The Complete Hulk Hogan | Under the CineMat Ep. 156: The Incredible Hulk TV Pilot (1977) Part 1

<v Speaker 1>This institute is private property.
<v Speaker 2>If you know anything about this creature, it is your
<v Speaker 2>duty to report that to the police.
<v Speaker 1>You're letting your imagination run away with you now. I
<v Speaker 1>have never seen this creature that you're talking about.
<v Speaker 3>Forgive me, doctor, but I am calling you a liar.
<v Speaker 1>Mister McGhee, mister McGee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't
<v Speaker 1>like me when I'm angry.
<v Speaker 4>The Lapsed Fan presents Under the Cinemat. Yeah, I love
<v Speaker 4>to talk film. I have come here to chew bubble
<v Speaker 4>gum and kick out.
<v Speaker 5>A great god.
<v Speaker 6>You're going nowhere under the cinemat, Get out, get out.
<v Speaker 4>I pick up guns. Bad things happen to people I
<v Speaker 4>don't like.
<v Speaker 1>Leave a movie to make.
<v Speaker 7>Can we all pull together here make movies?
<v Speaker 4>Well?
<v Speaker 6>The Complete Hulkogan continues on the other side of the
<v Speaker 6>lapsed pond. It could suggested that there is a before
<v Speaker 6>and after period for Terry Belea, a before Hulk after
<v Speaker 6>Hulk perhaps, and if what we are watching this week
<v Speaker 6>never happened, it might have been Kerry Van Eric or
<v Speaker 6>Jimmy Snooka, who was in the main event of WrestleMania
<v Speaker 6>one as the pilot for the Incredible Hulk TV series
<v Speaker 6>smashes its way under the Cinema.
<v Speaker 4>And it promises to be incredible. It Yes, it does,
<v Speaker 4>it absolutely does. As always, shout out to the Boss here.
<v Speaker 4>This is me interjecting myself into his Under the Cinemat
<v Speaker 4>agenda because I thought to myself, as we progressed with
<v Speaker 4>the complete Hulk Hogan, you have to know why the
<v Speaker 4>fuck the word Hulk was in the atmosphere as Terry
<v Speaker 4>comes back from Cocoa Beach and tries to make another
<v Speaker 4>run at the wrestling business. Yes, and why?
<v Speaker 6>And you know the thing is, you know, I'm actually
<v Speaker 6>disappointed in myself for not having thought of it first,
<v Speaker 6>because I should have. In all of my things and
<v Speaker 6>preparing the Under the Cinemat side of things, I was
<v Speaker 6>like this, like when you dropped it on me, it
<v Speaker 6>was like it was a no brainer. I was like, oh, fuck, yeah,
<v Speaker 6>whatever I was playing on doing out the window because
<v Speaker 6>this is way more important. And and I just I
<v Speaker 6>was like, I can't believe I didn't think of this,
<v Speaker 6>Like this was a hit me was it was?
<v Speaker 4>The years lined up? Yes, it wasn't like Luf Rigno's
<v Speaker 4>Incredible Hope on the air for ten years. When when
<v Speaker 4>Terry Boleo ves to dial it up in the wrestling business,
<v Speaker 4>it was the exact same.
<v Speaker 6>Year, and and and the this The Incredible Hulk was
<v Speaker 6>the TV series, well the TV well, I mean it all,
<v Speaker 6>it all coincides. But you know, we're gonna get in
<v Speaker 6>the whole history of everything, but it's it's really it
<v Speaker 6>was a huge hit. It was a very very very
<v Speaker 6>big hit. And and if it wasn't a hit, it
<v Speaker 6>really makes you wonder what would have happened it really does.
<v Speaker 8>You know.
<v Speaker 4>I'm so glad you said that way, because that's always
<v Speaker 4>part of a wrestling story is there's always something in
<v Speaker 4>the broader culture that, you know, be it a movie,
<v Speaker 4>like when we when we do the Art of War Games,
<v Speaker 4>you know, you've got to understand that movie, well one
<v Speaker 4>was it again, it was it's the Mad Max Mad
<v Speaker 4>Max movies. Right. You have to understand that like these bookers,
<v Speaker 4>these people who give wrestlers names are are just stealing
<v Speaker 4>from what's actually working in popular culture all day. Right,
<v Speaker 4>And if we're going to do the complete Hulkgain, we
<v Speaker 4>need to steep ourselves as only under the cinemat can.
<v Speaker 4>And I hope you all enjoy this in the Solar System.
<v Speaker 4>We don't have access to our EP tier on Patreon
<v Speaker 4>and thus don't get to revel in the genius that
<v Speaker 4>is Boss's UTC project. This is the kind of thing
<v Speaker 4>you're missing over there, and we're glad to make it
<v Speaker 4>available because it's going to be part of complete hulkogaan
<v Speaker 4>cannon to free listeners this time and.
<v Speaker 6>Course, and honestly, I'm going to open it up to
<v Speaker 6>certain things too, like you know, in terms of some
<v Speaker 6>of his more general no on like this is why
<v Speaker 6>why I was so very much why I was willing
<v Speaker 6>to definitely put this onto the main feed is because
<v Speaker 6>it does really tie into into the progression of Hull
<v Speaker 6>Cogan Terry Boley as hul Cogan, and and there are
<v Speaker 6>going to be some other.
<v Speaker 4>One, but I'm gonna have to go relook now.
<v Speaker 6>I have to kind of re examine my whole timeline
<v Speaker 6>of things, because I got to see if there are
<v Speaker 6>any other things that really kind of that were a
<v Speaker 6>little more important into into the career of Hull Cogan
<v Speaker 6>and not just a little side dance if you will,
<v Speaker 6>like a lot of the side dances, they're gonna still be,
<v Speaker 6>you know, on Patreon but but if there's any more
<v Speaker 6>really inspirational, creative pieces of work that he did, I
<v Speaker 6>mean it's it's we got to do it this way,
<v Speaker 6>hands down, right.
<v Speaker 4>I Mean, everybody talks about the movie that's seminal for
<v Speaker 4>Hull Cogan is Rocky three, and of course that stands
<v Speaker 4>to reason it absolutely he went into vern and they
<v Speaker 4>put turned a babyface, They forced him babyfit us the
<v Speaker 4>fans because you such a big star in that movie.
<v Speaker 4>But this to me is equally important in terms of
<v Speaker 4>a movie that allowed Hulk Cogan to become Hulk Cogan.
<v Speaker 4>Because yeah, it's just as we get into it, as
<v Speaker 4>we'll go for the next legs of the total non
<v Speaker 4>total hul Coken Journey, complete Hulk Coggin Journey, you're going
<v Speaker 4>to find that, like it is ripped straight from what
<v Speaker 4>the Incredible Hulk was and more significantly what Loo Forarigno,
<v Speaker 4>who I'm so delighted you're going to be able to
<v Speaker 4>get into in utc style. We're gonna get a full backdrop, yes,
<v Speaker 4>who came into the public consciousness as part of Arnold
<v Speaker 4>Swartzenegger's Pumping Iron, which might be a candidate for what
<v Speaker 4>you're talking about, even pre dated this in that.
<v Speaker 6>We are going to talk to We're going to talk
<v Speaker 6>a bit about about Pumping Iron and.
<v Speaker 4>Maybe sure, when we looked at that T shirt from
<v Speaker 4>Whitey and Terry's gym that they opened next to the
<v Speaker 4>Anchor Club in Cocoa Beach, I mean, right there, it's
<v Speaker 4>basically a fact simile of Arnold Swartzenegger's signature pose from
<v Speaker 4>the Pumping Iron movie poster, right exactly, So that this
<v Speaker 4>is all part of why Hulk was the man for
<v Speaker 4>the moment, because body building through Pumping Iron and through
<v Speaker 4>Luff for Rigno, who became known to the public through
<v Speaker 4>Pumping Iron and then became the incredible Hulk on this
<v Speaker 4>incredibly successful television adaptation just just skyrocketed into the public
<v Speaker 4>consciousness and it was like and Hulk became a shorthand
<v Speaker 4>Hulk became, you know, a term that everybody knew what
<v Speaker 4>you were talking about when you use the word Hulk exactly.
<v Speaker 4>And as I'm sure we'll get into, the comic had
<v Speaker 4>been around for a long time before this, yes, but
<v Speaker 4>it was really the launch of Luff Forigno as Hulk
<v Speaker 4>on national television. Yes, that made you know, made it
<v Speaker 4>a no brainer what you'd call Terry bolea.
<v Speaker 6>Exactly, You're absolutely right, and we're gonna we are going
<v Speaker 6>to go back. We're going to go back because and
<v Speaker 6>actually in things that I have planned down the line,
<v Speaker 6>it actually is is a great way to also just
<v Speaker 6>kind of to launch that rocket, because we are going
<v Speaker 6>to talk about because there would be no Hulk, there
<v Speaker 6>would be no incredible Hulk TV series without stan Lee. Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>or maybe that's not the case, maybe you don't necessarily
<v Speaker 6>need Stanley, but that's more down the line, because well,
<v Speaker 6>let me put it, let me put it this word
<v Speaker 6>to start off with Stanley, this is what Stan's brother.
<v Speaker 6>So there's a there's a great biography, more recent biography
<v Speaker 6>since he passed away by Abraham Josephine Risman, who wrote
<v Speaker 6>the Vince Nickman Ringmasters book. Yes, yes, well, uh, she
<v Speaker 6>or they, I apologize, I didn't actually look up the pronouns,
<v Speaker 6>I know, but anyway, uh wrote this book before the
<v Speaker 6>Vince book about stan Lee.
<v Speaker 4>It is and.
<v Speaker 9>Uh.
<v Speaker 6>In the book, she talked to Stan's brother Larry, who
<v Speaker 6>said that quote Stan had different sides to him. I
<v Speaker 6>feel like I'm almost talking about Charles Foster Kane, who
<v Speaker 6>was he what here we go, what was he?
<v Speaker 4>Here we go?
<v Speaker 6>What was he like? Yes, it depends on who you
<v Speaker 6>talk to at what moment.
<v Speaker 4>And you know, folks, this is why this is a
<v Speaker 4>job for under the cinemat because if we just threaded
<v Speaker 4>in the story of Lufeignow an Incredible Hulk into the
<v Speaker 4>complete hull coogin continuum, you know, we would have touched
<v Speaker 4>on it. We would have, you know, understood where it
<v Speaker 4>stood culturally, and but it would have been just a backdrop,
<v Speaker 4>just you know, twenty five percent of one episode of
<v Speaker 4>this whole thing. But that's not that's not what the
<v Speaker 4>lapsed fan was put on this earth to do. The
<v Speaker 4>lapsed fan was put on this earth to say, whoa
<v Speaker 4>rabbit hole, Let's get the fucking mining equipment out, because
<v Speaker 4>we're not stopping until we hit plasma, until we hit
<v Speaker 4>fucking the molten core of the earth. Yes, And so
<v Speaker 4>we go off, we go off to the side, and
<v Speaker 4>by the time it's over, not only will you understand
<v Speaker 4>Incredible Hulk, you'll understand that the full story behind everyone
<v Speaker 4>who made the Incredible Holk thing.
<v Speaker 6>You you really will, you really will, least I hope
<v Speaker 6>you will. Anyway, I mean, there is I mean, there's
<v Speaker 6>a man for the job, is what I'm saying. I're
<v Speaker 6>the man for the job. I appreciate that. H Further
<v Speaker 6>in the book, by the way, I want to say,
<v Speaker 6>I don't know if it's do you know if it
<v Speaker 6>is it Reisman or Reesman? I always said Reesman. Maybe
<v Speaker 6>it's Reesman. I don't know. The often false, the often
<v Speaker 6>false story stan Lee told about himself and his work
<v Speaker 6>was that of the American dream. Sure, success earned through
<v Speaker 6>hard work, optimism, and staying true to oneself. But as
<v Speaker 6>we know from talking to Brian Blair, the American Dream
<v Speaker 6>didn't want to see Terry Boleya become Hulk.
<v Speaker 4>But the true story of his life is that of
<v Speaker 4>the American reality. Don't even fuck what are you trying
<v Speaker 4>to do to me this early in the process.
<v Speaker 6>Here success one in no small part through nepotism, corner cutting, dissembling,
<v Speaker 6>and stealing. Here I am thinking, we're getting the minutia
<v Speaker 6>of Lufigno where he was born. In ten minutes in
<v Speaker 6>you're hitting you with the American reality. You damn fucking straight.
<v Speaker 6>Stan Lee Stanley Martin Lieber Correct was born December twenty eighth,
<v Speaker 6>nineteen twenty two. In New York City. His parents, Jacob
<v Speaker 6>nicknamed Jack and Celia, both Jewish immigrants from Romania. So
<v Speaker 6>what I could find Stan's mom Celia. So Celia arrived
<v Speaker 6>to the US first with her parents. This is where
<v Speaker 6>we would hit the However, that yeah, sounds in Romania.
<v Speaker 6>We're gonna I guess, yeah, probably, I don't know, my my,
<v Speaker 6>my anthing would go towards more towards Poland and have
<v Speaker 6>a polka playing, but you know whatever. She arrived December
<v Speaker 6>twenty sixth, nineteen oh one, and they would they would
<v Speaker 6>reside in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But this
<v Speaker 6>was long before it was the nostalgic home of Cat's Delhi.
<v Speaker 6>This was a rough neighborhood at this point, very rough
<v Speaker 6>and a very Jewish neighborhood. And they were but they
<v Speaker 6>weren't happy with fresh off the boat immigrant Jews. They
<v Speaker 6>were like no, no, no no. Jack arrived Ellis Island
<v Speaker 6>on August sixth, nineteen oh six. He was trained as
<v Speaker 6>a saddle maker in Romania, but when he came when
<v Speaker 6>he came to New York, he was now a dress cutter,
<v Speaker 6>like cutting dresses like clothing. Wow, saddle maker to dress cutter.
<v Speaker 4>And coming to New York and suddenly becoming an Irishman Irish.
<v Speaker 6>Or at least becoming coming into the professional wrestling world
<v Speaker 6>and becoming an Irishman.
<v Speaker 4>That's what I'm saying.
