YMMV / The Incredible Hulk (1977)

• Awesome Music:
  • "The Lonely Man", both the solo piano piece ("the sad walking-away music") and an uptempo version which plays during the opening credits. Like The Raccoons, it's a rare case where the CLOSING music is better known than the opening!
  • David's transformation into the Hulk is rich with flavorful musical sound effects, always starting with a screeching Scare Chord and followed up by etheral humming noises, and the sound of his clothes ripping apart. Then there's the transformation cooldown where the Hulk reverts back to being David, which is just the humming sounds all by themselves.
  • The various incidental music tracks for the Hulk, composed by Joe Harnell. He has one for when the transformation completes full of trumpets, another with tense violin music for when he's involved in an action sequence, and another for when he runs away with troubled-sounding and melancholic piano notes.
• Anvilicious: Quite a few episodes had An Aesop that was delivered with the force of a Hulk punch.
• Common Knowledge:
  • It's often been claimed the the Hulk doesn't talk because of Lou Ferrigno being deaf. This isn't true. Not only was the decision to keep him silent made well before Ferrigno was even cast, but he isn't completely deaf and is able to speak just fine thanks to hearing aids and lip-reading. The actual reason he doesn't speak is because both Stan Lee and the writers thought Hulk Speak wouldn't work well in live-action.
  • Bill Bixby's cancer diagnosis is not why the fourth reunion film was canned. It was due to The Death of the Incredible Hulk receiving disappointing ratings, and Bill's health only started declining after the decision to axe the movie was already made.
• Complete Monster:
  • "The Snare": Michael Sutton became bored with hunting animals, and so decided to start Hunting the Most Dangerous Game. He finds whatever men he can and invites them over to his own island, only to drug them to sleep and put them through deadly obstacles as he hunts them down, succeeding at least 5 times, and seeing it all as a "game"; he intends to do the same to David Banner. It's implied that the reason he's so successful is because he doesn't play fair, a fact David calls him out on, insisting that a real hunter plays fair and that all Sutton cares about is winning. When Sutton discovers David's inner beast, he becomes obsessed with it and tortures David with the intent of bringing it out and killing it, only to kill himself by accident. At the end of the episode, it turns out even in death Sutton can't stand losing, as it's revealed he booby trapped David's escape boat in preparation for the hero's victory. Ruthless, psychotic, and a cheater at his own game, Michael Sutton was unlike any other villain on the show, who were motivated by either tragedy or simple financial gain.
  • "Bring Me the Head of the Hulk": La Fronte is a ruthless mercenary whose rap sheet includes everything from political assassinations to outright mass murder. Hired to kill the Hulk for a large payday, La Fronte deduces that he's David Banner and schemes to anger him enough to get him to hulk out, planning to kill him in his enraged form. To provoke him, La Fronte attempts to massacre a laboratory's worth of innocent scientists, trying to burn them all to death; when his horrified Dragon tries to intervene, La Fronte guns him down without a second of remorse.
• Designated Villain: Jack McGee sometimes comes across as this. Sure, he can be a jerk, but he's regularly treated like a scumbag when he usually he just wants to tell the public the truth about a destructive monster who (as far as he knows) killed 2 people. It's because he works for a scummy tabloid that no one likes him, because no matter how many times he tries to pass himself off as an upstanding person, he will always come off as a nosy reporter working under a shill for selfish monetary gain at the expense of others and a proponent of slander.
• Fair for Its Day: The titular character in "Ricky" is mentally handicapped, and he's described by other people as "retarded" multiple times. In the years following, this would not have flown due to the word eventually evolving into an insulting and derogatory remark, so to a contemporary viewer it may seem jarring watching the episode today. At the time, however, the term was not seen as a slur.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • As noted below, while David and DW had a strained relationship, it's a damn sight better than that of their comic counterparts, where Brian was outright abusive to his family and Bruce had killed Brian in a fit of anger about Rebecca's death and repressed the memory.
