Being the Incredible Hulk doesn’t seem like it offers a lot of time for fun. The Hulk generally spends his days smashing buildings and yelling at the army to leave him alone. Then when he does calm down, he turns back into Bruce Banner whose idea of fun is to bury his head in a science textbook or figure out how to not change back into the Hulk.
So, it might be interesting to fans to discover that when he does have some free time, the Hulk is actually a big fan of pop culture – particularly one TV show about a group of enterprising men and women…
How the Hulk Revealed His Favorite TV Show
In the Damage Control miniseries, readers followed a construction company that specialized in cleaning up after superhero battles. In their third volume, the team began receiving calls alerting them to places where disasters were about to happen. One of those calls brought them to Yankee Stadium where the construction foreman got to enjoy some box seats – courtesy of the Incredible Hulk.
This Hulk was an intelligent, green-skinned version of the Hulk (known popularly as the “Professor Hulk”). Although easygoing, he had a temper, and Damage Control worried that the disaster that was about to happen would be caused by him. The Hulk, meanwhile, was only concerned with watching the ball game since he’d placed a large bet on his favorite team. Damage Control was able to convince the Hulk to leave, however, when they pointed out that if he did get into a fight it might screw up his bet.
Before the Hulk could leave, however, the superhero team the New Warriors showed up and threatened to cause trouble. Desperate, one of the Damage Control team members tried to calm everyone down by quoting William Shatner’s lines about overcoming animal instincts and the need to fight from Star Trek: The Original Series. Intrigued, the Hulk identified the exact episode the lines came from, revealing himself to be a huge Trekkie.
How Star Trek Prevented A Major Superhero Battle
Unbelievably, Hulk wasn’t the only Star Trek fan in the crowd. Half the New Warriors began sharing their favorite episodes with the Hulk, completely forgetting about the fight (apparently Hulk is a big fan of “The Enemy Within” and “City on the Edge of Forever”). They ended up doing nothing but talk about Star Trek for the next few pages, to the point where some of the characters started complaining about how boring everything looked with no fight scenes. Nevertheless, bloodshed was avoided and the New Warriors even invited the Hulk to a Star Trek marathon over the weekend.
Considering that Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for Star Trek involved people of different backgrounds putting aside their differences to work together, the issue was a hilarious tongue-in-cheek look at how Star Trek allows superheroes (arguably the easiest people to goad into meaningless fights) to calm their violent tendencies and hang out in the spirit of friendship. If even a giant green rage monster like the Hulk prefers geeking out over Star Trek to smashing buildings, perhaps there’s hope for us all.