<v Speaker 6>So I found something I found So I was trying
<v Speaker 6>to find, you know, trying to find as much as
<v Speaker 6>I could on ancestry regarding that the family lineage. And
<v Speaker 6>one thing I thought was kind of interesting was that
<v Speaker 6>in nineteen twenty, according to the Census, I found that
<v Speaker 6>Jack Lieber was listed as a border at the Schwartz household,
<v Speaker 6>so not a family related but this David Schwartz was
<v Speaker 6>in the dress business, so I'm made the assumption that
<v Speaker 6>Jack probably worked for him.
<v Speaker 4>So that was interesting.
<v Speaker 6>I don't know, it just felt because I didn't get
<v Speaker 6>the I don't think he came with family.
<v Speaker 4>I think he came on his own. And you know,
<v Speaker 4>it's weird.
<v Speaker 6>It's weird how sometimes on I mean, it's obviously whatever
<v Speaker 6>people are able to put up and whenever, whatever the
<v Speaker 6>people on ancestry are able to find. But it is
<v Speaker 6>fascinating how with some people you can find so much information,
<v Speaker 6>but then with other people you can find almost nothing,
<v Speaker 6>and then they're the ones in the middle and this
<v Speaker 6>was kind of in the middle one for me, like
<v Speaker 6>in terms of finding stuff about them. But he was
<v Speaker 6>naturalized as a citizen December fifth, nineteen twenty one, which
<v Speaker 6>was just over a year before stan was born. And
<v Speaker 6>stan he grew up obviously in depression era America. And
<v Speaker 6>this is one of those this is part of honestly,
<v Speaker 6>if you ask me, and no one just said this outright,
<v Speaker 6>but based on what I've learned about stan Ley, this
<v Speaker 6>is one of the reasons why he tells a different
<v Speaker 6>narrative than he does. Then he may have lived because
<v Speaker 6>he grew up in depression era America and he saw
<v Speaker 6>his dad like he even though he was a very
<v Speaker 6>good he was a very good dress cutter, and he
<v Speaker 6>was in demand and that kind of job paid very well.
<v Speaker 6>It was the depression and the guy couldn't find work
<v Speaker 6>all the time. And he actually says more often than
<v Speaker 6>not his dad was out of work. So this is
<v Speaker 6>what he's this is what he's witnessing as a kid,
<v Speaker 6>all right, He's witnessing, you know, probably a miserable dad.
<v Speaker 6>And and what's interesting too is that he doesn't go
<v Speaker 6>into much detail outside of his uh, you know, he
<v Speaker 6>wrote this kind of was considered a quasi autobiography Excelsior
<v Speaker 6>in two thousand and two. And but you know, if
<v Speaker 6>you look at interviews if he I've listened to a
<v Speaker 6>bunch of interviews when his parents are brought up, he
<v Speaker 6>doesn't really talk about them that much.
<v Speaker 4>I thought Ulkoken ripped off Lou Furigno. You're telling me
<v Speaker 4>Hulk Hogan ripped off stan Lee in terms of talking
<v Speaker 4>about his real upbringing.
<v Speaker 6>I'm telling you that this episode of Under the Cinemat
<v Speaker 6>is loaded with carnies. Look, folks, look at Stanley's face. Yes,
<v Speaker 6>look at an interview with him. Look, okay, here's k fabe.
<v Speaker 6>He's k fabe all fucking day.
<v Speaker 4>Look at the man.
<v Speaker 6>And let me tell you something. Okay, why the sunglasses,
<v Speaker 6>stan what are you hiding?
<v Speaker 7>Hiding?
<v Speaker 4>I want us to see, right, you want you want
<v Speaker 4>us to see your Paul Hayman esque shifty eyes when
<v Speaker 4>you're telling a half truth. You should you should watch.
<v Speaker 6>There's this great interview of him and and of it's
<v Speaker 6>with the Television Academy. All right, Television Academy. Oh god,
<v Speaker 6>what a what a treasure trow It is a treasure trove.
<v Speaker 6>Talk about doing incredible, yes, just having the work that
<v Speaker 6>needs to be done to preserve what moves people. It
<v Speaker 6>is unbelievable. Hundreds of hours of interviews with with people
<v Speaker 6>involved in television, which is amazing because it's like it's
<v Speaker 6>not even like, think about Stanley. I wouldn't consider Stanley
<v Speaker 6>to be a television guy, but so much of his
<v Speaker 6>work has been translated to television, so he kind of is.
<v Speaker 6>And he's listed as a producer most of the time.
<v Speaker 6>You know, he gets a producer credit for a bunch
<v Speaker 6>of shit. So yeah, he he you know, he he
<v Speaker 6>qualifies to be interviewed and it's amazing. But you watch
<v Speaker 6>that interview and he's almost too confident and too comfortable
<v Speaker 6>with what he's saying.
<v Speaker 4>In mainstream and likely nine yes.
<v Speaker 6>Yes, he knows like he he's he's more or less
<v Speaker 6>established his narrative. I mean, it definitely changed, but he
<v Speaker 6>more or less established his narrative at that point in
<v Speaker 6>that interview. You can tell, you know, there there are
<v Speaker 6>things that he says and he is he is all
<v Speaker 6>about just portraying this idea of American And I'm not
<v Speaker 6>trying to take anything away from Stanley. I'm not trying
<v Speaker 6>to do anything away from Stanley. There are I I
<v Speaker 6>firmly believe that there are that that that he is
<v Speaker 6>an important part I think, you know. But what what
<v Speaker 6>Reesman says in in their book is what I find
<v Speaker 6>great is that his success was not because he had
<v Speaker 6>the most talent. It was because he was the most ambitious. Yes,
<v Speaker 6>that's where he sell huh what what.
<v Speaker 4>Nothing? I'm talented? That is what I am. Sheer talent,
<v Speaker 4>sheer t luntuous individual. I was talking about Hogan. But
<v Speaker 4>you make a good point. Yeah, that's true, both of them.
<v Speaker 4>So this is what he wrote in his book about
<v Speaker 4>his parents, he said, because again this is when he
<v Speaker 4>finally opened up about them. He wrote, quote, I always
<v Speaker 4>felt sorry for my father. He was a good man,
<v Speaker 4>honest and caring. He wanted the best for his family,
<v Speaker 4>as most parents do, but the times were against him.
<v Speaker 4>At the height of the depression, there were no jobs
<v Speaker 4>to be had. Seeing the demoralizing effect that his unemployment
<v Speaker 4>had in his spirit, making him feel that he wasn't
<v Speaker 4>that he just wasn't needed, gave me a feeling I've
<v Speaker 4>never been able to shake. It's a feeling that the
<v Speaker 4>most important thing for a man is to have work
<v Speaker 4>to do, to be busy, to be needed today. I
<v Speaker 4>never feel more fulfilled than fulfilled than when I am
<v Speaker 4>working on a number of projects at once, which is
<v Speaker 4>really nuts, because I'm always wishing I had more free time. Still,
<v Speaker 4>when I'm busy, I feel needed and that makes me
<v Speaker 4>feel good. There you have it instance psychiatry and didn't
<v Speaker 4>cost either of us to send. Wow, it explains whole
<v Speaker 4>Coven's whole thing too, I mean, explains why till the
<v Speaker 4>bitter end he's doing media tours when he he can
<v Speaker 4>barely breathe.
<v Speaker 6>Exactly exactly, he continues. I always wished my mother and
<v Speaker 6>father would lavish as much love on each other as
<v Speaker 6>they did on my younger brother Larry and me. They
<v Speaker 6>were both parallel, right, I was going to keep doing that.
<v Speaker 4>No, do it?
<v Speaker 6>Please listen, there are way too many similarities. They were
<v Speaker 6>both good, loving parents, and I think the only thing
<v Speaker 6>that gave them any pleasure was their children. My brother
<v Speaker 6>and I always regretted that fate had not been kinder
<v Speaker 6>to them and that they couldn't have had happier lives.
<v Speaker 6>They must have loved each other when they married, but
<v Speaker 6>my earliest recollections were of the two of them arguing,
<v Speaker 6>quarreling incessantly. Almost always it was over money or the
<v Speaker 6>lack of it. I realized that at an early age,
<v Speaker 6>how the specter of poverty, the never ending worry about
<v Speaker 6>not having enough money to buy groceries or to pay
<v Speaker 6>the rent, can cast a cloud over a marriage. I'll
<v Speaker 6>always regret the fact that by the time I was
<v Speaker 6>earning enough money to make things easier for them, it
<v Speaker 6>was too late.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah.
<v Speaker 6>Now, so Stan, he paints a sort of like a
<v Speaker 6>tragic but loving portrait of the parents.
<v Speaker 4>Right.
<v Speaker 6>Larry, the younger brother, on the other hand, he would
<v Speaker 6>call he called his father cold, cryptic and more concerned
<v Speaker 6>about what other people were thinking. And the Kenny Wheeler
<v Speaker 6>I would say, so, yes, yeah, he also would say.
<v Speaker 6>Sam would say later on too, like basically no matter what. Again,
<v Speaker 6>you know, as he got older he became a little
<v Speaker 6>more open about certain things, and as I think anyone does,
<v Speaker 6>really and he basically implied that no matter what Stan did,
<v Speaker 6>whatever he accomplished, even you know, before the guy died
<v Speaker 6>or whatever, it just seemed like his his father never
<v Speaker 6>considered him to be successful. Wow, never considered him to
<v Speaker 6>be success And I and honestly like, to me, if
<v Speaker 6>I'm putting on my my non psychiatry degree, hat I
<v Speaker 6>would it sounds like a very insecure and resentful father.
<v Speaker 6>And to me like, I don't, I don't can't fully
<v Speaker 6>blame him. Obviously, the circumstances were out of his control,
<v Speaker 6>like the depression, what are you supposed to do in
<v Speaker 6>that in that situation, But at the same time he
<v Speaker 6>it clearly bothered him to see his son more successful
<v Speaker 6>than he was.
<v Speaker 4>Tremendous you know that what I that's what I see too,
<v Speaker 4>and I and then and then and then that resentment,
<v Speaker 4>you know, as if you're the son or you're the
<v Speaker 4>child of a parent that resents you, even if they
<v Speaker 4>don't outwardly say it, maybe they did. We don't.
<v Speaker 6>Again, we don't know all the details. But you feel
<v Speaker 6>that energy, You feel that, just as damn fucking right
<v Speaker 6>not to say he did do that, but he felt.
<v Speaker 6>I'm sure he felt that. A fear of that taking
<v Speaker 6>shape is part of what held him back. Of course,
<v Speaker 6>of course, you know you gotta you can't you get
<v Speaker 6>to think about all of them, you know, even no
<v Speaker 6>matter how, no matter how now uh much we give
<v Speaker 6>any of the McMahon children a hard time. You gotta
<v Speaker 6>you gotta think about the fact that they're also in
<v Speaker 6>the shadow of this goliath. This absolutely and I don't
<v Speaker 6>mean it in the positive way, but just awesome in
<v Speaker 6>terms of just sheer uh size, and and accomplishment. Goliath
<v Speaker 6>like you also see you see how he you know,
<v Speaker 6>whatever he did to be successful. But you also see
<v Speaker 6>all these awful, awful, awful things that that man has done,
<v Speaker 6>all the awful things. And don't tell me they don't
<v Speaker 6>know about it. Don't tell me they're not fucking waist
<v Speaker 6>deep in it.
<v Speaker 4>Mm hmm.
<v Speaker 6>It's these are these are troubled individuals, troubled individuals and
<v Speaker 6>uh uh on on top of that, Celia, Stan's mom standing,
<v Speaker 6>Larry's mom very very enamored with Stan, Yes, and he
<v Speaker 6>Stan called her his biggest fan. And I think to
<v Speaker 6>myself too, Okay, So then you're watching your wife act
<v Speaker 6>more lovingly. Presumably this is speculation, but I'm just putting
<v Speaker 6>the pieces together in my mind. You see your son,
<v Speaker 6>you see your wife being more loving towards your son
<v Speaker 6>than perhaps you. Resentment right there, sure, sure resentment and Larry. So,
<v Speaker 6>Larry was born nineteen thirty one, Stan was nine, and
<v Speaker 6>he admits that he pretty much lived his life in
<v Speaker 6>Stan's shadow even then, which was enforced in no small
<v Speaker 6>part by his mother. This is a clip from the
<v Speaker 6>A and E Bygraphy I think was ninety eight or
<v Speaker 6>ninety nine or two thousand, somewhere around there they did
<v Speaker 6>any Dini biography of Stan Lee. And this is Larry
<v Speaker 6>Larry Lieber talking about all that.
<v Speaker 1>I remember in terms of Stan and myself.
<v Speaker 2>She always spoke so highly of Stan talking about him,
<v Speaker 2>and at the time I used to play a lot
<v Speaker 2>and run. She said, why don't you read books the
<v Speaker 2>way your brother does and be literate and be like Stan?
<v Speaker 2>And I had this feeling that Stan was a wonderful
<v Speaker 2>I remember she told me once when he was a
<v Speaker 2>child that one of the school teachers said about him something,
<v Speaker 2>he reminds me of our President Roosevelt. Though that's the
<v Speaker 2>hell of a thing I was. My older brother was
<v Speaker 2>President Roosevelt, and as I said, I didn't really know him,
<v Speaker 2>so I think I built up a bit of a
<v Speaker 2>hero worship there.
<v Speaker 10>I've always regretted that I was so much older than he,
<v Speaker 10>because it was a little tough for us to play together.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 4>He was just an infant.
<v Speaker 10>He's a great guy, but I got to know him
<v Speaker 10>as well as I would have wanted.
<v Speaker 6>To think about that. He's a great guy, but I
<v Speaker 6>never got to know him as much as I would
<v Speaker 6>have wanted to.
<v Speaker 4>It's just weird to call your brother a great guy.
<v Speaker 4>It is like it's a guy you knew at worked
<v Speaker 4>for two years.
<v Speaker 6>It is exactually like it's a or it's like someone
<v Speaker 6>right that you kind of lost touch with over the years, right,
<v Speaker 6>you know. I mean, it's just that that whole to me,
<v Speaker 6>that whole thing was very, very telling. That little moment
<v Speaker 6>there just said so much to me when I was
<v Speaker 6>listening to it originally. It sounds a lot like how
<v Speaker 6>Hulk talks about Alan.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah. Yeah, I mean they ended up obviously worshiping at
<v Speaker 4>the shrine of Terry Pete and Ruth, but not so.
<v Speaker 4>It took a while. It took, at least to hear
<v Speaker 4>Hogan tell it, Hulk Hogan took a lot longer for
<v Speaker 4>them to come around that he was the son that
<v Speaker 4>they really loved the most.
