Rolling Stone

Marvel Heroes: They Were Just Like Us

- A.S.

Rememberin­g the comics giant’s early stabs at bringing its characters to television

WHEN LOKI PREMIERES on Disney+ on June 9th, it will be the second live-action show involving a character from the Thor comics, and the latest entry in what’s actually the second attempt to build an expanded Marvel universe on television. The first effort at both came in a 1988 made-for-TV movie called The Incredible Hulk Returns. A revival of the long-running Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk series that had concluded six years earlier, the film doubled as an attempt to set up a new series around Thor. Played by Eric Allan Kramer, he was more hard-drinking Viking warrior than thunder god, appearing whenever nerdy Dr. Donald

Blake (Steve Levitt) needed help. The planned Thor spinoff never materializ­ed, maybe because the movie was so cheap and corny, yet the Hulk producers tried again a year later. In Trial of the Incredible Hulk, David Banner’s blind attorney, Matt Murdock (Rex Smith), turned out to be the crime-fighting man without fear Daredevil, battling evil in a flimsy black body stocking not dissimilar to what Charlie Cox wore years later in the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil. Again, the spinoff didn’t happen, and the final Bixby Hulk film eschewed superhero team-ups altogether. Nineties attempts to make TV series out of Marvel characters like Nick Fury (played by . . . David Hasselhoff?) and the mutant team Generation X didn’t get past the pilot stage. Probably for the best, given how clumsy and off-model these projects were, but they were all Marvel fans had to dream on for a long time. How far we’ve come.

 ??  ?? Ferrigno (left) and Kramer in peak Eighties mode
Ferrigno (left) and Kramer in peak Eighties mode

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