  • Brenda Benet, Bill Bixby's ex-wife, guest-starred in a season 3 episode where (it appeared) David as the Hulk killed a child and was thinking about committing suicide, only for Benet's character to stop him, saying that it wouldn't bring the child back. Bixby and Benet's child died at the age of 6 the following year and a year after that, Benet committed suicide herself.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: In the episode "Homecoming", after years of estrangement, David makes peace with his father, DW Banner. Considering that his counterpart in comics (who debuted three years later), named Brian, was a really bad guy and an Archnemesis Dad, it's nice to see that the original version of Hulk's father was a good guy and ended up in good terms with his son.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Word of God explained that he wanted to change Hulk to red, but Stan Lee denied the permission. Years later in the comics, The Red Hulk became an actual character separate from the green Hulk.^{For those curious}Before the show was produced, Kenneth Johnston asked Stan why he was green, since red is often associated as the color for anger while green is the color of envy. Stan told him they chose the color green because their printer at the time couldn't consistently portray Hulk as gray, as they originally wanted, so green was the only color the printer had no trouble with. Stan won out and Hulk stayed green
  • In the Brazilian dub, David Bruce Banner was voiced, depending on the season, by Newton da Matta and Nilton Valério. Both of them voiced another superhero whose secret identity is Bruce: each one in different seasons of Superfriends, Da Matta in The New Adventures of Batman and Valério in the Tim Burton's films. Also, Jack McGee was voiced by Waldir Fiori, who voiced Batman's butler Alfred Pennyworth in Batman Forever, Batman & Robin and Birds of Prey (2002).
  • In the show, Bruce Banner's first name was changed to David. In the 2003 movie, Bruce's father Brian's first name was changed to David as a Mythology Gag, though the comics retconned his name as either David Brian Banner or Brian David Banner. The name Brian is itself an Adaptation Name Change, as Hulk's father appeared in the TV series three years before his comics version, under the name DW Banner. The "D" may or not stand for "David".
    • Then, in the Brazilian dub of the 2003 film, David (Bruce's father) was voiced by Newton da Matta, who, as mentioned above, was one of Series!David voice actors.
  • Although comics villains never appeared in the show, the antagonists of the final episode ("A Minor Probelm") wore yellow hazmat suits, looking similar to the members of Marvel's villainous organization A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics), who crossed Hulk's path a few times.
  • In "The First", Dick Durock played the green monster in which Dell Frye transforms (an Evil Counterpart of Hulk). Years later, Durock played another green monster who was once a man, this time a heroic one from DC Comics: Swamp Thing, in the movie The Return of Swamp Thing.
  • The series ends with the final death of Banner and the Hulk. In the comics, the two would eventually discover that for them, it is NOT that simple.
• Memetic Mutation
  • "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry". More often than not, it's followed up by "I don't like you now".
  • "The Lonely Man" has become go-to background music for underscoring over-the-top despair played for laughs.
  • This frame◊ of the Hulk and Thor from the first reunion film is often paired with a shot of the same two characters from the MCU to humorously compare something to a variant far smaller in scale, such as "The Final Boss in a Video Game vs. When You Unlock The Final Boss as a Playable Character" or "How I Think I Look vs. How I Actually Look".
• Most Wonderful Sound: That one Scare Chord leading to the Hulk's Leitmotif. It always means ass-kicking is due to ensue and it will be glorious!
• Narm:
  • A lot of David's transformation scenes, taken out of context, can appear very silly. Though it's usually a reason more related to people he knows being hurt or in distress, the actual event that triggers his eyes to turn white will sometimes involve very mundane things like arguing with an operator that he "DOESN'T HAVE 25 CENTS!!!", being stuck inside a taxi cab in New York City traffic and yelling "I HAVE TO BE THERE BY FIVE!!!", or perhaps most infamously...
    David: I DON'T WANT TEEEEEAAAAAA!!!
  • Del Frye's Hulk appears scary and looks like a werewolf. But all of that is diminished when you remember Frye is an old man, and his Hulk is scrawnier as a result. Especially when both Hulks are frame, you see David's is much more muscular, which makes it look like a skinny coyote going up against a muscle-bound wolf.
• Newer Than They Think: The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk was the first time that Stan Lee made a cameo appearance in a Marvel adaptation, although he wouldn't have a speaking appearance in a live-action adaptation till 2003's Hulk.