<v Speaker 6>Yep, yeah, well, I mean, come on, Kenny, Ruth loves Kenny.
<v Speaker 6>I don't care what anyone says. Wow, Ruth loves Kenny.
<v Speaker 6>But you know, like I sat there and listened to that,
<v Speaker 6>and the question that went through my mind is, well,
<v Speaker 6>why didn't you try to get to know him better?
<v Speaker 6>Not necessarily, I understand the idea of being almost a
<v Speaker 6>decade a part. You know, when you're kids, that's a
<v Speaker 6>whole different story. I totally understand that it's hard to
<v Speaker 6>be able to get to know somebody when you know
<v Speaker 6>they're five and you're fifteen. Obviously that's the case. But
<v Speaker 6>when you're when you're thirty five and they're twenty five,
<v Speaker 6>that's a different story. Now, you know, it's like you're
<v Speaker 6>you're closer in age than you were back then. Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>even though it's ten still ten years. It's like in
<v Speaker 6>terms of naturation, Yeah, you know, it's like you like,
<v Speaker 6>why didn't you get to know him?
<v Speaker 7>Then?
<v Speaker 4>What's what's going on there? Stan? I don't know. I
<v Speaker 4>don't know.
<v Speaker 6>But and here there's another example here too. So he
<v Speaker 6>always says he doesn't have a lot of memories of
<v Speaker 6>when he was younger, and the family moved around quite
<v Speaker 6>a bit, and at one point they were living up
<v Speaker 6>in Washington Heights in Manhattan, and in that TV Academy interview,
<v Speaker 6>he shared this story about him riding a bicycle across
<v Speaker 6>the GW Bridge.
<v Speaker 10>After a while we moved uptown to Fort Washington Avenue
<v Speaker 10>in a one hundred and seventy fifth Street, and it
<v Speaker 10>was a nice neighborhood. And the two things I remember
<v Speaker 10>There was a theater called the Low's one seventy fifth Street,
<v Speaker 10>and there was a fellow who played an organ. In
<v Speaker 10>those days to bring people into the theaters, they eva
<v Speaker 10>had free Dish Night, where anytime you'd go, you'd get
<v Speaker 10>free dishes and you could build up a set of
<v Speaker 10>dishes by going often enough. Or they'd have somebody playing
<v Speaker 10>an organ. And I forget this guy's last name. His
<v Speaker 10>first name was Lou and they advertised him as Lou
<v Speaker 10>So and so at the Magic Organ or the Magic Console,
<v Speaker 10>I think they called it. And as a young kid,
<v Speaker 10>I was so impressed with this guy because the organ
<v Speaker 10>was almost as big as the theater. It was enormous,
<v Speaker 10>and he would sit there playing these songs and I
<v Speaker 10>never forgot that. I don't know why they don't have
<v Speaker 10>organs today in movies. And let's see the other thing
<v Speaker 10>I remember about that neighborhood. It was near the George
<v Speaker 10>Washington Bridge, which goes from Manhattan to New Jersey Big Bridge.
<v Speaker 10>But when I was about ten or twelve years old,
<v Speaker 10>I used to ride my bike over the bridge to
<v Speaker 10>the Jersey side because on the Jersey side there was
<v Speaker 10>a little hot dog stand with a big sign that
<v Speaker 10>said the world's longest hot dog twelve inches. It was
<v Speaker 10>twice the size of a regular hot dog, and it
<v Speaker 10>was a dime, and a regular hot dog was a nickel. Now,
<v Speaker 10>I don't know why I didn't say to myself, I
<v Speaker 10>could have stayed in Manhattan and bought two regular ones
<v Speaker 10>for a dime and it would have been the same thing.
<v Speaker 10>But it was such a triumphant feeling to ride across
<v Speaker 10>the bridge and no, I'm meeting the world's biggest hot dog,
<v Speaker 10>and it's to show you what a shallow mind I have.
<v Speaker 10>Those are the two things that stick in my mind.
<v Speaker 6>I okay, take any take away from that, not really,
<v Speaker 6>no ones that are appropriate.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, good.
<v Speaker 6>So something that he didn't say there, but he's I've
<v Speaker 6>read him word that he said other places. I've seen
<v Speaker 6>him say it in other interviews that nobody loved a
<v Speaker 6>bicycle more than he loved his. Larry says, I don't
<v Speaker 6>remember stand loving a bicycle that much. I don't remember
<v Speaker 6>riding that often. You know, Larry, I'll say, you know,
<v Speaker 6>nine years younger. You know, you don't know who knows.
<v Speaker 6>I'm not saying I'm not saying either one is right.
<v Speaker 6>But I also have seen that it is suggested that
<v Speaker 6>this quote love of the bicycle is more a storytelling
<v Speaker 6>technique in that he is constantly trying to escape the
<v Speaker 6>life he was born into. That he's riding off on
<v Speaker 6>the George W.
<v Speaker 4>Bridge. I was going to say something similar, what are
<v Speaker 4>you peddling from right exact? Why is it so enticing
<v Speaker 4>to like make that truck across the bridge.
<v Speaker 6>Exactly exactly leaving? Oh, you know, I don't know all
<v Speaker 6>these little these little things. It's kind of like interesting.
<v Speaker 6>And he you know, we talked about the movie theater
<v Speaker 6>in that clip. He loved media, loved media, comic strips,
<v Speaker 6>radio shows, going to the movies, he loved reading. And
<v Speaker 6>he apparently he rarely didn't have a magazine or a
<v Speaker 6>book in his hand at all times. And while you're
<v Speaker 6>while I was reading these these chapters and whatnot, and
<v Speaker 6>these passages in the book True Believer, that's the that's
<v Speaker 6>the Uh.
<v Speaker 4>I don't know if I said that before, but that's
<v Speaker 4>the book.
<v Speaker 6>About That's Reisman's book about about Stanley is called True Believer. Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>you really do gather that this poverty, like he he
<v Speaker 6>like it really became a chip on his shoulder, really
<v Speaker 6>became this chip on the shoulder, and that he would,
<v Speaker 6>you know, he would always talk about how his life
<v Speaker 6>was shitting and how his life was great. Yeah, you know,
<v Speaker 6>back then it was shooting. Now it's great, and it's
<v Speaker 6>a before and after thing. It's it's not you know,
<v Speaker 6>it's it's like it was shooting, then I got rich
<v Speaker 6>and famous and in my life was great.
<v Speaker 4>You know.
<v Speaker 6>There's just that kind of there's there's like a very
<v Speaker 6>I mean, it kind of reminds me of Vincent Away
<v Speaker 6>and the idea of you know, it was like his
<v Speaker 6>life was shooting when he was in North Carolina and
<v Speaker 6>then his life was great kind of was shooting North Carolina,
<v Speaker 6>you know. But still it's like, I don't know, there's
<v Speaker 6>there's I wanted. I always want to dig more into
<v Speaker 6>the mind of people who who really can't and I'm
<v Speaker 6>not saying that they didn't have a bad upbringing. They
<v Speaker 6>they're very probably did, but I'm always fascinated as to
<v Speaker 6>what where, Like, I want to know more. I want
<v Speaker 6>to know more. I want to I want I want details.
<v Speaker 6>And from what I gathered, Stan wouldn't give anybody details, right.
<v Speaker 6>He attended the DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx
<v Speaker 6>and this fucking school, man, do you know this high
<v Speaker 6>school at all? It's like a fucking sponge for successful people.
<v Speaker 6>Sounds like Robins High School visa virest. No, seriously, it
<v Speaker 6>fucking is so graduates of them. Fellow comic legends Batman
<v Speaker 6>creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Basketball hall of Famer
<v Speaker 6>Nate Archibald, TV's Don Adams, former president of Columbia Pictures,
<v Speaker 6>David Begelman, legendary playwright and screenwriter Neil fucking Simon, Journalist
<v Speaker 6>David Steinberg, Musical theater pioneer Richard Rogers, actor Judd Hirsch,
<v Speaker 6>Boston Celtics radio play by play announcer Johnny Most, funny man,
<v Speaker 6>Tracy Morgan, film director George Cocoorr. Another Broadway legend, fucking
<v Speaker 6>Frank Lesser, design fucking legend, Ralph Lauren, Bernard fucking Herman,
<v Speaker 6>Fucking Patty Chayavsky and rapper A boogie would to Hoodie.
<v Speaker 4>Do you know him? Yeah, I als know where I
<v Speaker 4>fucking know him.
<v Speaker 6>I know him because I had to do what for
<v Speaker 6>my kids fucking cheerleading program. It was like a fundraiser
<v Speaker 6>type fucking thing. I had to I had to do.
<v Speaker 8>U.
<v Speaker 6>I had to, h you know, do concessions at a
<v Speaker 6>fucking at a hoodie boogie would a Hoodie concert. And
<v Speaker 6>I've never seen more drunk and just completely off the
<v Speaker 6>chain twenty somethings than that second concert.
<v Speaker 4>Oh my god. It was like, I mean, there was
<v Speaker 4>so much vomit, so much vomit. It was so awful.
<v Speaker 4>Do you have to have the hoodie covering their mouth?
<v Speaker 4>I know exactly.
<v Speaker 3>And uh.
<v Speaker 6>Also, by the way, the graduate TV legend and Gary Marshall,
<v Speaker 6>who Stan shared a funny story about that when he
<v Speaker 6>is on a TV Academy interview.
<v Speaker 10>I have a friend Gary Marshall, the television director producer.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, see pal, we all know who Gary Marshall is. Okay,
<v Speaker 6>all right, thanks, we get it.
<v Speaker 10>Good writer and so forth. And he was a he
<v Speaker 10>went to Clinton also, so we have that in common.
<v Speaker 10>And it's the funniest thing I was with him the
<v Speaker 10>other day. And whenever he introduces me to somebody, instead
<v Speaker 10>of saying, oh, this is stan Lee, he did Spider Man,
<v Speaker 10>or this is stan Lee. He went to Clinton with me.
<v Speaker 10>That's the biggest thing to good old Gary.
<v Speaker 6>It's a guy from a league of their own, right
<v Speaker 6>right right right, And you know he produced a bunch
<v Speaker 6>of he produced like the Happy Days and whatever. One
<v Speaker 6>little small detail though, is that stan graduated in nineteen
<v Speaker 6>thirty nine and Gary Marshall graduated in nineteen fifty two,
<v Speaker 6>so they really don't go to school together. So he
<v Speaker 6>said this is my classmate from him. So okay, hey, fine,
<v Speaker 6>I'm not saying anything wrong with it. I'm just saying,
<v Speaker 6>you know, I'm just pointing out details, that's all. Mike
<v Speaker 6>Graham was obsessed with the Hulkan. He was like the
<v Speaker 6>whole like high school four years out of.
<v Speaker 4>Him brother, exactly. You know what Stanley the worker, either
<v Speaker 4>worker Daddy e the worker Stanley forgetting Gary Marshall or
<v Speaker 4>remembering depending on how you want to spin it, you know.
<v Speaker 6>And I mean this should come as no surprise. But
<v Speaker 6>you know, stan Lee he has needs right right right?
<v Speaker 6>He has needs and Reeseman insinuates that Stanley got this
<v Speaker 6>apartment in the West Village. It was so he uh he,
<v Speaker 6>I'm jumping ahead of moment. I'm going to go back.
<v Speaker 6>But like he was dating a girl. He went to
<v Speaker 6>City College for like six months, then moved into a
<v Speaker 6>hotel and and but he got this apartment I think
<v Speaker 6>to be away from his parents, but also to he
<v Speaker 6>Reeseman calls.
<v Speaker 4>Him a hound with the ladies. A hound.
<v Speaker 6>Well, okay, I mean, and there are stories. Sadly we
<v Speaker 6>don't really touch upon that for this, but Stanley is
<v Speaker 6>coming back under the cinemat.
<v Speaker 4>That's a promise. Yeah, all right, for sure. And we're
<v Speaker 4>going to talk about his his his needs, but I
<v Speaker 4>want to put it right here that he has them.
<v Speaker 4>And man, there are stories about his needs. Wow, okay
<v Speaker 4>down the line. Wow, I didn't know this at all.
<v Speaker 4>Oh yeah, an insatiable appetite. Yes, yes, listen, carnal Oh
<v Speaker 4>he needs to be satisfied, all right, Jhn Wilson, all right,
<v Speaker 4>damn fucking right. Don Wilson needed it too? All right?
<v Speaker 6>There are there are certain men out there, okay, who
<v Speaker 6>have no names here, who have just a lust for
<v Speaker 6>for just carnal pussy.
<v Speaker 4>Yes, okay, what you're saying makes sense so far.
<v Speaker 6>Right, and and and you know what, they're gonna go
<v Speaker 6>to whatever lengths that they can't to get it all right,
<v Speaker 6>to fill the void.
<v Speaker 4>I think you're trying to think, you're trying to tell
<v Speaker 4>me that Stanley fall squarely in that categ He does, Yes,
<v Speaker 4>he does so again.
<v Speaker 6>After after graduation from ICEOL, we spent he worked a
<v Speaker 6>number of odd jobs.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, he all of docs. He worked at a bank.
<v Speaker 4>He worked.
<v Speaker 6>Exactly exactly he was and he was he was going
<v Speaker 6>through the you know, some of the clients files and stuff,
<v Speaker 6>and he realized how much comic book makers were working
<v Speaker 6>were making and so he was like, you know what, brother,
<v Speaker 6>are getting on that business.
<v Speaker 4>Sorry, we're going to comic We're going to comic circuit. Yep.
<v Speaker 6>But this is when he worked as an office boy.
<v Speaker 6>And this is another clip from the TV Academy interview
<v Speaker 6>of him working as a as an office boy.
<v Speaker 10>I was an office boy at the second largest trouser
<v Speaker 10>manufacturer in America. It was down on twenty seventh Street
<v Speaker 10>and Broadway, and it was terrible.
<v Speaker 1>It was a big place.
<v Speaker 10>They had the whole floor and they had millions of
<v Speaker 10>salesmen or I don't know what they were, guys who
<v Speaker 10>sat in cubicles, little cubby holes, writing reports or sales
<v Speaker 10>slips or something all day long. And there was another
<v Speaker 10>office boil. So I was the second one hired, and
<v Speaker 10>whenever they wanted something like if they wanted a glass
<v Speaker 10>of water or they wanted someone to sharpen a pencil,
<v Speaker 10>they would yell boy, and whichever one of us was closer,
<v Speaker 10>I had to come running. And I resented the fact
<v Speaker 10>that these it looked to me like a million guys
<v Speaker 10>on that floor. They never took the trouble to learn
<v Speaker 10>either his name I don't remember his name either, or
<v Speaker 10>my name.
