‘It’s “The Fugitive,” but Green’: How TV’s ‘The Incredible Hulk’ Redefined Superheroes (EXCLUSIVE)
Kenneth Johnson’s adult, tragic take made 'The Incredible Hulk' prestige TV before it had a name
The success of the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (with the character played by Mark Ruffalo returning in next year’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day) owes as much to the late ’70s/early ’80s superhero TV series The Incredible Hulk as it does to Marvel Comics.
The show was created and developed by writer/director Kenneth Johnson (the creative force behind the V miniseries of the 1980s). He had just come off of producing duties on The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman and was admittedly reluctant to dive back into the superhero pool again—particularly one featuring a character “in a funny costume.”
He had been asked to a meeting with Frank Price, then the head of Universal Television, and told that the studio had acquired the rights to several Marvel characters, including Captain America, the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four and the Hulk. Johnson was given his choice of the spandex litter, but he expressed a lack of interest in any of them.
“I went home that night very frustrated,” Johnson says, “because I didn’t want to create bad blood with Frank, but at the same time I didn’t want to do any of those things. I was also in the process of reading Les Misérables, which my wife Susie had given to me. I had that book and the whole fugitive concept in my head and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, man, I’ll bet I can take a little bit of Victor Hugo and a little bit of Robert Louis Stevenson and this ludicrous thing called The Incredible Hulk and turn it into an adult psychological piece that would belie its comic book origins.’”
After consulting with friend Steven Bochco (creator of, among many others, L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue), he came to the conclusion that he would go back to Price and agree to take on The Incredible Hulk provided that he would be allowed to do it his way without interference. In return, he would like the opportunity to do a four-hour miniseries based on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (“A wonderful romantic adventure which had never really been done well,” he opines). A deal was struck and Johnson immediately began work on the pilot script.
It’s ‘The Fugitive,’ but green
The Incredible Hulk (which ran from 1977 to 1982) focuses on Dr. David Banner, a scientist whose experiments with gamma radiation causes him to transform into a powerful green raging creature whenever he loses control os his anger. The series followed Banner as he wanders from town to town, city to city under assumed identities, searching for a cure while inadvertently helping people in trouble, all the while being pursued by investigative reporter Jack McGee, who sought to expose the creature’s existence. Combining action, melodrama and a tragic tone, the show became a major hit of the 1970s.
“Like I said,” Johnson explains, “I had a difficulty with funny costumes, such as Wonder Woman and the like. The Hulk at least came out of a real person, though it didn’t make sense that he was green. Is he ‘The Envious Hulk? The Jealous Hulk?’ So I called Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee and said, ‘Why isn’t he red for rage?’ and Stan said, ‘When they first started doing the comic book, he was gray. But then the printer came to us and said, “We’ve got a pretty good consistent green, how about that?” So we changed it.’
“It had nothing to do with logic,” he continues, “which is the thing that I’m always looking for in the stories that I do. I was indeed anxious to keep the story as logical and based in truth as possible. I did a lot of research into cellular biology so that I could include some of that in the pilot to make it sound like Dr. Banner would know what he was talking about. And also so that I could come up with some sort of logical jump that an adult audience would take with me.”
In his opinion, keeping a certain level of truth in the situation was imperative to maintain a connection with that adult audience. “In the second two-hour movie,” Johnson recalls, “there was a fight with a bear, because I was always looking for worthy adversaries to go up against the creature. By the way, that’s what we always called him in the scripts: he was never the Hulk, always the creature. Stan Lee, who was still being invited to give us his thoughts, with the understanding that we didn’t have to pay any attention to them, but he was a very smart guy and worth listening to, called me and said, ‘I love the script, especially the fight with the bear, but it ought to be a robot bear.’ I said, ‘Stan, let me explain why it shouldn’t be a robot bear. We’re already asking the audience to buy that Bill Bixby transforms into Lou Ferrigno. That is a humongous buy for the audience. If you ask them to believe that there are robot bears, you’ve then lost the adult audience.’”
Casting the show
In casting the role of Dr. David Bruce Banner (the comic character’s name “Bruce” was thought to be somewhat effeminate at the time), Johnson wanted “a classy actor; one whom the audience knew, liked and felt a connection to,” which he found in the late Bill Bixby, whose previous series had included My Favorite Martian, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and The Magician.