• Older Than They Think: In a 2013 comic, Indestructible Hulk Special #1, a scene in which S.H.I.E.L.D. calms Hulk down by surrounding him with puppies, so that he reverts to Banner, amazed the fans. But, decades earlier, the TV series had already shown that Hulk was fond of cute animals, petting them and turned into Banner in their presence.
  • In the episode "The Snare," Hulk helped some little birds who had fallen from their nest.
  • In "A Solitary Place," he saved a rabbit from a bear trap.
  • In "A Minor Problem," he petted a literal dog.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Any time a scene with the Hulk has bystanders speaking, the dialogue is added post-production because the Hulk is constantly subjected to Overcrank for dramatic effect and the limitations of the film and recording equipment at the time made it difficult to perfect the timing of speaking parts without the slow-motion sequences distorting the audio captures, so the vocal audio parts (aside from Lou Ferrigno's Hulk noises) were recorded separately on a sound stage. Because none of the vocal performances are live, they always sound so fake and shoehorned in, like a crummy Godzilla dub, with the tones and delivery of the lines never meshing cleanly with the scenes of the Hulk. Worse, a lot of the time, the dialogue would be thrown in while the characters were off-screen, making it painfully obvious they couldn't lip-sync any of the sound bytes, or even sound like they're in the same place as the Hulk (characters from afar sound too loud for it to sound believable and like they're blurting their lines out or just plain shouting into the mics).
  • The green shoes Lou Ferrigno often wore in outdoor scenes, for obvious safety reasons, had a habit of being plainly visible in many episodes. (Particularly "Terror in Times Square" — Ferrigno joked that even the Hulk wouldn't go barefoot in Times Square in the '70s.)
  • Mrs. Maier from the pilot episode was burned in the face trying to rescue her son, but the burn mark is very clearly makeup. Of course, this could have been intentional for censorship purposes.
  • A scene in "Death In The Family" which Hulk carries the episode's Damsel in distress via jumping shows him about to make a jump (with the torn shirt still on), makes the jump (with it off), then makes it to the other side with the shredded shirt still on.
  • In the same episode, Hulk fights a bear, which you can clearly see Ferrigno's body paint getting on the bear's fur. Then he throws the thing in which it is tossed lifelessly in the air.
  • In the episode "A Child In Need" in which the Hulk punches an abusive father, you can see Ferrigno's body paint getting on the father's sleeves.
  • In "The Beast Within", the suit used for Elliot the gorilla looks ridiculously fake, barely resembling an actual gorilla.
  • In the second reunion TV movie, David has a beard, yet it inexplicably disappears whenever he becomes the Hulk with absolutely no explanation. It's especially noticeable as Lou Ferrigno does sometimes sport facial hair, so one wonders why he didn't just grow it out for his scenes.
  • The Hulk is said to be 7 feet, but it rarely shows. While Lou Ferrigno is in fact very tall at 6'5', which made it easy for camera tricks to make him look larger, it's quite obvious when he's in close proximity to people next to him that he's not as huge as the narrative paints him to be, making him look slightly less monstrous and more like a really tall green shirtless man on occasion.
• Stock Footage Failure: During the second Hulkout in "The Beast Within", brief scenes of the Hulk running in the pilot movie are recycled, which is painfully obvious due to the noticeable differences in his hair and eyebrow length.
• Spiritual Predecessor: With the sheer number of homages and callbacks to this series in adaptations such as novels, games, and both the 2003 and 2008 live-action films, one could make the argument this series serves as the ancestor of virtually all non-comic Hulk media in the 1980s onward. Certain elements even found their ways back into the comics as recently as the 2020s.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While Lou Ferrigno did most of the stunts himself, for some episodes he did in fact have a stunt double in fellow bodybuilder Manny Perry. Even with limitations of the time, despite Perry being three inches shorter than Lou and being of a completely different ethnicity (he's black while Ferrigno is a darker-skinned Caucasian), thanks to the immaculate work of the make-up team he managed to uncannily resemble him to the point that nobody watching would ever realize he wasn't Ferrigno in his scenes. Yes, this actually isn't Lou.◊
• The Woobie: Of all the characters who fit this, it's David FREAKIN' Banner. At young age, he loses his mother. He loses both of his wives, one by car accident and the other by disease. And how does the series ultimately end? He dies at the end of the series finale. Worse is that his remaining family will have to learn about it.