Awesome / The Incredible Hulk (1977)

• One of the most famous lines in all of television:
  "Mr. McGee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
• Hell, anytime Banner Hulks out and starts kicking ass, especially when the ass he's kicking was threatening/harming him or another character. The Oh, Crap! alone is worth the price of admission.
  • All you have to see is David's eyes turning white, and you know that ass-kicking and name-taking will occur. (One internet meme shows David with the white eyes and an angry expression and has the caption "When you saw this, you knew shit was about to get real."
• In "747", he manages to land a plane while Hulking out! Also, the transformation took much longer than usual, so that David got some degree of control over it, slowing its pace as long as possible in order to retain intelligence enough to follow the flight controller's instructions.
  • The teen guy who enters the cockpit when the transformation is complete also deserves mention: he's fully calm in Hulk's presence and helps him (by then fully primitive-minded) to activate the brakes and properly stop the plane.
• In "Homecoming", Hulk helps to land another plane, albeit a much smaller one (his father's single-engine, two-seat agricultural plane), not by piloting it (the pilot was OK), but by holding a sabotaged wing in its proper place. Once the pilot lands safely and Hulk releases the wing, it detaches from the plane and falls on the floor.
• The very first transformation deserves mention here; remember, this was in the 1970s, way before CGI was the norm for filmmaking, and audiences had seen nothing like this on television: Banner, trying to change a tire in a thunderstorm, loses control as the lug wrench keeps slipping from his hands...and then his eyes change color. Lightning flashes, thunder crashes; Jekyll morphs into Hyde and the green beast is unleashed.
• During the Hulk's second transformation, Elaina gets her own moment. David is hulking out inside a pressure chamber, and he is acting very much like an animal trapped in a cage, hitting the walls, trying the tear the place apart to get out. Elaina grabs her tape recorder and gives a sitrep, describing everything she sees. Then when the big guy is able to break out, Elaina—who is scared to death—doesn't panic, bolt for the door, or even raise her voice. She reasons with the Hulk, using a calm and soothing voice. She's able to talk the creature down and even get him to hold out his hand (which has a cut) so she can get a blood sample. Then she guides him to a sofa and gets him to sit down. The Hulk—who remained the Hulk for several hours the night before—changes back into Banner after less than ten minutes. It's a shame that the lab went up, and Elaina was mortally injured at the end of the pilot (but then we wouldn't have a series). She showed a textbook perfect way to handle the Hulk and get him to calm down... and she was improvising. David was right; she was a hell of a brave woman.
• David has a type; he tends to go for women who have a lot of inner strength. In "Married", David Hulks out when under hypnosis. Caroline Fields watches him transform, then he starts to trash the place. But when he's about to destroy a piece of medical equipment, Caroline jumps to her feet and shouts, "No!" The Hulk turns and just stares at her, and both of them are clearly thinking the same thing: "Did that just happen?!" Hulk is more surprised than angry; his expression seems to say, "Okay, fine, lady, be that way!" Finally, he kicks over a coffee table and knocks down a door and books it out of there. No wonder David fell in love and married her; any woman who stands up to the Hulk like that is a keeper.
• Li Sung, from the episodes "Another Path" and "The Disciple", is an old and blind guy... and a superb martial artist. In his first episode, he kicked the Big Bad's ass by himself. Even the Hulk was just cleaning up after him.
• In the episode "A Child In Need", David learns that a boy at the elementary school he's currently working at has an abusive father (with the nurse mentioning that the boy, Mark, comes in regularly for various bruises). David quickly learns that Mark's entire neighborhood knew about the physical abuse, but did nothing out of fear of Mark's father. David, after hearing Mark's father attacking his mother, Hulks out, throws the father around like a rag doll, and gets Mark out of there. He later does the same and triggers a Heel Realization in the father when he realizes that he became an abuser because his father was one, and finally sees what he's become. A moment for both sides of Banner: David for being the only adult to realize what was going on and actually do something about it, and for the Hulk, who managed to show enough restraint to not actually hurt the father, just scare him straight. Especially once one remembers that, in the comics, Banner had an abusive father, too.
  • One for Mark, as well, as he quickly accepts Mr. "Baxter" for who he is, and appreciates him for being the only adult in his life to do something about the abuse.
• Even when he's in his normal form, David can be resourceful when he needs to. In "The Snare", he was smart enough to disarm many of Sutton's traps, transforming only in really critical situations. By the end of the episode, David also was Genre Savvy enough to leave Sutton's tape recorder out of the boat he used to escape (the device exploded at the deck, after playing Sutton's farewell message), denying the villain a posthumous victory.
• Jack Kirby's Creator Cameo as a police sketch artist. His only cameo ever in a Marvel adaptation. This was actually at a time when his relationship with Marvel was strained at best but right before that relationship had completely soured. Stan Lee makes the first of what would be a continuing (to this day) tradition of cameos in Trial of the Incredible Hulk, where he is the jury foreman. For many fans, these are the first glimpses of what these guys looked like in person.