<v Speaker 1>It was always boy.
<v Speaker 10>And I probably shouldn't say this, but they let me
<v Speaker 10>go just before Christmas. And I was doing a much
<v Speaker 10>better job than the other guy, because he was a
<v Speaker 10>little bit of a loafer. Whenever they'd yell boy, I
<v Speaker 10>would run to do it, and he was just kind
<v Speaker 10>of min his own business. But he had been there
<v Speaker 10>longer than me, and they didn't give a damn. They
<v Speaker 10>didn't know one of us from the other, and they
<v Speaker 10>had to let somebody go. So like a week before Christmas,
<v Speaker 10>they told me I'd have to leave and or I
<v Speaker 10>was burned up. So they had some big boxes. They
<v Speaker 10>were like coffins, big crates, and they kept what they
<v Speaker 10>called cutting tickets in them, and they were big stiff
<v Speaker 10>sheets of oak tag and they were crowded in these crates,
<v Speaker 10>and each cutting ticket, I guess, had the history of
<v Speaker 10>every pair of trousers that they made.
<v Speaker 1>They were the records of them.
<v Speaker 10>One of my jobs was to file them all in
<v Speaker 10>the crates, and every night I went home with my
<v Speaker 10>nails bleeding because trying to put those things in, you know.
<v Speaker 4>Oh.
<v Speaker 10>In another thing, I was getting paid for eight hours
<v Speaker 10>a day, but I had to come to work an
<v Speaker 10>hour and a half earlier to be at the post
<v Speaker 10>office to pick up two sacks of mail and walk
<v Speaker 10>those sacks of mail four blocks to their office. I
<v Speaker 10>didn't get paid for that time. So when they told
<v Speaker 10>me I was fired, I was so mad. One night,
<v Speaker 10>I walked into where the cutting ticket I shouldn't say this,
<v Speaker 10>I'll go to jail. I walked into where the cutting
<v Speaker 10>tickets were, where I had spent all that time bloodying
<v Speaker 10>my fingers putting them all in those tight cotton cartons,
<v Speaker 10>and I turned them all upside down, and I scattered
<v Speaker 10>the sheets on two or three of them. I felt
<v Speaker 10>so good. I think even if I had gone to jail,
<v Speaker 10>it would have been worth it. And this is the
<v Speaker 10>first time I've ever told about my criminal passion.
<v Speaker 4>YEA, you're not gonna get aarrested stand for that, but
<v Speaker 4>I appreciate it.
<v Speaker 6>I thought I was gonna kill somebody, and we build
<v Speaker 6>it up so much, and all it did was fucking
<v Speaker 6>start over the papers. Like it's like it's like, you know,
<v Speaker 6>you get you're so pissed off, your threatening everybody. Then
<v Speaker 6>all you do is you break a fucking pencil. Like
<v Speaker 6>didn't do anything like you made it. You made it
<v Speaker 6>inconvenient for maybe half a day. That's it. You should
<v Speaker 6>have torn him up or burned him, right, you know,
<v Speaker 6>then then you're talking. That's some sweet fucking revenge there,
<v Speaker 6>But scattered him gives a shit.
<v Speaker 4>Either way.
<v Speaker 6>Eventually he gets a job working at this new publishing
<v Speaker 6>company called Timely Comics, which would eventually become more of
<v Speaker 6>a comics. This was in nineteen thirty nine, so he
<v Speaker 6>was seventeen seventeen at the time. For some reason, he
<v Speaker 6>graduated high school at sixteen. I don't understand I couldn't
<v Speaker 6>really find much information about that.
<v Speaker 4>I don't know.
<v Speaker 6>I mean, part of me thinks that that it follows
<v Speaker 6>the suit of these kind of This is more of
<v Speaker 6>his storytelling him that he dropped out.
<v Speaker 4>Of school at sixteen.
<v Speaker 6>Sure, sure, I don't know, like you know, he claims
<v Speaker 6>he graduated. Now you get to note at this point,
<v Speaker 6>comics were emerging as this popular medium. You know, Superman,
<v Speaker 6>Batman already been published. So it was it was, you know,
<v Speaker 6>we gotta jump on the bandwagon. And it was founded
<v Speaker 6>by this guy, Martin Goodman, who was a pulp magazine publisher.
<v Speaker 6>And you know he he put an ad out around
<v Speaker 6>this time for an assistant job, supposedly and h this
<v Speaker 6>was this was answered by Stanley Lieber and resulted in
<v Speaker 6>him getting a job. You know, there we have it
<v Speaker 6>right there, stan Lieber, good old fashioned American hustle, right,
<v Speaker 6>hard work and being on top of things, you know,
<v Speaker 6>way to the top.
<v Speaker 5>Right.
<v Speaker 4>Sounds like it to me so far, except not entirely
<v Speaker 4>of the truth. Is he going to discover stero, start
<v Speaker 4>selling them.
<v Speaker 6>Started using them to advance in the comic market. Stick
<v Speaker 6>a needle in your ass, you get better in comics. No,
<v Speaker 6>that's not exactly the entire story, because during one interview, sadly, I,
<v Speaker 6>you know they don't. I want to know more of
<v Speaker 6>the sources that Resman used because sometimes they're not there
<v Speaker 6>in the index, some of them, most of them are.
<v Speaker 6>But there's one in this one interview. I'm really fucking
<v Speaker 6>bummed that there's no I couldn't find the actual interview.
<v Speaker 6>But according to Reisman, in an interview in like the
<v Speaker 6>eighties or whatever, Stan Lee told this same story about
<v Speaker 6>answering the ad. He tells a story all the time.
<v Speaker 6>But the interviewer stopped and was a little confused, and
<v Speaker 6>they said, well, wait a minute, wasn't wasn't Martin Goodman,
<v Speaker 6>the founder and publisher of Timely Comics. Wasn't he a
<v Speaker 6>relative of viewers?
<v Speaker 4>Stan?
<v Speaker 6>Wasn't he related to you? And indeed, Martin Goodman was
<v Speaker 6>married to Stan's first cousin on his mother's side, Ida Solomon,
<v Speaker 6>And later he would admit too in his in his
<v Speaker 6>uh In that in Excelsior, the pseudo autobiography, that his
<v Speaker 6>uncle Robert also worked at Timely Comics and may have
<v Speaker 6>helped him get hooked up with this job. Mhmm, Stan, Stan,
<v Speaker 6>what is it stan right? Which one?
<v Speaker 4>Did you? Was it the good old fashioned American hustle
<v Speaker 4>or did you use your familis's father basically run the whole.
<v Speaker 6>Damn fucking right, all right? Did mommy put in a
<v Speaker 6>phone call huh to uh to Uncle Rob.
<v Speaker 4>And say are you guys away? How long are you
<v Speaker 4>guys away? How are you guys awaking? How are you renovating?
<v Speaker 4>You said they were renovating. Mm hmmmm.
<v Speaker 6>So Martin Goodman too, he's fucking. This guy's a fucking
<v Speaker 6>This guy's a this guy's a trip. I wish, I
<v Speaker 6>wish we could do a whole fucking thing on him.
<v Speaker 6>He's a fucking mess.
<v Speaker 4>But he was.
<v Speaker 6>He was pretty much all about milking the success of others. Sure,
<v Speaker 6>that's what he was about when it came to his
<v Speaker 6>comic business. And we're actually gonna turn a true believer
<v Speaker 6>for a moment. As publishing historians Michael J. Vascello and
<v Speaker 6>Blake Bell put it, quote for Goodman successment jumping and pumping,
<v Speaker 6>jumping on a successful trend and pumping multiple similar titles
<v Speaker 6>with the least possible investment through the pipeline as fast
<v Speaker 6>as possible in order to rake in as much profit
<v Speaker 6>as possible. They point out that Goodman set up more
<v Speaker 6>than eighty quasi fictitious companies over the years, shady publishing
<v Speaker 6>entities that could buy and sell their intellectual property from
<v Speaker 6>one another when one or a few went to bankrupt
<v Speaker 6>or got into legal trouble.
<v Speaker 4>Also known as the National Wrestling Alligance.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, don't tell me they're not fucking taking notes, Okay,
<v Speaker 6>off of this fucking guy. As Vassalo and Bell say,
<v Speaker 6>Goodman quote put more effort into building his corporate web
<v Speaker 6>of shell publishers than he did into building a strong brand,
<v Speaker 6>which right there reveals the priorities of the quick buck,
<v Speaker 6>lowbrow publishing mindset of the nineteen thirties. Oddly enough, the slender,
<v Speaker 6>prematurely white haired, generally quiet Goodman would be the first
<v Speaker 6>to cop to this not so generous assessment.
<v Speaker 4>Quote.
<v Speaker 6>If you get a title that catches on, then add
<v Speaker 6>a few more. You're in for a nice profit, he
<v Speaker 6>once told the Literary Digest. Tremendous fans are not interested
<v Speaker 6>in quality, he said on another occasion, by way of
<v Speaker 6>justification for this mindset, we have yet another cutthroat line
<v Speaker 6>from Goodman, quote, this field is full of piratesquote. This
<v Speaker 6>was the business psychology milieu that Stan entered while he
<v Speaker 6>was still in his impressionable teenage years. When the lad
<v Speaker 6>went to work for Goodman, the latter had only just
<v Speaker 6>started to publish comic books, having launched Marvel Comics number one.
<v Speaker 6>That was the title, not the company.
<v Speaker 4>This was, you know.
<v Speaker 6>That was the comic series, Marvel Comics number one through
<v Speaker 6>Shell publisher Timely in August nineteen thirty nine. Timely became
<v Speaker 6>the name most closely associated with Goodman's early comic publishing,
<v Speaker 6>although the books were actually published under a variety of
<v Speaker 6>headings prior to the lines renaming in the early nineteen sixties,
<v Speaker 6>time Lee Atlas Manvus even on a few occasions Marvel
<v Speaker 6>whatever you wanted to call it. The comics operation was
<v Speaker 6>a near instant smash for Goodman. Marvel Comics number one
<v Speaker 6>had introduced the company's first superheroes, the human Torch sub
<v Speaker 6>Mariner Superhero comics. What human What do you mean human torch?
<v Speaker 4>Dude? From the very beginning, we're talking human Torch. Did
<v Speaker 4>you no wonder he's stole? He's still more than a
<v Speaker 4>secredible hulk. From there, get the Torch, the whole fucking thing.
<v Speaker 4>I love how he says there's pirates everywhere, and then
<v Speaker 4>they would breathlessly pursue Hulk Cogan for pirrating the name.
<v Speaker 4>You're damn fucking right. Eight decades later, You're absolutely right.
<v Speaker 6>Superhero Comics, first introduced in the form of National Superman
<v Speaker 6>the previous year, had abruptly become one of the most
<v Speaker 6>popular items in the cultural marketplace, and Goodman wanted to
<v Speaker 6>secure his.
<v Speaker 4>Foothold, So Superman right from the beginning. Then Yes, Wow, Yep, yep, yep.
<v Speaker 4>Marvel Comics renamed Mystery Marvel Comics, and the second issue,
<v Speaker 4>for no extent extant reason, had been produced through a
<v Speaker 4>partnership with Funnies Incorporated a third a third party Hey
<v Speaker 4>love that She's gonna say it does not say a
<v Speaker 4>third party Hey, No fucking one.
<v Speaker 6>Third party Funnies big fan of that, right, a third
<v Speaker 6>party packaging vendor that produced comic books, and seeing the
<v Speaker 6>success that this series brought him, I'm just replaying third
<v Speaker 6>party Hey, in my mind is over and over again
<v Speaker 6>right now.
<v Speaker 4>That's just ask a farmer about that. I support third party, hey, big,
<v Speaker 4>and you know, I think that's that's the way you
<v Speaker 4>gotta go. When you're a farmer from mister ed. That's
<v Speaker 4>catch Oh good.
<v Speaker 6>He enticed one of the Packager star writer artists, Joe Simon,
<v Speaker 6>to come up bored and work for him directly. The
<v Speaker 6>young man, lanky and in his mid twenties, had been
<v Speaker 6>born Heimi Simon to an English and an American jew
<v Speaker 6>in Western New York. He was confident and charismatic in
<v Speaker 6>addition to being remarkably good at juggling assignments while cranking
<v Speaker 6>out work for funnies in corporate and he simultaneously acted
<v Speaker 6>as an editor at Comics Packager Fox Feature Syndicate. It
<v Speaker 6>was there that Simon met another twenty somethingter writer artist
<v Speaker 6>with a prodigious work ethic. The squat, serious, serious man's
<v Speaker 6>name was Jacob Kurtzberg, yet another Jewish name that would
<v Speaker 6>eventually be discarded in favor of something a little more
<v Speaker 6>establish establishment dish. In this case, the nam de gore
<v Speaker 6>became Jack Kirby. Kirby was born to Jews of going
<v Speaker 6>to his whole thing. But yes, so I bring those
<v Speaker 6>up because Joe Simon and Jack Kirby essential not only
<v Speaker 6>to the beginning stages here of Marvel, but also for
<v Speaker 6>later on.
<v Speaker 4>It becomes.
<v Speaker 6>One of the biggest controversies is the squaring off between
<v Speaker 6>Stanley and Jack Kirby, which we're going to get into
<v Speaker 6>why that all started here, but suffice to say their
<v Speaker 6>initial contribution to the Timely Comics Enterprise is the third
<v Speaker 6>of their big three superheroes, Captain America. They're the creators
<v Speaker 6>of Captain America and now about six so they Captain
<v Speaker 6>America debuted in May of nineteen forty one, and by
<v Speaker 6>the end of the year, Simon and Kirby are out
<v Speaker 6>of the company. Why do you think that is? Do
<v Speaker 6>you think it does have to do with money? I
<v Speaker 6>will say that it doesn't have to do with the
<v Speaker 6>jump Hip. They did Jump Ship, but they realized, you know,
<v Speaker 6>they they they were supposed to get twenty five percent
<v Speaker 6>of the sales of Captain America. But they did it
<v Speaker 6>on a handshake deal with Martin Goodman again pro wrestling.
