Ignorami don't count.
Apologies if I am mistaken, but didn't you give me shit when I said you can't apply anything later series said when interpretting TOS?
Bill Bixby's HULK wins!
- Thread starter RobertScorpio
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Ignorami don't count.
Apologies if I am mistaken, but didn't you give me shit when I said you can't apply anything later series said when interpretting TOS?
It was Ferrigno in the long shots, just not in the green makeup and Hulk wig.
And I think Ferrigno's a good actor, in his way. He was able to make the Hulk very sympathetic and poignant with his pantomime performance, and in the '90s animated series, he was able to do much the same as the voice of the Hulk.
Didn't the comics adopt a sort of "on the road" format while the show was on the air? Like I said, comics often change to reflect current mass-media adaptations of them. (Like Spidey getting his ill-conceived organic webbing.) And as I suggested, a comics version of Jack McGee wouldn't have had to have the exact same motivation and mission as the TV version. I just think it would've been nice if Marvel had paid homage to this beloved character. I think the closest there's ever been was a cameo by a reporter named Jack McGee in Peter David's Hulk novel, which is based on but not part of the continuity of the Hulk comics at the time he was writing them.
I recently bought the first season of the 70s/80s Hulk. (This includes the two 2-hr movies) I'd seen a few episodes in passing over the years, but never watched it much, not being a heavy TV watcher.
So What I'm going to say comes from the POV of a younger, virtually new viewer.
First off, Bixby is (was) a great actor. I've seen him in several things over the years, and he was a great actor consistantly. He's on full display here, and really nailed the role.
My man Lou is also awesome. He gives a great performance as the Hulk.
As for the show itself. I've never read the Hulk comics. Now somehow this is a 70's show about a doctor that turns into a big green guy based on a monster comic. It should, by all rights, be terrible. But it's amazingly well done. The hulk make-up is impressive, the effects are top-notch for the era, and they use a lot of clever tricks to get around the morphing sequence. For example, in the 1st movie, he looks at himself in the water as Hulk, and splashes the water. When the ripples fade, it's Bixby. That's some great work.
The sets/locations are impressive too. It has the feel of a real high-budget production, which is really great.
And finally, the stories are well writen and truely emotional. They really nailed everything dead on.
So What I'm going to say comes from the POV of a younger, virtually new viewer.
First off, Bixby is (was) a great actor. I've seen him in several things over the years, and he was a great actor consistantly. He's on full display here, and really nailed the role.
My man Lou is also awesome. He gives a great performance as the Hulk.
As for the show itself. I've never read the Hulk comics. Now somehow this is a 70's show about a doctor that turns into a big green guy based on a monster comic. It should, by all rights, be terrible. But it's amazingly well done. The hulk make-up is impressive, the effects are top-notch for the era, and they use a lot of clever tricks to get around the morphing sequence. For example, in the 1st movie, he looks at himself in the water as Hulk, and splashes the water. When the ripples fade, it's Bixby. That's some great work.
The sets/locations are impressive too. It has the feel of a real high-budget production, which is really great.
And finally, the stories are well writen and truely emotional. They really nailed everything dead on.
Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall some issues like that.
Yeah, what the fuck were they thinking.
^ Clearly you've never read The Advanced Adhesive Properties of Multi-Polymer Compounds, by Stanley Lieber
A number of Classic Star Trek alumni appeared on the Hulk series. A by no means complete list includes Diana Mulduar (who played David Banner's sister), Mark Lenard, Whit Bissel, Morgan Woodward, Charles Napier, Jon Lormer, Paul Carr, Louise Sorel, Sharon Acker, William Windom and Harry Townes. "Galileo Seven" alumni Don Marshall and John Crawford were even reunited in "The Hulk Breaks Las Vegas".
And at least a couple of Hulk writer/producers contributed freelance scripts to DS9, including Nicholas Corea and Jill Sherman Donner (who was just Jill Sherman until she married actor Robert Donner, whom she met when he guest starred on a Hulk episode).
the old tv Hulk shows were great, the movies that have come out totally SUCK because the Hulk looks so fake. The latest movie reminded me of Roger Rabbit where cartoon characters are intermingling with real people.
^^Since when does lack of visual realism make a story bad? For thousands and thousands of years, all dramatic storytelling was done on a stage, with the scenery and effects and so forth being blatantly artificial, and audiences still loved it. That's because they had imaginations which they used to bridge the gap between what they saw and what was being represented. And it's because when the story is worthwhile, it doesn't matter if the effects or the scenery are perfect.
Since they're trying to sell it as visual realism. As I've observed before, the Kirk Alyn Superman, where he literally turned into a cartoon to fly, was effective on its own terms. Its goal was to convey the feeling of flight. The goal of the recent Hulk was to create something visually convincing, as were the goals of the recent Superman and the Spiderman series. Of these, only the latter was successful.
It's a shame that audiences today can't enjoy something like "The Day the Earth Stood Still" or "Forbidden Planet" because, "OMG tHe SPeCAL AFfECTZ R SOooOOOoo FaKE!!" Even the original Star Wars trilogy is unnacceptable to these people.
^^Yeah... I wonder what people like that think of books. "They're terrible! Those words on the page don't look anything like the scene they're describing!"
I grew up thinking of special effects as symbolic -- approximating a reality that it was my job as an active, participating viewer to imagine more fully. Being an audience member isn't supposed to be a passive experience.
I grew up thinking of special effects as symbolic -- approximating a reality that it was my job as an active, participating viewer to imagine more fully. Being an audience member isn't supposed to be a passive experience.
Agreed. If the effects are impressive, great. But all I really need them to be is functional, a means of conveying what is happening in the story. On the other hand, I'm less forgiving of bad visual effects in the big budget movies of today. Seems more a product of laziness or ineptitude than being constrained by technological limits, although I could be wrong. Maybe it's just because some of those films have nothing else going for them, storywise.
