The Incredible Hulk In Animation - A Retrospective
Rather than admit defeat or tell the current crew to work harder, Marvel simply started again, replacing all the crew, hiring a new animation studio and the quality of both shows improved exponentially. Rather than ignoring the first season, both crews worked around it and made each show very, very entertaining. But this is a Hulk thread, so where does ol’ Jade Jaws fit into all this? Where else but those accursed back door pilots! Our not so jolly green giant first appeared on Fantastic Four in Nightmare In Green and had took part in some great fight scenes with the ever lovin’ blue eyed idol of millions, which ranks highly on the list of Marvel’s best animated fights, especially in the 90’s era where most Marvel cartoons lacked violence. Due to The Marvel Action Hour being syndicated, Iron Man and Fantastic Four got away with more on the physical side of things. There’s one kick ass moment where Iron Man actually stabs Crimson Dynamo with Wolverine like claws in one episode! 
The story of the episode isn’t anything remarkable, Dr. Doom tricks The Hulk into attacking The Fantastic
Four when he believes they have stolen Rick Jones’ friendship from him. Bonus points for using Rick, but like
the Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends version, I felt this version of Hulk was a little lacking. The episode
itself is probably one of the better episodes of the show, but there was something… iffy about their version of
The Hulk. The design looked a little too goofy for my liking. I’m not exactly sure why, but I thought The Hulk looked a little too much like a child. He was big and muscular, sure, but he still looked really soft. The voice didn’t quite fit either. Rather than have different actors portray the roles, Ron Pearlman supplied both Banner and Hulk’s lines and to me, didn’t fit either of them especially well. His Hulk didn’t sound scary enough and his Banner didn’t sound… anything like Banner should. I think the dialogue didn’t necessarily help, but of all the roles I’ve heard Pearlman portray, I thought The Hulk was the most disappointing. Ironically enough, he would later go on to play The Abomination, one of the biggest Hulk villains from the comics in the recent The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction video game, and he was fantastic. Luckily, this season has pretty much a spot on version of The Thing. Of all the things the first season managed to screw up (which believe, is too numerous to mention), they managed to cast The Thing very well. Whenever I read a Fantastic Four comic, it’s Chuck McCann’s voice I hear whenever Thing speaks. They managed to fix his horrendous first season design too, and basically crafted a much more entertaining, much more likeable character, with a great sense of humour, a lot of which comes in abundance in this episode. It was a solid episode overall, but much like Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, The Hulk would need a lot of work if he was to become the star of his own show. He would get a second chance on the small screen over in the other half of Marvel Action Hour in Iron Man. Thankfully, he appeared in a much superior episode, Hulkbuster. The crew kept Pearlman as the voice for both characters, but offered a much better design that personally reminded me of legendary Amazing Spider-Man/Ultimate Spider-Man artist Mark Bagley’s depiction of the character. It’s worth noting that the Bruce Banner design was pretty terrible. For some reason, Banner was blonde! 
This episode didn’t have Ben Grimm to save the day, but it really helped further the romance between Iron Man and
Julia, which is Marvel Mod’s Arsenal’s personal favourite, according to his lengthy list. It’s a time travelling story,
and it features Iron Man and The Hulk pounding the crap out of each other in several different time settings, whilst ol’
shellhead races to save his girl. There’s few other ways to describe it other than just great fun. We also saw the debut
of the Hulkbuster armour to animation, and see Hulk rip Iron Man’s arm off, completely battering his armour. The episode
does feature the worst line in the season though. As Banner transforms into Hulk, Rhoadie makes a really stupid
comment about how Banner is looking “green at the gills”, which still makes me cringe to this day. I utterly
love this show, and would recommend it to anyone who likes a good cartoon, whether you’re a Marvel fan or not.
I would also place Hulkbuster in the show’s top 5 episodes, it’s simply great fun to watch. So, with two backdoor pilots completed in late 1995/early 1996, Marvel was hoping that The Hulk would be given his own show in the fall, and much like the Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends guest spot did, it worked. In the fall of 1996, The Incredible Hulk joined UPN’s Sunday morning line up.
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