<v Speaker 6>Why do you do a handshake deal.
<v Speaker 4>Folks, because you're not going to fucking exactly don't want
<v Speaker 4>auditing rights.
<v Speaker 6>And it makes me wonder why smart people give in
<v Speaker 6>to a handshake deal. I take no man at his word.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, well an extent today, you know, I don't even
<v Speaker 4>know if the laws were as robust or on contract
<v Speaker 4>law back then as they would become. Anyway, that's a
<v Speaker 4>good point too. You're hard pressed to drive a hard
<v Speaker 4>bargain and you're getting started like that. Perhaps so, but
<v Speaker 4>that's not why they left, though, I believe it or not.
<v Speaker 4>That's not why they left. They left because they couldn't
<v Speaker 4>get dates on the fucking NBA World Champion exactly right,
<v Speaker 4>because he's always in New York and it's right, well,
<v Speaker 4>they're in New York too, got me there? Yeah, Now,
<v Speaker 4>So what they did was they started doing freelance work
<v Speaker 4>for National Comics aka the future DC Comics, and one
<v Speaker 4>day down the road, at some point, the rest of
<v Speaker 4>the Timely Comic staff they approach Simon and Kirby and
<v Speaker 4>they're like, what the fuck.
<v Speaker 6>We know what you're doing. We know that you're fucking
<v Speaker 6>uh you know, what do you call it? Double dipping? Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>dear double dipping with fucking National over there. What's going on?
<v Speaker 6>What's the dizz bro?
<v Speaker 4>And you know they're wondering who fucking who was it?
<v Speaker 4>Who who told on them? A rap? Fuck?
<v Speaker 6>Well, Joe Sion didn't find out until Vince was deposed
<v Speaker 6>that there was, Hogan. I told him exactly, Joe Simon, uh,
<v Speaker 6>I believe that. You know, it's the comic business was
<v Speaker 6>a very very small business at the time, and so
<v Speaker 6>everybody knew everything. So it was likely that, you know,
<v Speaker 6>they could have found out any way possible. Jack Kirby, well,
<v Speaker 6>he went to his grave hating stan Lee, yep, because
<v Speaker 6>he was nothing less than one one hundred percent convinced
<v Speaker 6>that Lee had ratted them out to Martin Goodman. Love it, hated, hated, hated,
<v Speaker 6>and so they left and went to work. This is
<v Speaker 6>the verse Dona in the story here. Yeah, and after
<v Speaker 6>they leave, Goodman is forced to promote stan Lee to
<v Speaker 6>editor and he's just nineteen years old at the time,
<v Speaker 6>and then Pearl Harbor happened, and the United States at
<v Speaker 6>war in Europe and in Japan. Now in it's no
<v Speaker 6>secret that stan Lee he enlisted in the Army. He
<v Speaker 6>served during World War Two. He says in interviews that
<v Speaker 6>he felt guilty sitting around writing comic books and that
<v Speaker 6>he needed to join the fight, and basically said, you know,
<v Speaker 6>the idea was that you know, if you're not if
<v Speaker 6>you're not doing your best, if you're not trying to
<v Speaker 6>go out there and fight for this, you know, fight
<v Speaker 6>this war. Then you're a fucking asshole and you're a
<v Speaker 6>coward and you're a bitch. Right, very patriotic guy, except
<v Speaker 6>he didn't join the army until November of nineteen forty two. Sure,
<v Speaker 6>so you know, I gotta kind of get stuff done
<v Speaker 6>before I served my country. Point, I got a bunch
<v Speaker 6>of st all I gotta do, dude, you know, got
<v Speaker 6>to get those stories out first, right. So he does
<v Speaker 6>basic training in New Jersey and he served in He
<v Speaker 6>served in the Playwright Division of the art That's where
<v Speaker 6>they placed him. In the Playwright Division of the Army,
<v Speaker 6>alongside We've talked to protect We talked about this, We
<v Speaker 6>talked about this a couple of years ago. Frank Capra
<v Speaker 6>also part.
<v Speaker 4>Of this division.
<v Speaker 6>Ok, yeah, you know when he made all those movies,
<v Speaker 6>you know, those propaganda movies. Also in the playwright division
<v Speaker 6>Charles Adams, the you know, writer of the creator of
<v Speaker 6>the Adams Family, and Doctor Seuss also in the playwright Division.
<v Speaker 6>The Official Military Manual described the Playwright Division as follows.
<v Speaker 4>Quote.
<v Speaker 6>The division rights scenarios and scripts for theatrical, radio, or
<v Speaker 6>motion picture productions for entertainment or instruction of military personnel
<v Speaker 6>or for publicity purposes.
<v Speaker 4>So you said military personnel. I thought you were reading
<v Speaker 4>a WWE creative job ad.
<v Speaker 6>Civilian experience in writing or adapting scripts for scenarios for
<v Speaker 6>state radio, stage or motion pictures required. We have offices
<v Speaker 6>in Stanford, New York Global Entertainment.
<v Speaker 4>We are servicing a range of verticals. The the the
<v Speaker 4>the playwright division of the of the Army is a
<v Speaker 4>multiple and the multiple generational entertainment conglomerate that provides lateral
<v Speaker 4>and collateral UH opportunities for as well as parts of
<v Speaker 4>the back. That's the president ever opened like a like
<v Speaker 4>a live theater ballet nick just w W now it
<v Speaker 4>is ballet.
<v Speaker 6>I know they should have like a You imagine if,
<v Speaker 6>like all of a sudden, the w W E Theatricals
<v Speaker 6>presents the Nutcracker.
<v Speaker 4>Now we are ballet ww W Theatricals little redundant there events,
<v Speaker 4>a little less theatricality might do us all good. The
<v Speaker 4>WWE Dance department where we do ballet much like the
<v Speaker 4>in ring department as well. Oh, actually, we actually have
<v Speaker 4>quite a bit of experience at the LAYA. You look
<v Speaker 4>at the nature of what we do and if you
<v Speaker 4>look at look at the nature.
<v Speaker 2>What we do.
<v Speaker 4>We have two people who are doing a dance, requiring
<v Speaker 4>each other to participate in the other maneuvers, synchronize, make
<v Speaker 4>it appear organic without anyone ever getting hurt. We do lifts,
<v Speaker 4>we do twirls, We do all of it. The WWE
<v Speaker 4>is a synchronized dancing organization principally headquartered in Stanford, Connecticut,
<v Speaker 4>with offices in We are a synchronized syndicated dancing corporation
<v Speaker 4>synchronized dancing on syndicated television, the television network of over
<v Speaker 4>one and forty affiliates across North America. WWE Superstars of Dance,
<v Speaker 4>Well he tried body building, might as well body Stars
<v Speaker 4>Superstars of Dance, Dance Stars and Dancing with the Stars.
<v Speaker 4>Dancing with the superstars you know you know that came
<v Speaker 4>up when Dancing with the Stars. Check out WE just
<v Speaker 4>but no TV network wanted to buy it. Ww Dance
<v Speaker 4>Dance Challenge every Saturday after Superstars of Dance, ww All
<v Speaker 4>American Dance. That's how he gets out of the taxes
<v Speaker 4>on the sports taxes it ww all American Ballet. See
<v Speaker 4>that's how you use AI, go create, go pull down
<v Speaker 4>and all American wrestling ad from back in the day
<v Speaker 4>and just replace wrestling with ballet and have Vincent ballet.
<v Speaker 6>That's it, perfect ballet menia.
<v Speaker 4>You get the gist.
<v Speaker 11>He's a lapsed fan wrestling podcast with Jack and and
<v Speaker 11>JP soo.
<v Speaker 12>Fan wrestling podcast.
<v Speaker 6>After the war, goes back to work. But you know what,
<v Speaker 6>he wants to do something else. Okay, Stanley's done. Because yes,
<v Speaker 6>although after the war comics started to go not not
<v Speaker 6>be as popular as they as they were beforehand, but
<v Speaker 6>even if they even through the popularity, you got to
<v Speaker 6>remember something, much like professional wrestling, comics is not considered
<v Speaker 6>prestige employment, right, all right, it is bottom of the
<v Speaker 6>barrel rubbish.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, that's so important to remember. That's why there's so
<v Speaker 4>much in common between comics. Why cons there's wrestlers there.
<v Speaker 6>Right, I mean, the con come on totally like this
<v Speaker 6>is this is an embarrassment, okay, correct to the point
<v Speaker 6>where people change their names stan Lee, same thing, no exception.
<v Speaker 6>This is from the TV Accademy interview.
<v Speaker 10>All right, Stanley Martin Lieber a perfectly lovely normal name,
<v Speaker 10>and I wish I had never changed it because stan
<v Speaker 10>Lee is such a silly name, but I'm stuck with it.
<v Speaker 12>How did that?
<v Speaker 4>How did that come about?
<v Speaker 12>The change?
<v Speaker 10>When I started doing comics, nobody had any respect for
<v Speaker 10>comics in those days, they were considered literature for very
<v Speaker 10>young kids or for stupid adults.
<v Speaker 4>And he just said stupid adults. I mean, he's okay,
<v Speaker 4>just like wrestling is just espress at us, exactly right.
<v Speaker 4>There's no fucking difference. Only an idiot would think it's real, right,
<v Speaker 4>exactly real enough to get invo.
<v Speaker 6>It or even better, even more importantly, only an idiot
<v Speaker 6>would know that it's not real and still watch bing Go.
<v Speaker 10>Do them for a little while and get some experience
<v Speaker 10>and then get into the real world. And I thought,
<v Speaker 10>one day I'll be a big time writer. Maybe I'll
<v Speaker 10>write the great American novel. And I don't want my
<v Speaker 10>name on these silly comics. So I just took my
<v Speaker 10>first name, stan Lee, and I cut it in two
<v Speaker 10>and I signed stan Lee. But what happened was I
<v Speaker 10>stayed with the comics for years, and after a while,
<v Speaker 10>when I get married, my life got very confusing because
<v Speaker 10>we bought our house in the name of stan Lee Lever,
<v Speaker 10>but we'd open a charge account in a store in
<v Speaker 10>the name of stan Lee, and in some other store
<v Speaker 10>we'd have the name Stanley Lieber. And sometimes we'd have
<v Speaker 10>to give our name to a store and we'd say
<v Speaker 10>Stanley Lieber and they'd look and they'd say, no, no,
<v Speaker 10>that's not your name, and oh, try stan Lee, and
<v Speaker 10>they'd look at us like we're a bunch of crooks,
<v Speaker 10>you know, we're using And it got so complicated that
<v Speaker 10>we finally decided well, by then, more people know me
<v Speaker 10>as stan Lee than Stanley Lieber. So to simplify our life,
<v Speaker 10>I changed my name to stan Lee, which is such
<v Speaker 10>a silly name. And very often people that I meet
<v Speaker 10>they say what's your name? And I say stan Lee
<v Speaker 10>and they say Stanley.
<v Speaker 4>What so?
<v Speaker 10>Now I'm thinking of changing it back again to stan Lee.
<v Speaker 10>What so when they say that, I could say, gee,
<v Speaker 10>how do you know that?
<v Speaker 4>To the point I just changed my name to Warrior
<v Speaker 4>exactly withes of wrestling, all.
<v Speaker 6>Right, like this is it. They're all the same. No
<v Speaker 6>one wanted to be associated with comics, No one knows,
<v Speaker 6>No one cares about Stanley Lieber. As soon as you
<v Speaker 6>walk through that front door. As soon as you walk
<v Speaker 6>through that front door, all anybody cares about?
<v Speaker 4>Is stan Lee?
<v Speaker 13>Right?
<v Speaker 4>Exactly? What?
<v Speaker 3>Like?
<v Speaker 14>Who?
<v Speaker 6>The only people who know him is Stanley Lieber are
<v Speaker 6>the people inside the house. He leaves the house. He's
<v Speaker 6>stan Lee. He's the gimmick Carney exactly. I'm a real
<v Speaker 6>human being, no a facsimile of a human being, a
<v Speaker 6>similar damn fucking straight, let's go. And not only that,
<v Speaker 6>were you ready for this? This is great? This is
<v Speaker 6>from a twenty twenty piece back in nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 6>It's a great, great little piece they did, because not
<v Speaker 6>only did he change the name, but you also don't
<v Speaker 6>want to tell people where you're working, right, all right?
<v Speaker 10>Was there ever a time early in your career then
<v Speaker 10>when you go to a cocktail party and somebody would
<v Speaker 10>ask you, well, what do you do?
<v Speaker 1>And you'd have to say, all my red comic books
<v Speaker 1>are yes.
<v Speaker 10>Really, very often, in the early days before Marvel, I'd
<v Speaker 10>be at a party with my wife and somebody would
<v Speaker 10>come over it just as you say what do you do?
<v Speaker 10>When I'd get a little bit nervous and I'd say, well,
<v Speaker 10>I'm a writer, and they say, oh, really, what do
<v Speaker 10>you write? Well, I still had a couple of options.
<v Speaker 10>I'd say I write magazine stories, and I'd start to
<v Speaker 10>walk away, but what magazines? Well I still had a chance,
<v Speaker 10>and I would say, well, children's magazines, which ones. At
<v Speaker 10>some point I was pinned down and it had to
<v Speaker 10>be comic books. And then oh, I see and they
<v Speaker 10>drift away.
<v Speaker 4>Sounds a little too close to home. My goodness, does
<v Speaker 4>it ever podcast about what?
<v Speaker 14>Well?
<v Speaker 4>Sports and entertainment?
<v Speaker 6>I gotta make I'm gonna make this train. Oh so
<v Speaker 6>I taught sports and entertainment.
<v Speaker 3>Oh?
<v Speaker 6>Really, Like, well, what do you what do you guys do? Well,
<v Speaker 6>you know it's about professional wrestling. I no, no, no,
<v Speaker 6>I'm sorry before that. Oh oh that's great. Let me
<v Speaker 6>know the name of them? What do you I want
<v Speaker 6>to know what it is? So you guys are that
<v Speaker 6>I'm looking at and like, do you get out their phone?
<v Speaker 6>Oh it's a it's called the Lapse Fan and it's
<v Speaker 6>about professional wrestling. Oh, phone goes away.