Sometimes bad effects make something all the more entertaining. Old Doctor Who, for example. They did the best they could with the limitations placed upon them by the BBC, but it doesn't matter, because the stories were great and the effects served to move the story along. And if I get a few chuckles out of some of the more outlandishly bad effects sequences, great!
^^True, but I don't assume that absolute photorealism is the only way of defining good effects. They're an art form, and art doesn't have to look like photography; it just has to be imaginative, aesthetically pleasing, and effective at conveying an impression or emotion.
For instance, in Spider-Man 2 there's a CGI shot of Doc Ock tentacle-walking out of the trashed diner with a struggling Mary Jane in tow. It doesn't look particulary convincing, but I love it, because it looks like an Alex Ross painting.
For that matter, most FX shots set in outer space are totally fake-looking -- the ships are too brightly lit from too many sources, the stars are too visible in comparison, the energy beams are visible when they should be invisible, the ships are too close or too slow-moving relative to each other, the explosions are too fiery and turbulent to be in a vacuum, etc. If space FX were done realistically, they would be dark, empty, confusing, and dull. Creating an effective impression matters more than creating a perfect illusion of reality.
For instance, in Spider-Man 2 there's a CGI shot of Doc Ock tentacle-walking out of the trashed diner with a struggling Mary Jane in tow. It doesn't look particulary convincing, but I love it, because it looks like an Alex Ross painting.
For that matter, most FX shots set in outer space are totally fake-looking -- the ships are too brightly lit from too many sources, the stars are too visible in comparison, the energy beams are visible when they should be invisible, the ships are too close or too slow-moving relative to each other, the explosions are too fiery and turbulent to be in a vacuum, etc. If space FX were done realistically, they would be dark, empty, confusing, and dull. Creating an effective impression matters more than creating a perfect illusion of reality.
I loved the TV series for what it was, but it wasn't the comics by a long shot, and thus I could never consider it to be a definitive interpretation of the character. Bixby was great in the role...he sold the series where it would have sunk in lesser hands. And Ferrigno deserves a lot of credit for finding a successful balance between scary and sympathetic.
The formula--HA! With the exception of a handful of episodes that deviated for various reasons, you could set your watch by those transformations. I remember, as a 10-year-old, literally watching the clock in anticipation of when he'd Hulk out. "Two minutes to go--David's gonna get into trouble here!" Not to mention how, again with a few exceptions, the toughs who tended to beat up on Banner invariably managed to throw him somewhere out of sight before he transformed!
The formula--HA! With the exception of a handful of episodes that deviated for various reasons, you could set your watch by those transformations. I remember, as a 10-year-old, literally watching the clock in anticipation of when he'd Hulk out. "Two minutes to go--David's gonna get into trouble here!" Not to mention how, again with a few exceptions, the toughs who tended to beat up on Banner invariably managed to throw him somewhere out of sight before he transformed!
Tell me about it! There were so many threads from the TV series that could have used resolution...chief among them being the Banner/McGee dynamic that was the core of the series. I always wanted to see what would happen if/when McGee learned the truth...any wrap-up to the TV series should have dealt with that. What was also grating was how they made such a big deal out of selling Banner's new friends in that movie as the only family that he had left...totally ignoring Banner's actual family from the Thanksgiving episode. I can understand if they couldn't get the actors, but the charcters should have been acknowledged. "If something goes wrong, I'd like you to get in touch with my sister...."
While they were the earliest Hulk artists, the character was still finding his identity in those years, and the contributions of those artists were relatively brief. I'd consider Herb Trimpe and Sal Buscema to be more definitive Silver/Bronze Age Hulk artists.
They showed a teleplay of The Tempest in my high school English class in the late '80s, which featured Hammond. I spotted his name in the credits and recognized him immediately, but didn't say anything...so I was amused when a couple of other guys in the class could be heard saying, "Hey, it's Spider-Man!"
Nope, the "Demi-Hulk" was played in the long shots by a bodybuilder/stuntman named Ric Drasin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Drasin. I had to look it up, but I remembered it was a third actor from some publicity that I read around the time that the show aired.
Kinda-sorta...Banner wandering around and finding himself in various situations became more prominently featured, though it wasn't a new element of the series. In the comics, it tended to be of a more worldwide scope, given that he'd tend to stay in Hulk form a lot longer...sometimes for several issues in a row...and the Hulk could travel pretty far in mile-wide leaps. I remember a series of issues from that period that had him in a new country every issue or two, including Israel, Egypt, Russia, and Japan.
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Anybody know why they changed his name from Bruce Banner to David Banner in the TV show?
The popular story was that they thought "Bruce" sounded gay, IIRC, but in the commentary for the pilot episode the producer says that it's because he couldn't stand the comic-booky illiteration.
Bruce was also his middle name in the comics, but the first name was Robert. And that owed to a mistake in an early story or two in which Lee accidentally referred to him as "Bob Banner". (Not to mention the time he was referred to as Donald Blake...!)
Bruce was also his middle name in the comics, but the first name was Robert. And that owed to a mistake in an early story or two in which Lee accidentally referred to him as "Bob Banner". (Not to mention the time he was referred to as Donald Blake...!)
^^Yep, Kenneth Johnson said it was to avoid the alliteration. He also chose "David" after his son, I believe. Some member of his family, anyway.
Though I kind of wonder, if Banner's full name in the comics was Robert Bruce Banner, why Johnson didn't just go with calling him Robert Banner. Although I like David better.
Though I kind of wonder, if Banner's full name in the comics was Robert Bruce Banner, why Johnson didn't just go with calling him Robert Banner. Although I like David better.
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