I grew up reading THE INCREDIBLE HULK; when it was announced that there would be a TV show based on the comic, I was ecstatic. I was more than a little disappointed by the pilot episode: Bill Bixby as Bruce Banner isn't ACCIDENTALLY transformed into The Hulk, he actually irradiates himself... Not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, huh? He loses not one but TWO women in the pilot (and, later, in the second season opener, a third)- but he gets blamed for the second woman's death (actually the fault of a nosy reporter- back when reporters WERE nosy), and this sets up his fugitive-on-the-run series (and, like David Jansen in THE FUGITIVE, Banner's a physician, too). Because this show was being produced by the man who gave us THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (who duked it out with Bigfoot, no less,), my expectations were high that we would finally see some decent super-heroics on TV for the first time in a long while. What we got, instead, was a snarling deaf and dumb brute whose every appearance began with a pose-down and a slow-mo throw and ended with him fleeing the scene of the crime. (The show got off to a ROCKY start, with a badly done episode featuring a prizefighter nicknamed... you guessed it.) A traveling social worker, Bruce Banner became the real star of the show, with The Hulk popping up literally on cue twice in each episode to go through his formulaic routine. (The best episode was KINDRED SPIRITS, which postulated a prehistoric Hulk, but the idea was never followed up on. Second-best was the two-parter THE FIRST, which featured the only character from the comic, a Hulk-like monster called The Abomination.) The shows were often bland and uninteresting, employing every clichéd convention of television storytelling, all the while ignoring the gold that could've been mined from 15 years worth of comic stories. Readers of those comics were all too aware of the show's shortcomings and the passive-aggressive Hulk (who tossed or pushed but rarely hit his attackers) was little more than an addendum to what came to be THE BRUCE BANNER SHOW. Comics to this day are a Gold Mine yet to be mined.
Review of The Incredible Hulk