<v Speaker 4>Or inevitably eleven minutes later. So when when the subject
<v Speaker 4>has been changed, they come back to it. So how
<v Speaker 4>many like followers do you go? And then it's so
<v Speaker 4>you guys like make money doing this? Yep? Oh my god,
<v Speaker 4>it's like, just please leave me alone. It's like, you know,
<v Speaker 4>like you don't want to.
<v Speaker 14>You know.
<v Speaker 6>Then then when if it gets to be that point,
<v Speaker 6>I have to go through the whole fucking spiel and
<v Speaker 6>try to make a sound more legitimate and talk about
<v Speaker 6>talk about you and say, well, you know, my, my,
<v Speaker 6>you know he's been mister robot Orange, his new bride,
<v Speaker 6>he's a valuedictorian of college.
<v Speaker 4>Trust me, it's nothing to do with our share passion
<v Speaker 4>for pro wrestling. It's really just a we're two brilliant
<v Speaker 4>fucking stars in the constellation. That just oh my god.
<v Speaker 4>Let me let me ask you a question, though, Budy,
<v Speaker 4>you know it's fake, right what.
<v Speaker 6>Since one? I thought they changed it? My mom told
<v Speaker 6>me they changed it. I still maintained to this day.
<v Speaker 6>But that's the best response when someone says it's fake.
<v Speaker 6>You see, No, a year and a half ago they
<v Speaker 6>changed that because of the popularity of.
<v Speaker 4>Uf SAE fucking talked about that somebody's face. No, no, no,
<v Speaker 4>they changed it, so well, no, it's wrong now now
<v Speaker 4>it's real, though, I understand what you're talk about. No,
<v Speaker 4>it don't like that anymore. You must not have watched
<v Speaker 4>in a while. Cody Wroats is actually submitting p for
<v Speaker 4>different roles, and he's actually he's an agent for consideration
<v Speaker 4>the Rose Agency. Yeah, the only thing he ever submits
<v Speaker 4>is his resume.
<v Speaker 6>In his head shot. I wonder I want to know.
<v Speaker 6>I get, I really want to know. I mean, obviously
<v Speaker 6>you know you're not, but you know you got to
<v Speaker 6>you do have to have some kind of a some
<v Speaker 6>kind of a picture. I do wonder if he you know,
<v Speaker 6>I imagine that when he's when he is submitting, when
<v Speaker 6>when agents are submitting something. I mean, granted again, it's
<v Speaker 6>he's at a different level, so he's not like, you know,
<v Speaker 6>not like submitting his head shot to all these different things.
<v Speaker 6>But I imagine he's going to have a picture out there
<v Speaker 6>that's not wrestling related.
<v Speaker 4>Right.
<v Speaker 6>I want to know what his actual non wrestling publicity
<v Speaker 6>headshots look like.
<v Speaker 4>Right, That's what I want to know, the ones where
<v Speaker 4>he wants to be taken seriously. Is an act as
<v Speaker 4>an actor? I asked, I have a question for you.
<v Speaker 4>Besides both being wrestlers, what do Masato Tanaka and Cody
<v Speaker 4>rhodesv in common? What they're both constantly taking headshots?
<v Speaker 15>Oh fuck, okay, oh jesus, I guess they could also
<v Speaker 15>be submitting headshots too for that matter.
<v Speaker 4>Ha oh god.
<v Speaker 6>He mentioned his wife in there in that last one.
<v Speaker 6>And yeah, they they met in nineteen forty six, December
<v Speaker 6>of nineteen forty six. He was supposed to, I guess
<v Speaker 6>the story goes, he was supposed to be meeting another
<v Speaker 6>young woman at a party, or to go to a party,
<v Speaker 6>and there he hit a snag. And again this from
<v Speaker 6>the A and E biography where he and his wife
<v Speaker 6>share their little their little story.
<v Speaker 8>One person he man at a party didn't walk away.
<v Speaker 8>She was actress writer Joan Clayton Boucock. They met by
<v Speaker 8>accident and also by faith.
<v Speaker 4>That was what Jimmy Barnett first wanted to call Stone.
<v Speaker 4>I want to call you sterling Boocock blowcock. What leave
<v Speaker 4>it up to this guy who thinks stan Lee sounds
<v Speaker 4>like a ridiculous name to marry Joan Boocock? Serious?
<v Speaker 5>She was?
<v Speaker 6>I mean, honestly, if you asked me, she was just
<v Speaker 6>dying to get fucking marriages. You can change your name.
<v Speaker 6>Oh my god, I'm gonna get that cock out of there.
<v Speaker 6>I guess it's better than marrying Joan Netflix.
<v Speaker 4>Or Joan t k O. Yes, it would be better.
<v Speaker 4>I think George Taka like get different spelling. Yeah, it's
<v Speaker 4>like it's t apostrophe ko or whatever. Peacock bluecock, yeah,
<v Speaker 4>either one. It still sucks in a social gathering.
<v Speaker 10>Well, it's a funny thing about how I met my wife.
<v Speaker 10>You know, I used to draw cartoons when I.
<v Speaker 4>Was By the way, tell me if this story sounds
<v Speaker 4>like absolute bullshit to you very young, I d quickly
<v Speaker 4>in us. Yes, what besides you know the incredible Hulk.
<v Speaker 4>What do Stanley and hok and have in common? What
<v Speaker 4>constantly drawing?
<v Speaker 10>And with everybody who draws every guy?
<v Speaker 4>I guess you, I know, I know, I know why.
<v Speaker 4>That's why I had to do it on first reference,
<v Speaker 4>because it's gonna keep paying off.
<v Speaker 1>You like the drug girls, and you usually draw your.
<v Speaker 4>Er fucking right or shot Michaels in ninety six.
<v Speaker 10>Oh shit, idealized girl's face. And there had been one
<v Speaker 10>face I had been drawing all the time, and.
<v Speaker 4>I remember, now, no, stan you're drawing as a face. Well,
<v Speaker 4>there was one face who was drawing. They'll tell you
<v Speaker 4>about Bob Armstrong.
<v Speaker 6>It's the only time that the only time a face
<v Speaker 6>draws instead of someone draws a face.
<v Speaker 4>That's good very clearly.
<v Speaker 3>He came to the door, and he was He had
<v Speaker 3>his raincoat thrown over his shoulder.
<v Speaker 10>Joan opened the door, and she was not the girl
<v Speaker 10>that I was supposed to meet, but she was the
<v Speaker 10>head model there and she was one.
<v Speaker 1>She opened the door and said hello, and he said.
<v Speaker 4>Hello. I think I'm going to fall in love with you.
<v Speaker 10>And I took one look at her at a it
<v Speaker 10>was the face I had been drawing all my life,
<v Speaker 10>and I think I said something stupid like I love you.
<v Speaker 4>And I thought, this is when I got to that
<v Speaker 4>to get away.
<v Speaker 8>Joan and Stan were married in time for Christmas nineteen
<v Speaker 8>forty seven.
<v Speaker 4>Respectfully, I mean, he's Jewish. He doesn't give a fuck
<v Speaker 4>about Christmas. Like, why did they mention? They mentioned Christmas
<v Speaker 4>like forty five times? All right, I know, I know,
<v Speaker 4>maybe maybe celebrated. I don't know. But it's a strange
<v Speaker 4>thing to keep saying over and over again.
<v Speaker 6>I know it really is, But I really I take
<v Speaker 6>issue with the idea that he kept drawing this face
<v Speaker 6>and all of a sudden he meets the face.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, that's that's a little maybe we're a little reverse engineering, yew.
<v Speaker 4>What he was after and exactly started to concoct a story. Yep. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>it just doesn't feel completely. I'm still waiting for the
<v Speaker 4>part where she reveals that her family owns a nail
<v Speaker 4>salon in La.
<v Speaker 6>Well, I'm waiting for the part where she turns heel
<v Speaker 6>and then he's then she's then she's a heel drawing
<v Speaker 6>heat and he's still drawing a face. But you know,
<v Speaker 6>there was a they get married, like like you said,
<v Speaker 6>They got married December of nineteen forty seven, though sadly,
<v Speaker 6>eleven days later his mom died. Celia died, and then
<v Speaker 6>in nineteen fifty one, Timely Comics would become Atlas Comics
<v Speaker 6>and would eventually Martin Goodman would change distributors of his
<v Speaker 6>comics to the American News Company, which I don't know
<v Speaker 6>if you know, I didn't really know much about them,
<v Speaker 6>but I knew a little bit more now. They About
<v Speaker 6>a year af after Timely Comics changed to their distribution,
<v Speaker 6>the company folded because the Justice Department began some anti
<v Speaker 6>trust litigation against you. Yeah, but nothing like the NWA
<v Speaker 6>at all. Jesus christ Man, you try a you trolling
<v Speaker 6>me ketch. We write The history of the NWA was
<v Speaker 6>Stanley in Marvel comics. Yeah, they'd be like, oh wait,
<v Speaker 6>there's no difference, what do you want? Yeah, so they
<v Speaker 6>there is any trans litigation going on in nineteen They
<v Speaker 6>began nineteen fifty five, and.
<v Speaker 4>That's like the same year the NWA action started. This
<v Speaker 4>is no shit, that's funny.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know that.
<v Speaker 4>I think it was like forty eight actually, but hot
<v Speaker 4>and heavy, and they really well, i'll tell you what,
<v Speaker 4>maybe maybe that's maybe that's what kind of said, well,
<v Speaker 4>wait a minute, we had to we had took down wrestling.
<v Speaker 4>Let's take down these fucking guys. These guys are the
<v Speaker 4>same thing, basically, a bunch of carnies writing fucking fake books,
<v Speaker 4>fake fake drawings for kids they called fake books.
<v Speaker 6>Oh, he pretty much did, and describing the live comics
<v Speaker 6>were looked down on. And if you I looked through
<v Speaker 6>a bunch of you know, the you know, I did,
<v Speaker 6>basically American News Company, and if you got the other
<v Speaker 6>word a keyword, I did, and just skimmed all of
<v Speaker 6>nineteen fifty seven, and you would basically see in succession
<v Speaker 6>all these different branches of the American News Company in
<v Speaker 6>different states just closing down, like week after week after week,
<v Speaker 6>and I was like, holy shit, like it's a really
<v Speaker 6>it was like a fucking it's crazy, and.
<v Speaker 4>You know, so.
<v Speaker 6>This is where it gets a little fuzzy. And I
<v Speaker 6>didn't really take the time too. There was so much
<v Speaker 6>I was trying to get through.
<v Speaker 4>That I didn't mind. We're here for well.
<v Speaker 6>I know this part though, because so because to me
<v Speaker 6>this is kind of important. Atlass Comics shuts down when this,
<v Speaker 6>like if you look on the Wikipedia is defunct as
<v Speaker 6>of nineteen fifty seven, but Marvel doesn't really open until
<v Speaker 6>like nineteen sixty or sixty one. Yet all these guys
<v Speaker 6>are employed still and they're doing comics within those three years,
<v Speaker 6>and I don't know how it well, okay, actually, wait
<v Speaker 6>a minute now that I'm thinking about it, is this
<v Speaker 6>the time period? Yes, okay, this is the time period.
<v Speaker 6>So I guess what happened here? Okay, Martin Goodman basically
<v Speaker 6>found he went to another distributor in the meantime after
<v Speaker 6>this whole shit went down that was owned by the
<v Speaker 6>same company, Yes, that own National Comics. So I have
<v Speaker 6>meant he'd have many different It's it's all the same.
<v Speaker 6>It's TKO basically and www UFC what it's Aftermax Ah there, Yes,
<v Speaker 6>that's right, family Weston with five different names all the yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 6>until they you know, they do split up eventually obviously.
<v Speaker 6>But yes, that's a that's actually that's a better that's
<v Speaker 6>a better announce the same publishing strategy.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, yeah, and.
<v Speaker 5>So.
<v Speaker 6>But basically the internal the other wrestling equivalent that I
<v Speaker 6>have for it is it's also like Montreal in a way. Okay,
<v Speaker 6>because at this point it seems like there's nothing like
<v Speaker 6>Atlas Comics here. The sooner we Marvel is going to
<v Speaker 6>be just completely destroyed and gone like ww you know,
<v Speaker 6>was going to be destroyed by Doc W. But the
<v Speaker 6>phoenix is about to rise again. And the the rise,
<v Speaker 6>this phoenix rising of Marvel Comics might not have occurred
<v Speaker 6>if it had not been for three individual jewels who
<v Speaker 6>came on board. The extremely private but brilliant Steve Ditko,
<v Speaker 6>who was a mega mega mind, Larry lieber Stan's brother,
<v Speaker 6>and with his fucking tail between his fucking legs, Jack Kirby. Yes,
<v Speaker 6>Jack Kirby is back in the mix. And this is
<v Speaker 6>where the shit begins to hit the fan, because if
<v Speaker 6>you talk to Jack Kirby before he died, he would
<v Speaker 6>say that it was he who turned business around and
<v Speaker 6>made Marvel what it would become. This is a quote
<v Speaker 6>from he said this in nineteen eighty nine. He said, quote.
<v Speaker 6>It came about very simply. I came in and they
<v Speaker 6>were moving out the furniture. They were taking desks out,
<v Speaker 6>and I needed the work. I had a family and
<v Speaker 6>a house, and all of a sudden, Marvel is coming apart.
<v Speaker 6>Stanley is sitting on a chair crying. He didn't know
<v Speaker 6>what to do. He's sitting in a chair crying. He
<v Speaker 6>was just still out of his adolescence. I told him
<v Speaker 6>to stop crying, I says, I says, he says. I says,
<v Speaker 6>go into Martin and tell him to stop moving the furniture.
<v Speaker 6>Furniture out, and I'll see what the books, and I'll
<v Speaker 6>see that the books make money. And I came up
<v Speaker 6>with a raft of new books, and all these books
<v Speaker 6>began to make money. Somehow they had faith in me.
<v Speaker 6>I knew I could do it, but I had to
<v Speaker 6>come up with fresh characters that nobody has seen before.
<v Speaker 6>Whatever it took to sell the book, I came up with.
<v Speaker 6>So he did it all. Yes, by the way, adolescence,
<v Speaker 6>I mean he was born in twenty two, So he's
<v Speaker 6>this is sixty, he's like thirty thirty five, eight, thirty six,
<v Speaker 6>thirty seven is Stanley. It's a little bit out of adolescence, yes, me.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, yeah, Well there's always arrested development with all comic people.
