"I came upon Hulk [in 1976] when I was told that Universal had bought the rights to the Marvel Comics superheroes. They asked me, 'which one do you want to do?' I said, "None of them!'"

    Nevertheless, Johnson had second thoughts. "I was reading Les Miserables, so I had Jean Valjean and the Fugitive TV series in my head. I thought, 'Maybe there's a way to take this ludicrous thing called The Incredible Hulk and turn it into something with Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson [Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde],'" he explains. "The network liked my idea and I convinced Bill Bixby to come aboard.

    "Bill was as reluctant as I was. If you're a serious actor and somebody hands you a script called The Incredible Hulk, you would say, 'I'm not gonna do this childish crap!' But Bill saw what I had done, which was to leave the comic origins and take the core: A man struggling with this psychological problem."

    Some viewers were disappointed that Marvel's monstrous character never reached the mayhem level seen in the comic. "I wanted to be realistic," Johnson notes. "Stan Lee and I have been pals since the Hulk, but we had many battles at the beginning. In one early episode ("Death In The Family" - M.R.), I wrote a fight between the Hulk and a bear. Stan said 'it's great, but it ought to be a robot bear!'

    "I said 'Stan, you don't understand. You have a man who turns big and green, so you need the audience to make a "buy." If the audience doesn't "buy" that, the show goes nowhere. If the audience does "buy" it, you've got 'em. If they say, "OK, I believe Bill Bixby can turn into a green Lou Ferrigno," then I've pushed the audience a major step. Do you really want to take the chance of trying to push them farther by having the bear be a robot? They'll sit back and say, "Sorry, I don't buy it!"' I think the audience will give you one big 'buy' per show.

    Under Johnson's stewardship, the CBS series was one of comic book TV's few major successes. "The Incredible Hulk was on for five years. Kids always tuned in to see the big green monster crash through walls, but our largest audience was adults who realized something else was going on - the mortality play in each episode," Johnson states. "Hulk was about facing things within yourself and learning to deal with them.

    "Because of Hulk, I was offered [the TV series pilot] Beauty and the Beast and passed on it. The first script I read, I didn't believe. As esoteric and interesting as it was, it required a suspension of belief that I couldn't achieve.

    "When you look at the history of shows like The Hulk on television, there aren't many on as long as it was. The reason was that it worked on more than one level. They wanted me to do The Flash too, but I said, 'I have trouble with people in funny costumes, and red tights don't do it for me!' They wanted lightning in a bottle like The Hulk. Wonder Woman, Spider-man, and TV shows like that missed finding it. You've got to have great writers and work on more than one level."

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