes into the episode ‘The Snare’ I was thinking, HOW GAY is this episode? David Banner is at an airport waiting for his delayed, then cancelled flight. A guy sees him working on a chess puzzle in the newspaper and challenges him to a game – of course he happens to have a chess set with him. Then invites him to his private island, makes him dinner, mentions that they are all alone, slips him a roofie…
I’ve occasionally wondered how Bill Bixby felt about Kenneth Johnson’s dislike of alliterative names.