<v Speaker 6>Well, with anybody, any I mean, anybody who's older than
<v Speaker 6>somebody else. That person's silly kid. The younger person, silly kid. True,
<v Speaker 6>that's true. You know, I was, like I was in
<v Speaker 6>my thirties, and I remember I remember working with, you know,
<v Speaker 6>some older actors and shows, and oh, you're just still
<v Speaker 6>You're still just a kid. I'm like, I'm thirty and
<v Speaker 6>I'm getting married next year, but I'm still just a kid, right,
<v Speaker 6>you know, that's fucking It's a weird thing. But if
<v Speaker 6>you talk to stan Lee, obviously he would say he
<v Speaker 6>was the one who was the savior of the day.
<v Speaker 6>He said in nineteen ninety eight quote, I never remember
<v Speaker 6>being there when people were moving out the furniture. If
<v Speaker 6>they ever moved the furniture, they did it during the
<v Speaker 6>weekend when everybody was home. Jack tended toward hyperbole, just
<v Speaker 6>like the time he was quoted as saying that he
<v Speaker 6>came in and I was crying and I said, please
<v Speaker 6>save the company. I'm not a crier, and I would
<v Speaker 6>never have said that. I was very happy that I
<v Speaker 6>that that Jack was there and I loved working with him,
<v Speaker 6>but I never cried to him. Why can't they just
<v Speaker 6>both say they had both parts to do with it?
<v Speaker 6>Like no, Like, why can't we just say, yeah, you
<v Speaker 6>know what, we both if if weren't for both of us,
<v Speaker 6>nothing of this would have happened. It's like, you know,
<v Speaker 6>you know what remind it's honestly, it's it's like Ian
<v Speaker 6>Fleming not given fucking what's his but any credit for that. Yep,
<v Speaker 6>you know he would have saved himself an entire life
<v Speaker 6>of fucking litigation if he had just given him credit
<v Speaker 6>on that fucking screenplay.
<v Speaker 4>That the irishman there.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, I can't think of his name, but right, you know,
<v Speaker 6>that's all you had to fucking do. Unreal, and you
<v Speaker 6>caused this fucking world of shit either way. As the
<v Speaker 6>sixties began, the world's you know, comic book world is
<v Speaker 6>ruled by DC all Right, Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman. They're
<v Speaker 6>the fucking kings and queens, and leading up to March
<v Speaker 6>of nineteen six, the editor at DC at the time
<v Speaker 6>is Julius Schwartz, and he asked a writer, Gardner fox Or,
<v Speaker 6>to revive and update his superhero team that he created
<v Speaker 6>back in the forties, the Justice Society of America. Now,
<v Speaker 6>obviously we know the group was renamed the Justice League
<v Speaker 6>of America, and it was used as they said league.
<v Speaker 6>You know why they said league instead of they said
<v Speaker 6>league because they wanted to appeal the younger readers and
<v Speaker 6>it made it feel like more like sports. Really, yep,
<v Speaker 6>that's what they call it, Justice League of America. So
<v Speaker 6>it's like, oh, baseball, Oh, it's baseball.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, then I can fucking off for you that it's
<v Speaker 4>the Justice Baseball League of America. All right, I'll fucking
<v Speaker 4>read it.
<v Speaker 6>A lot of thought going into that one. Yeah, you know,
<v Speaker 6>and you know, I assume you know Justice League of America.
<v Speaker 6>You know, Superman, Batman, One, A Woman, the whole fucking
<v Speaker 6>dam So the that team, big hit, big, big fucking hit,
<v Speaker 6>top selling title average of two hundred and fourteen thousand
<v Speaker 6>copies sold per issue every month.
<v Speaker 4>And now.
<v Speaker 6>Back at Marvel, this was like, okay, well we need
<v Speaker 6>to do something in you know that that resembles this
<v Speaker 6>we need to do something to kind of counterbalance what
<v Speaker 6>they're doing.
<v Speaker 4>We need a team.
<v Speaker 5>Now.
<v Speaker 6>There are a lot of stories as to how this
<v Speaker 6>kind of came to be, but I like this one.
<v Speaker 6>This one's kind of fun to me. Stanley, as always,
<v Speaker 6>he was ready to move on from the comic book industry.
<v Speaker 6>So yeah, I'm want out. I want out. I want
<v Speaker 6>to do something else. I want to do something more legitimate.
<v Speaker 6>But this is a quote from him. He says, quote,
<v Speaker 6>I thought about changing careers many many times. So I
<v Speaker 6>would tell my wife Joan, next year, I'll quit. Then
<v Speaker 6>I would to get a raise or work on a
<v Speaker 6>book that interested me, and I would say, next year,
<v Speaker 6>we're all quit. This time, I was really going to quit.
<v Speaker 6>When I told Joan that. She said to me, then
<v Speaker 6>why don't you write them the way you want to
<v Speaker 6>write them? For years, you wanted to do stories the
<v Speaker 6>way you wanted to tell them, Go for it. If
<v Speaker 6>it's not going to be the way you want to
<v Speaker 6>do it, if it's not going to be the way
<v Speaker 6>you want it, do it the way you want.
<v Speaker 4>To do them.
<v Speaker 6>If it's not going to be the way you want it,
<v Speaker 6>do it the way you want to do them. You're
<v Speaker 6>going to be leaving anyway, So what do you get
<v Speaker 6>to lose? Do it your way, and if they fire
<v Speaker 6>you just remember you're leaving anyway. When I wrote the
<v Speaker 6>first comic that way, I tried to break all the rules.
<v Speaker 6>These superheroes would be different. They would act the way
<v Speaker 6>I would act if I got superpowers. So, in essence,
<v Speaker 6>Stanley Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four. Well, but who
<v Speaker 6>truly created the Fantastic for Who actually created the Fantastic
<v Speaker 6>for it? And there is you know, again, this was
<v Speaker 6>still still early on, you know, in the comics world,
<v Speaker 6>even though it's been you know, almost thirty years. But
<v Speaker 6>you know, no one's recording things for prestige. Everyone thinks
<v Speaker 6>that this world's gonna end at any moment, So why
<v Speaker 6>do you need to have evidence that things happen? So
<v Speaker 6>there's no there's no hard evidence that leads in Stan's
<v Speaker 6>favor or Jack Kirby's favor, at least that I'm aware of.
<v Speaker 6>But there's this, supposedly there's this synopsis that another writer
<v Speaker 6>had that Stanley wrote, but it's not known if it
<v Speaker 6>was written before or after the first Fantastic Four book
<v Speaker 6>was released, and Jack Kirby said, you know, I've never
<v Speaker 6>seen this synopsis, and if it did exist, then.
<v Speaker 4>It was a lie.
<v Speaker 6>And so like Stan says that it was written, So
<v Speaker 6>who knows either way, The Fantastic Four was huge. It's
<v Speaker 6>kind of funny because I always considered the Fantastic Four
<v Speaker 6>to be kind of a lame comic book Sola, right,
<v Speaker 6>this was groundbreaking. The Fantastic Four was groundbreaking, broke all
<v Speaker 6>the rules of comic book superheroes. They didn't want their powers.
<v Speaker 6>Gaining their powers was painful. They were exactly at first.
<v Speaker 6>They resented having their powers. They wanted nothing to do,
<v Speaker 6>they wanted to get rid of them. It was just
<v Speaker 6>it was awful. They at the time when you have
<v Speaker 6>superheroes like Superman, Superman's always doing the good thing. He's
<v Speaker 6>never he doesn't have like he's not flawed in any way.
<v Speaker 6>Superman is just a fucking goody two shoes, perfect guy,
<v Speaker 6>always doing the right thing. The Fantastic Four bickered. They
<v Speaker 6>were passive, aggressive towards each other. They would say things.
<v Speaker 6>They were a family and they acted like a family,
<v Speaker 6>you know, and so it was more relatable. It actually
<v Speaker 6>was believable because they were saying shit that that you
<v Speaker 6>might say to a friend or to a sibling, or
<v Speaker 6>to a parent or whatever. And it was that just
<v Speaker 6>changed the whole fucking game. I don't even realize it
<v Speaker 6>yet that it. I mean, it changed the way they
<v Speaker 6>did all comics. You know, now, all of a sudden,
<v Speaker 6>comic book characters, even superheroes, had to be human beings
<v Speaker 6>as well. They had to have flaws. They couldn't be
<v Speaker 6>the goodie two shoes perfect thing, because you know, it
<v Speaker 6>just no one, no one could relate as well anymore
<v Speaker 6>to all that stuff. And the best part is, as
<v Speaker 6>you know, I think, as any of these things happen,
<v Speaker 6>when you start doing things for yourself, things become a hit.
<v Speaker 6>That stuff becomes a hit because you you begin you
<v Speaker 6>start to realize that, wait a minute, you know, either
<v Speaker 6>more people think like you do than you thought did,
<v Speaker 6>or it's it's something that's just so genuine because it
<v Speaker 6>came from your heart and it's just became from what
<v Speaker 6>who you are, that you can't help but enjoy it
<v Speaker 6>because it's because it feels different, and so here it is.
<v Speaker 6>The Fantastic Four is a massive success, and anybody, you know,
<v Speaker 6>if you read any kind of article about it, or
<v Speaker 6>any kind of story or whatever posting about it. They
<v Speaker 6>all say, how you know, if you look back at
<v Speaker 6>it now, you say this is lame, like it's all cliched,
<v Speaker 6>everything is so fucking whatever. But this was completely fresh.
<v Speaker 6>It's like any good thing, any good thing. It's like
<v Speaker 6>it's like watching the Sergio Leone westerns. All right, all
<v Speaker 6>those things are cliches, but when those things came out,
<v Speaker 6>they were not Yes, like that's the original. They've the
<v Speaker 6>Fantastic four is the original, and yeah, so it was huge,
<v Speaker 6>but they weren't expecting to be huge, so they had
<v Speaker 6>no other characters to follow up with at the time.
<v Speaker 6>And this finally gets as to where we need to
<v Speaker 6>be because they needed to create another character. I We're
<v Speaker 6>going to turn to his pseudo autobiography, Excelsior Stanley's, and
<v Speaker 6>here's what he says. It was May nineteen sixty two.
<v Speaker 6>I still recall Martin's expression after he asked which new
<v Speaker 6>heroes I'd put in the next team? See one another team?
<v Speaker 6>You would have seen. You should have seen the look
<v Speaker 6>on his face when I told him that the next
<v Speaker 6>series wouldn't feature a team, there would only be one superhero.
<v Speaker 6>Oh and by the way I wanted that hero to
<v Speaker 6>be a monster. He slowly turned and walked away, shaking
<v Speaker 6>his head. I'm sure we thought I was. It's probably
<v Speaker 6>lucky for me that he didn't know I wasn't. I've
<v Speaker 6>been racking my brain for days, looking for different superhero type,
<v Speaker 6>looking for a different superhero type, something never seen before.
<v Speaker 6>I basically decided the new guy should be someone with
<v Speaker 6>superhuman strength. But I didn't want to make him a
<v Speaker 6>cliched character who'd resemble Superman or even our own the
<v Speaker 6>Thing from Fantastic Four. I thought, wouldn't it be fun
<v Speaker 6>to make a superhero out of a monster?
<v Speaker 4>Hey?
<v Speaker 6>What could be more different than that? I probably have
<v Speaker 6>that thought because I'd always loved the Frankenstein movies. To me,
<v Speaker 6>the monster was the good guy. We always saw that
<v Speaker 6>mob of idiots with torches chasing Boris Karloff, who played
<v Speaker 6>the monster up and down the hills until he went berserk.
<v Speaker 6>Remember now, he never really wanted to hurt anybody, So
<v Speaker 6>I figured some sort of a misunderstood monster could be
<v Speaker 6>fun to work with. Besides, the Thing had proven that
<v Speaker 6>monsters could be popular. Now the Thing became a huge
<v Speaker 6>like one of the popular out of the Fantastic Four.
<v Speaker 6>Everyone loved the thing, sadly not John Carpenter's a thing
<v Speaker 6>that's a whole different story. You can listen to in
<v Speaker 6>the under the Cinemata archives. He was the member of
<v Speaker 6>Fantastic Four who got the most male day after day.
<v Speaker 6>And in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, didn't everyone root
<v Speaker 6>for quasi moto?
<v Speaker 4>Next?
<v Speaker 6>I thought it might give me more flex story flexibility
<v Speaker 6>if he could change back and forth in and out
<v Speaker 6>of monster mode. Why couldn't a monster have a secret identity?
<v Speaker 6>Never done before far as I knew, at least not
<v Speaker 6>in comics. It was wildly successful when Robert Louis Stevenson
<v Speaker 6>did it in Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. I decided
<v Speaker 6>to have a normal man, doctor Bruce Banner, transform into
<v Speaker 6>a monster and back again. You can see I have
<v Speaker 6>a thing for doctors. It's so easy to weave them
<v Speaker 6>into these semi psi fi plots. Okay, now, how would
<v Speaker 6>Doc Banner become a monster? The origin is always so important.
<v Speaker 6>I had already bombarded the Fantastic Four with cosmic rays,
<v Speaker 6>so I needed something new for our embryonic monster. Let's
<v Speaker 6>see what other rays were there?
<v Speaker 4>It seemed to me.
<v Speaker 6>I had heard of Gamma rays somewhere, had no igineio.
<v Speaker 6>It's true, there are a lot of rays, mysterio rays.
<v Speaker 4>Ray candy, There's a lot of options.
<v Speaker 6>True, I had no the name had a nice ring.
<v Speaker 6>Oh yeah, Gamma ray somewhere had no idea what they
<v Speaker 6>really were. But that didn't matter. The name had a
<v Speaker 6>nice ring to it. So I found a way to
<v Speaker 6>zap Banner with some Gamma rays, and lo, another hero
<v Speaker 6>was born. Now, of course, even a monster needs a name.
<v Speaker 6>The name is important because you have to convey the
<v Speaker 6>entire essence of your concept in a word or two.
<v Speaker 6>I wanted a name that conjured up an intimidating, gargantuan
<v Speaker 6>behemoth with a plotting brain and enormous power. So I
<v Speaker 6>turned to two other classics, Noah Webster's Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus.
<v Speaker 6>Is it Roge or is it Roget? I never knew that.
<v Speaker 6>I think it's Roget, But yeah, sure, I don't know.
