Marvel fans whenever people talk about the companies animated series there are a few shows that I see not being mentioned. One of those shows is the show that i'm about to take a look at the first two episodes of simply because this was a show that I grew up watching and it really does make me wonder why people don't mention this show despite having a really good cast and here is my review of the first two episodes of the 1996 animated series "The Incredible Hulk" with the episodes being called "Return Of The Beast Part 1" and "Return Of The Beast Part 2" enjoy Marvel and animation fans.
The plot of the two parter is Bruce Banner thinks he's finally come up with a way to rid himself of the Hulk and when he tries his experiment out at an army base under the watchful eye of General Thunderbolt Ross something goes wrong and so it's up to Bruce , Betty and Rick Jones to find what happend , who caused it and why. I'll admit that the plot of this two parter is perhaps it's weaker aspect since there's barely enough story to cover one episode let alone two as such I strongly believe that this story should have been told in one episode , not helping things is the fact that the story is pretty thin which makes it hard to work what the actual plot of the episode actually is.
Starring in the episodes are Lou Ferrigno as The Hulk , Neal McDonough as Bruce Banner and Genie Francis as Betty Ross . Also starring in the episodes are John Vernon as General Ross , Matt Frewer as The Leader , Mark Hamill as Gargoyle , The late Luke Perry as Rick Jones and Kevin Schon as Major Talbot and The Abomination. Yeah there really isn't that big of a cast list for these episodes literally every single person who appears in part 1 appear in part 2.
In terms of what I thought about the acting in the episode it was honestly so much better then what I thought it was going to be. Which for me is a good because I saw the cast list and thought that the acting was going to be pretty bad but no the acting at least in these two episodes is actually really good with all of the actors doing there best to make there roles there own which for this reviewer at least is a very good thing.
In a rather odd move there's no company listed as doing the animation for this show on the show's official IMDB page but after checking the IMDB page for both the episode I found that the animation at least these two episodes was done by Saerom Animation. I have no idea what Saerom Animation have worked on and after seeing these twp episodes I don't want to know because yeah the animation in these two episodes was at best OK.
On top of that there are really noticeable animation errors which no one bothered to check and fix with the most obvious being in the above picture where for one scene instead of having Bruce with brown hair he apparently died it blonde for a few moments. There are alot more errors in not only part 1 but also part all of which I feel could have been fixed if someone either at the animation studio or where ever the show was being produced actually did there job.
I like i'm assuming many other people had no idea that Mark Hamill was in this show and i'm not going to lie he was perhaps the biggest reason for me checking the show out this time around. He actually does I think a rather solid Russian accent altho to say it's an accent would be a bit of lie because all he does is heavily accented English with a Russian sounding voice but it's a really good voice in my opinion.
Fir some reason these two episodes don't deal that much with the relationship between Betty and Bruce which is a shame because the intro to the show makes that aspect seem really interesting. I would have liked it if either of the episodes devoted a small amount of time to the Betty and Bruce relationship since that's Bruce's way of transforming himself back to normal and so it would have been nice to get some insight about there relationship but hey we most likely get that in later episodes of the show of the first season or somewhere in second season.
These two episodes aired on September 8th 1996 and September 15th 1996 respectively with the episodes and thus the whole series airing on UPN. What I find to be weird is that from what I can gather the first season was pretty good and yet for some reason UPN thought that the first season was two dark and so for season ordered that She-Hulk be added to the main cast as a way to make the show seem more female friendly which to me is just dumb because surely making the show actually good would in turn make more people want to tune in it goes without saying but the show didn't get a third season with it's final episode airing on November 23rd 1997.
The villain of these two episodes and the show as a whole is The Leader who as mentioned is played by Matt Frewer. I honestly didn't mind the character in these two episodes since he has a good if somewhat confusing plan and is actually very proactive in getting done what let's the character down tho is we don't get that much time with him in these episodes with alot of the screen time being spent with Bruce and friends dealing General Ross.
Now then since this is an action show that does mean that we have to talk about the action that's in these episodes. To me the action in these episodes was honestly really good i'm not going to say that they were great because i'd be kidding myself but when you compare to alot of the things that are wrong with the episode the action comes of looking better plus it's always fun seeing Hulk smash things and blow things up.
Overall these two episodes are really good and are a really good representation of what to expect from the first season of this show. That being said these episodes are not even close to being perfect since they have alot of issues with them all of which i've covered in this review and what's worse is all of these issues are things that could have been fixed very freaking easily as such I these episodes get a combined score of a 5 out of 10 from me.
All images that I used in this review were gathered from either the official Hulk fandom wiki page , the Marvel Animated Universe fandom wiki page or Google Images. I honestly cannot say which is the best website to use for images either from these episodes or from this show because they all are roughly the same when it comes to quality which given that this show came out in the mid-nineties makes alot of sense.
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