He was as much a 1940s Universal Pictures monster as he was a 1960s Marvel Comics superhero.
And thanks to that admixture, television’s Incredible Hulk was also by far the most successful of the four adaptations of Marvel Comics’ superheroes on the tube in the 1970s.
The show began with two 1977 TV movie pilots, continued in a series of 80 episodes from 1978 to 1982, and was then revived in three TV movies during the late 1980s. The CBS series also inspired a King Features comic strip that appeared in newspapers from Oct. 30, 1978, until Sept. 5, 1982
Stan Lee, the co-creator of the Hulk, said of the TV show, “The Hulk was done intelligently. It was done by Ken Johnson, who’s a brilliant writer/ producer/ director, and he made it an intelligent, adult show that kids could enjoy. He took a comic book character and made him somewhat plausible. Women liked it and men liked it and teenagers liked it … It was beautifully done. He changed it quite a bit from the comic book, but every change he made, made sense.”
The opening few minutes of the first Incredible Hulk pilot film was brilliant, efficient screenwriting. Dr. Banner (Bill Bixby) dreams of his happiness with his wife (Lara Parker), of his inability to lift the burning car that had trapped her in an accident, and then jolts awake to stare at the empty spot next to him in his bed. The audiences get the whole of Banner’s motivation and dilemma in a minute or two without dialogue.
“It’s ironic, many of my fellow producers at Universal thought my script would never work,” Johnson recalled. “No dialog for the first long opening sequence — are you nuts, Kenny?! But I’ve always tried to think more cinematically — and it paid off. We really grabbed the audience by the heart — thanks to Bix’s amazing performance. He totally realized exactly what I wanted to achieve and applied his considerable talents.
“I had seen his performance in Steambath (rent it – it’s amazing) and he was the first and only actor I ever sent the script to. I talked to him up until the day he died. We were brothers.”
“(Johnson) wanted someone whom audiences trusted and could believably bring the drama to life to sell the more fantastical elements of the show,” noted TV writer Matt Tucker. “Bixby, of course, scoffed at the title when first presented with it, but his agent convinced him to give the pilot script a read anyway. Bixby immediately got what Johnson was trying to do and became just as big a champion for the series as its creator.”
The TV Hulk’s strength, while stupendous, was never outlandishly omnipotent. This Hulk might juggle bulls and bears, but not mountains. The TV Hulk performed his comic book counterpart’s super-leaps only once — in the second TV pilot movie A Death in the Family — and never again.
And on TV, instead of being a cold-hearted physicist who created weapons of mass destruction, Banner was a compassionate physician on a feverish quest to find the strength that had failed him when he needed it most.
That relative plausibility helped make the show successful. People tend to forget how unlikely it was the comic book character – “Hulk smash!” — could ever work on 1970s television. But by emphasizing the Wolf Man-like tragedy of the story (ah, that bittersweet, stoic theme music), and later cheekily using Banner’s transformations as a metaphor for anger at the petty frustrations of American society, Johnson made it a beloved prime-time series.
“What we were constantly doing was looking for thematic ways to touch the various ways that the Hulk sort of manifested itself in everyone,” Johnson explained. “In Dr. David Banner, it happened to be anger. In someone else, it might be obsession, or it might be fear, or it might be jealousy or alcoholism! The Hulk comes in many shapes and sizes. That’s what we tried to delve into in the individual episodes.”
The newspaper comic strip drawn by Larry Lieber followed the TV series’ lead, introducing a beautiful CIA agent who was tracing the Hulk and an international criminal mastermind, Victor Nash, who intended to capture and clone the creature.
Although he falls for the lovely spy, Banner must always remain alone. “If only I dared tell her the truth — that David Banner and the monstrous Hulk are one and the same! But I can’t! I can’t!”
Lee, who also penned the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper feature, said he learned that writing newspaper strips would require a shift in dramatic emphasis.
“It’s much, much more difficult than doing a comic book,” Lee said in 1983. “You’ve really got three panels a day, and in those three panels you cannot have much dialogue because the strips are printed so small in so many papers. You need the first panel to sort of remind the reader of what had happened. The first panel is generally a summing-up panel. The second panel moves your story forward slightly. And the third panel, if you’re lucky enough to dream one up, is a cliffhanger.
“So you can’t move the story too quickly, and yet you can’t let it just lie there or it gets too dull.”
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