“It must be said that Bill Bixby was my first and only choice for the role,” he points out. “And when his agent sent him the script, he had the same reaction that I did when he heard the title, which was that he couldn’t do something called The Incredible Hulk. But he was convinced by the material and he was the perfect man for the job.”
Interestingly, the actor they had first turned to for the part of the Hulk was Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He was just breaking on to the scene and we went to him, but he was tied up and couldn’t break free,” says Johnson. “And it was actually Arnold that suggested Lou Ferrigno to us and in some ways it probably was to our advantage. Arnold is under six feet and Lou is six feet four inches. That helps immensely to make the Hulk taller, though we were doing tricks to make him look even taller than that with the use of wide-angle lenses right behind his shoulder to make his shoulder look like Mt. Everest. We’d put him on apple boxes and have people squat down—all kinds of tricks to make him look as big as we possibly could. It would have been a double-duty with Arnold, trying to make him look bigger.”
The incredibly dramatic Hulk
The power of Johnson’s take on the character was obvious to everyone who attended a screening of the original pilot (which would spawn a second two-hour TV movie and the subsequent series).
“If you notice, the first film opens with a title card that reads, ‘Within each of us oft times dwells a mighty and raging fury,’” Johnson details. “I did that because I wanted to immediately set the tone for a more adult drama, for a tragedy of sorts. I still remember a lot of people coming to the first screening of the pilot who had no interest at all in some sort of comic book show. What happened was interesting in that people got so caught up with the relationship between Dr. Banner and his wife, Laura, and their love and closeness, and then felt the shock of her being in the wrecked automobile which is on fire, and Banner being unable to turn the car over and the anguish he felt over her death. And these people came away from it thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is not what we expected at all,’ and it was something they wanted to continue to watch.”
Which is exactly what they did, turning The Incredible Hulk into a hit, largely because the creative staff avoided the supervillains of the comics and focused, instead, on real-life adversaries and threats that anyone in the audience could potentially experience.
Johnson offers, “I think part of the reason that the Hulk was so successful was because of the inner psychology that we were focusing on, which was unusual at the time. We would use the Hulk figuratively. In other words, the Hulk inside Banner was anger. In other people it might be obsession or greed or lust or drugs or alcohol or any number of things that causes someone to behave in a way that is not acceptable in society. There is a visceral response we’ve all felt of our anger springing up inside us. People have felt that and still do.”
Which all sounds great on paper, but was not always an easy sell to the network. “There were a number of times where we had to go to bat for ideas we wanted to do,” Johnson sighs. “I wanted to do an episode about a child-abuser and the network said, ‘That’s not a Hulk episode. Who are the bad guys?’ We said, ‘Wait a minute, don’t you think child abusers are bad guys?’ I had to fight tooth and nail for it. I said, ‘We’re going to do this. The parallel is direct—the Hulk beating up on an adult is a parallel to an adult beating up on a child. It’s perfectly thematic within the context of the show that we’re doing.’
“‘It’s a social issue worth talking about and it’s something we can talk about in a unique way.’ We battled and battled and the episode did get made, and of course, it was one that the critics picked up as being one of the best we ever did. But you’re constantly having to hold your own standards and quality against what the network thinks, even if you’re a hit show. They leave you more alone when you are a hit, but even with a hit show like The Hulk was, they’re always afraid of going outside the box.”
Although that challenge continued right until the show’s final episode aired in 1982, Johnson expresses a deeply felt satisfaction in being able to reach out and touch the audience through the television medium.
“When I was going to college at Carnegie Tech, I would take the train back and forth to Washington, D.C., where I grew up,” he says. “And going back and forth between Washington and Pittsburgh, I would be passing through these little towns in Pennsylvania at night. I would find myself looking into the windows as they flashed by, looking into the rooms of all of these houses of all of these people, and it used to make me cry. I could never quite figure out why and then finally I came to realize that it was because of all of the humanity that was out there.
“And all of the people in all those rooms that I would never know or touch. Later on, though, I began to get fan mail from those little towns and I realized the breadth of my audience and how lucky I was to be able to reach out to people, not only all over the country but all over the world. And to be able to tell them a story and hopefully touch them in some way that might be profound or moving. Certainly, I think that anything we do in television reaches a vast audience and sometimes the work is extraordinarily good and moving and has a real impact on people. I think The Hulk was one of those shows.”
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