A few days after Halloween 1977, CBS aired a pilot movie about a man who becomes a monster.
Produced by Kenneth Johnson from the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Incredible Hulk’s opening moments were an exceptional example of economy and elegance in screenwriting.
In a silent montage, we see Dr. David Banner (Bill Bixby) falling in love with his wife (Lara Parker), sharing daily smiles with her, and comforting her in sadness. Then a sudden accident, an overturned car, Banner struggling to lift the burning vehicle to free his trapped wife.
And Banner awakens with a start, and looks at the space beside him in bed.
In only a minute, without dialogue, the screenplay has vividly outlined the motivation that provides the wellspring for the entire series. Because he hadn’t had sufficient strength to save the woman he loved, Banner threw himself into researching sources of emergency strength, an obsession that would trigger his tragedy.
Part Wolf Man, part Superman, the Hulk appeared in a second TV movie four months later, and a popular TV series the next fall.
Success was hardly guaranteed. Marvel’s costumed characters, Spider-Man and Captain Americ, failed badly on 1970s TV. But Johnson— a veteran of two successful superhero shows, The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman — chose to do the Hulk in part because, like the bionic duo, he wore no flamboyant costume.
The Hulk was, after all, just an old Universal Pictures monster writ large, coupled with the familiar TV formula of The Fugitive. No reason why that combination shouldn’t work. And indeed it did, for five seasons and three subsequent TV movies.
Lee remarked, “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 mmademade sense.”
Johnson stated, “What we were constantly doing was looking for thematic ways to touch the various ways that the Hulk sort of manifested itself in everyone. 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.”
I once interviewed children’s television host Fred Rogers about superheroes, an issue that concerned him. He had taken his TV audience onto the set of The Incredible Hulk to explain that Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, who played the Hulk, were two different people, that it’s all just make-believe.
Mr. Rogers said superheroes are natural for children. “The first superheroes, of course, are the parents themselves,” he said. “There is a very natural stage in the development of the human personality in which we believe that we are omnipotent, and that our parents are omnipotent, and that we’re able to do anything. But we have to help children gently along the way to realize that nobody is omnipotent, and neither are the heroes on television.”
I asked him why he stressed “gently.”
“Because even though children would love to think that they could take on the world and win, it can also be very frightening to them to think that they are omnipotent — and that what they think will, indeed, happen,” he said.
“One of the things that our Hulk program came from was reading about kids who were killing themselves playing superheroes, and also knowing how widespread superhero play is among children. Adults need to know how blurred the lines are between reality and fantasy in young children’s minds.”
I asked why he thought children find superheroes so attractive.
“Children are small,” Mr. Rogers said. “There are all kinds of powerful things in their environment over which they feel they have control. When they get angry, they often project that anger onto people and things around them, expecting them to have the same intensity of feeling. So to overcome the fear which results from being little in a big, scary world, children often pretend that they have superhuman powers — powers even greater than the big people and things around them. Seeing superheroes on television and in comic books feeds that ‘personal pretend.’ In the face of very difficult circumstances, everybody wishes once in a while that he or she had superhuman ways of dealing with difficulty.
“As usual, we’re not condemning fantasy. It’s often the basis for resolution and invention. What we’re doing is helping children to understand that human beings can pretend to be super-strong, super-big, super-fast, etc., but that it’s their real selves which do all the important things in the world. Their play needs to be safe so they can grow and develop into what’s super about each one of them.”
When the Hulk series started on TV, I had interviewed Bixby at a CBS press event for newspaper reporters. Critic Glenn Greenberg cited Bixby’s performance as the series’s strength, noting that he “masterfully conveyed the profound loneliness and tragedy of Dr. Banner while also bringing to the role an abundance of warmth, intelligence, humor, nobility, likability, and above all else, humanity.”
I’ll never forget how Bixby mixed me a gin & tonic in the Hyatt Regency hospitality suite. He was a kind, hardworking actor whose life was dogged by nearly as much tragedy as Dr. David Banner’s. He lost his 6-year-old son to a bizarre infection, and then the boy’s distraught mother killed herself. Bixby himself died of cancer at the age of only 59.
Joe Harnell’s haunting theme The Lonely Man, which played at the end of every episode as Banner’s solitary, unsung figure hitchhiked to new adventures, turned out to fit both actor and hero.
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