May 2021
There they were on Prime, so I gave it a go. I had watched a season or two of the old Bixby/Ferrigno show and quite enjoyed it. For some dastardly reason, I never finished, but I figure I wasn't missing much. Every episode has the same structure: David Banner has a random job elsewhere, meets someone, finds out they have a problem with someone, said someone pisses him off, and hulk smashes the problem. The movies are more of the same, but with a twist. They were both failed tv pilots.
The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) was meant to spawn a Thor tv show. Audiences didn't care for it apparently, but the Thor actor wasn't too bad. They cashed in on Thor's best superpower of drinking many beers, so that was fun. However, his lore is a bit different here than it is elsewhere.
The setup has David Banner running into someone he once taught, Donald Blake. He's a Harvard nerd, but if any of you are familiar with the lore, Don is also the human/doctor alter ego of Thor. The new movies skip this dynamic entirely, but we at least acknowledge it here, albeit in a different way. Our Donald Blake merely summons the actual Thor while some villains (Tim Thomerson and Charles Napier) try to stop him and the hulk for some reason that I already forgot. In the end, it wasn't good enough to spin-off a new series, but people still enjoyed the hulk enough to spin off another movie...
The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) was better. We finally bring Hulk into New York City where he's framed for a subway brawl (in which hulk was actually helping in), and who is his attorney? The man with no fear.
Rex Smith did an okay DareDevil, wearing a costume of black spandex that was the basis for DD's ninja-esque costume in the Netflix series, I'm sure. It was definitely cheesy, but it had more potential than a Thor series, I'd say. Our villain is Kingpin, played by John Rhys-Davies. He's okay at best, as is the movie in general.
I think the shows didn't take off because they could yield more intricate stories, and our audience wouldn't want that. We just want to see Bixby turn into Ferrigno and flex. I will say that dream sequences are the ultimate cop-out, and this movie shouldn't have dreamed the hulk trial scene.
The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) was meant to spawn a Thor tv show. Audiences didn't care for it apparently, but the Thor actor wasn't too bad. They cashed in on Thor's best superpower of drinking many beers, so that was fun. However, his lore is a bit different here than it is elsewhere.
The setup has David Banner running into someone he once taught, Donald Blake. He's a Harvard nerd, but if any of you are familiar with the lore, Don is also the human/doctor alter ego of Thor. The new movies skip this dynamic entirely, but we at least acknowledge it here, albeit in a different way. Our Donald Blake merely summons the actual Thor while some villains (Tim Thomerson and Charles Napier) try to stop him and the hulk for some reason that I already forgot. In the end, it wasn't good enough to spin-off a new series, but people still enjoyed the hulk enough to spin off another movie...
The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989) was better. We finally bring Hulk into New York City where he's framed for a subway brawl (in which hulk was actually helping in), and who is his attorney? The man with no fear.
Rex Smith did an okay DareDevil, wearing a costume of black spandex that was the basis for DD's ninja-esque costume in the Netflix series, I'm sure. It was definitely cheesy, but it had more potential than a Thor series, I'd say. Our villain is Kingpin, played by John Rhys-Davies. He's okay at best, as is the movie in general.
I think the shows didn't take off because they could yield more intricate stories, and our audience wouldn't want that. We just want to see Bixby turn into Ferrigno and flex. I will say that dream sequences are the ultimate cop-out, and this movie shouldn't have dreamed the hulk trial scene.
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In Trial of the Incredible Hulk, Bill Bixby has a beard. When he turns into hulk, hulk has no beard. A bearded hulk would have been too cerebral for most audiences.