<v Speaker 6>In fact, I thought the word thesaurus itself sounded pretty dramatic,
<v Speaker 6>sort of like some kind of dinosaur. But no, it
<v Speaker 6>wasn't quite right. I needed a name for this monstrous
<v Speaker 6>potentially murderous, hulking brute. Who WHOA hulking brute is the
<v Speaker 6>exact description, and I instantly, and instantly I knew hulking
<v Speaker 6>was the abjective. Well, it wasn't much of a stretch
<v Speaker 6>to go from hulking to hulk, which sounded like the
<v Speaker 6>perfect noun. And so the Hulk was born.
<v Speaker 4>And there it is, there it is right. That's the
<v Speaker 4>germ of why we got Hulk Cogan. As wrestling fans,
<v Speaker 4>imagine they called him the Hulk for years. Imagine a
<v Speaker 4>man if he just if he came up with a
<v Speaker 4>different name exactly, like like uh.
<v Speaker 6>Boor fodder or something, or Thesaurus, the Immortals, the incredible
<v Speaker 6>the Saurus. Yeah, the immortal Thesaurus.
<v Speaker 4>Hogan Uasaurus Thesaurus. Oh my god, I mean, folks, this
<v Speaker 4>is all right. First of all, everything he's saying about,
<v Speaker 4>how you know, Boris Karloff and stuff, the Giant is
<v Speaker 4>actually the babyface Andre the Giant. Yep. I mean, for
<v Speaker 4>his first decade and a half in the business, he
<v Speaker 4>was a babyface everywhere, yep. And he towered over almost
<v Speaker 4>every one of his opponents. In fact, it was the
<v Speaker 4>sort of sweepstakes of trying to find somebody that could
<v Speaker 4>present a credible physical threat to Andrea, that that that
<v Speaker 4>put Terry Bolea in a perfect position. So exactly we'll
<v Speaker 4>get to exactly in the complete hole Cogan. But everything
<v Speaker 4>Stanley is describing about the role of the giant and
<v Speaker 4>kind of the the emotional heartstrings that a giant pulls
<v Speaker 4>on the audience, not as a destructive force, but as
<v Speaker 4>someone that you glimpse a bit of humanity and feel
<v Speaker 4>sorry for instantly and root for explains Hulkogan as well
<v Speaker 4>as under the Giant. Exactly. At first, it was like, Okay,
<v Speaker 4>he's the Hulk, so he's just gonna go nuts and
<v Speaker 4>crush people, and so you know, baby face Jabroni's you're
<v Speaker 4>gonna have to bounce off this guy like he's an
<v Speaker 4>electrical fence. But very quickly it's like, no, actually the
<v Speaker 4>money is in that giant having sort of like a
<v Speaker 4>bit of a moral compass and actually right not wanting
<v Speaker 4>to be regarded as automatically an evil slimeball just because
<v Speaker 4>he's massive, but in fact, if he were to use
<v Speaker 4>those powers for good, my god, is there no other train?
<v Speaker 4>And I would want to.
<v Speaker 6>Arrive exactly exactly. It's so true and it's perfect. You know,
<v Speaker 6>the Hulk is so you know, there's if so much
<v Speaker 6>comes to mind when you say the word hulk.
<v Speaker 4>Yes, and this is why. And so the hulking was certainly,
<v Speaker 4>you know, hulking was certainly an adjective. But to call
<v Speaker 4>someone the Hulk the Hulk, or to use hulk as
<v Speaker 4>a noun, it's just that, it's all what he just described,
<v Speaker 4>that Eureka moment, that's where it all comes from. Meanwhile,
<v Speaker 4>and that's roughly at the same time period, Terry Bulaya
<v Speaker 4>is in Tampa literally stuffing rocks up his nose in
<v Speaker 4>the backyard. He's hulking rocks up his nose, and amazing
<v Speaker 4>to think about it is absolutely Think of a random
<v Speaker 4>day when Terry Bulay, at twelve years old, goes into
<v Speaker 4>the supermarket and sees the Incredible Hulk comic book. He did,
<v Speaker 4>I mean, think about this, folks, all right, you know
<v Speaker 4>what happened? All right, they're all, it's all everyone's around
<v Speaker 4>that same age. Give it to me, give me the
<v Speaker 4>real American story.
<v Speaker 6>You're damn fucking right. And so the Hulk was born,
<v Speaker 6>or the name was anyway, I still needed to see
<v Speaker 6>the creature himself, and so I naturally turned to Jack Kirby.
<v Speaker 6>It is funny how stan Lee always never really he
<v Speaker 6>talks poorly about Jack Kirby, but Jack Kirby fucking talks
<v Speaker 6>shit about Stanley.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah. Always.
<v Speaker 6>Once again, Jack came through magnificently. I remember telling him, Jack,
<v Speaker 6>You're gonna think I'm crazy, but can you draw a
<v Speaker 6>good looking monster, or at least a sympathetic looking monster.
<v Speaker 6>Even as I said it, I could hear how idiotic
<v Speaker 6>the words must have sounded, but nothing phased Old Kirby.
<v Speaker 6>Instead of walking out indignantly and saying I've got no
<v Speaker 6>time for jokes Lee, as I might have expected, he
<v Speaker 6>simply uttered his usual non committal grunt, and with a
<v Speaker 6>nod of his head and a puff the cigar, he
<v Speaker 6>bent over. They bent forward over his drawing board, and
<v Speaker 6>later came up with a monster who was so perfect,
<v Speaker 6>so empathetic, that the readers took him, took to him immediately,
<v Speaker 6>and today he's still one of our most popular heroes.
<v Speaker 6>I've always known that superhero fans love their heroes and
<v Speaker 6>villains to wear costumes. I have no idea why, but
<v Speaker 6>it seems to be de rigueur for the genre. Well,
<v Speaker 6>call me unimaginative, but I couldn't, for the life of me,
<v Speaker 6>find a reason for our newest monster to outfit himself
<v Speaker 6>in a costume. Still, the readers would expect something colorful
<v Speaker 6>about him. Then it hit me, Instead of a colorful costume,
<v Speaker 6>I'd give him colorful skin. So I made up my
<v Speaker 6>mind to color his flesh gray, which I thought would
<v Speaker 6>look kind of spooky. Unfortunately, in our first issue, the
<v Speaker 6>printer had trouble keeping the shade of gray consistent from
<v Speaker 6>page to page. On some pages his skin was light gray,
<v Speaker 6>on others it was dark gray, and on some it
<v Speaker 6>looked black too confusing. So for the next issue, I
<v Speaker 6>changed his skin color to green, a color the printer
<v Speaker 6>had less trouble with. Although it was done on a whim,
<v Speaker 6>it turned out to be a fortuitous choice because it
<v Speaker 6>gave rise to many memorable nicknames for me to employ,
<v Speaker 6>such as the Jolly green Giant, old green Skin, the
<v Speaker 6>green Goliath, etc. I've always loved giving characters nicknames because
<v Speaker 6>it helps embed them in their reader's minds. Oh the nicknames, Yes,
<v Speaker 6>all right, all right, lunatic fringe. There we go, right,
<v Speaker 6>lunatic fringe right, and to tell the truth, it makes
<v Speaker 6>it easier for me to remember who the characters are.
<v Speaker 6>Myself needless to say, but I'll say it anyway. The
<v Speaker 6>Incredible Hulk, as we called it, was enthusiastically received by
<v Speaker 6>the fans, and we had another winner on our hands.
<v Speaker 6>So it seems like Stanley owned the Hulk. Yes, well.
<v Speaker 6>Jack Kirby also claimed ownership of the Hulk.
<v Speaker 4>In nineteen eighty.
<v Speaker 6>Nine, he said, quote the Hulk I created when I
<v Speaker 6>saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught
<v Speaker 6>under the running board of this car. The little child
<v Speaker 6>was playing in the gutter, and he was crawling from
<v Speaker 6>the gutter under the sidewalk, under the running board of
<v Speaker 6>this car. He was playing in the gutter.
<v Speaker 4>Oh my god.
<v Speaker 6>His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear view
<v Speaker 6>window of the car, and this woman, in desperation, lifted
<v Speaker 6>the car, lifted the rear end of the car. It
<v Speaker 6>suddenly came to me that in desperation we can all
<v Speaker 6>do that. We can knock down, we can go berserk,
<v Speaker 6>which we do. You know what happens when we're in
<v Speaker 6>a rage. You can tear a house down. I created
<v Speaker 6>a character who did all of that and called him
<v Speaker 6>the Hulk. So so that's Jack Kirby's version of creating
<v Speaker 6>the Hulk like this, this is this is all throughout
<v Speaker 6>the sixties. This is what they just there is no
<v Speaker 6>there is no admitting the other one did anything. Although
<v Speaker 6>Stanley's better at it, I think, but I also think
<v Speaker 6>he's also more political. He also knows how to sell
<v Speaker 6>something better than Jack Kirby does. Yes, yes, you know,
<v Speaker 6>I think that's a part of it. I think I'm
<v Speaker 6>trying to think.
<v Speaker 4>Of a wrestling corollary where somebody gives somebody else a
<v Speaker 4>bunch of credit and the guy never reciprocates.
<v Speaker 6>I mean, two thousand and two, Triple H. Anybody who
<v Speaker 6>fucking wrestl Triple H had to call him how great,
<v Speaker 6>to tell him how Grady was. Yeah, you know, and he
<v Speaker 6>never reciprocated that. That's a good one. But yeah, So
<v Speaker 6>The Hulk wasn't an immediate success like Fantastic Four was,
<v Speaker 6>but it did be obviously found its footing, and you know,
<v Speaker 6>think about it, Hulk is one of the most I mean,
<v Speaker 6>I can remember when I was a kid, like the
<v Speaker 6>Hulk was the one I liked the most, Like you
<v Speaker 6>loved big things that could smash things. You know, I
<v Speaker 6>love the Hulk growing up before I even loved Hulk Hogan, So.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, I don't. I mean I think I was somewhat
<v Speaker 4>aware of what Hulk was, but not like the generation
<v Speaker 4>in the seventies. I mean, no, no, no, no no. I mean,
<v Speaker 4>if you were a.
<v Speaker 6>Kid in the seventies, you absolutely knew all about you
<v Speaker 6>definitely did, and I mean I was. I was familiar
<v Speaker 6>with the show. I like, I remember seeing either WE
<v Speaker 6>runs or or I probably saw some of the TV
<v Speaker 6>movies from the eighties, so like, I remember, I remember
<v Speaker 6>the Hulk quite a bit. I can remember I remember
<v Speaker 6>watching The Hulk at my grandparents' house when I was
<v Speaker 6>a kid. Yeah, I don't know.
<v Speaker 4>Well, I'm glad you said the TV movie is in
<v Speaker 4>the eighties, because one I do want to set out
<v Speaker 4>and you'll probably talk more about it, but I do
<v Speaker 4>want to set it straight in my mind because I
<v Speaker 4>was a little confused when putting you on this. Yes,
<v Speaker 4>so wild goose Chase. So what are we looking at.
<v Speaker 4>We're looking at an animated Hulk series, and then I
<v Speaker 4>made for TV pilot and then the series and what
<v Speaker 4>we're doing here is deep diving the pilot like we
<v Speaker 4>did the Twin Peaks more, we're gonna do that.
<v Speaker 6>We're gonna deep We're gonna watch the pilot, but we're
<v Speaker 6>all I'm going to talk about the whole the whole thing.
<v Speaker 6>I mean, it's it's it's you know, not in not
<v Speaker 6>in complete detail, but kind of go through because it is.
<v Speaker 4>It is.
<v Speaker 6>After the two pilots there. So there are two TV
<v Speaker 6>movies that happened in seventy seven to seventy eight, Okay,
<v Speaker 6>got it, and then the show premiered in seventy eight. Okay,
<v Speaker 6>after the second TV.
<v Speaker 4>Movie, we'll touch on those two films. Yeah, but we're
<v Speaker 4>gonna watch the first one, just the first one, the
<v Speaker 4>very first one. Yeah, good, okay, now I understand. Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>So it's like they're called pilots, but in reality they
<v Speaker 4>stand alone as many movies as well.
<v Speaker 6>That's that's the way you to be. You know, much
<v Speaker 6>like the with Twin Peaks, you know, in what they
<v Speaker 6>would do is you would not always the way Twin
<v Speaker 6>Peaks did it, because Twin Peaks did the two hour
<v Speaker 6>premiere and then immediately went to series after that. Sometimes
<v Speaker 6>these these these pilots would would air in a different
<v Speaker 6>say in the springtime, and then if it was well received,
<v Speaker 6>it would be picked up for series during the summer
<v Speaker 6>and then they would have a you know, a season
<v Speaker 6>starting in the fall, right, you know, but they the
<v Speaker 6>but if it didn't get.
<v Speaker 4>Picked up that spring movie was made to stand. It
<v Speaker 4>was just it was yeah, exactly, it was just its
<v Speaker 4>own thing. It didn't leave this huge cliffhanger where it
<v Speaker 4>was like it might have it might have done it anyway,
<v Speaker 4>just to that for the idea that okay, you know,
<v Speaker 4>we want to try to get people to watch this
<v Speaker 4>and see if people are interested. But they wouldn't just
<v Speaker 4>they just wouldn't follow up with it. But to be clear,
<v Speaker 4>if we want to talk about the Forerigno era, the
<v Speaker 4>Hulk that made Hulk Hogan a thing, we've got to
<v Speaker 4>talk about made for television stuff. There was nothing theoreatrical. No, no,
<v Speaker 4>nothing theatrical. It was all made for television. Yep, well,
<v Speaker 4>well more or less in America. Yes, So just leave
<v Speaker 4>it at that because we'll talk about more about that later.
<v Speaker 4>But uh yeah, so so obviously so Hulk. But I
<v Speaker 4>wanted to say though, but like for me in in
<v Speaker 4>the eighties, the characters that I remember the most, Like
<v Speaker 4>there are there are four superheroes that I remember most
<v Speaker 4>as a kid, all right, Superman, Batman, spider Man, and
<v Speaker 4>the Hulk. Those are the four that for me, like, I,
<v Speaker 4>uh if there were whenever I get action figures like
<v Speaker 4>I had these.
<v Speaker 6>There were two. There were two actually in a weird way.
<v Speaker 6>It's kind of like Hasbrosen Globs the way that they
<v Speaker 6>were formed because if DC's the WWE. Okay, they had
<v Speaker 6>the plastic, the harder plastic superhero characters all right that
<v Speaker 6>had that had you know, if you squeeze the legs
<v Speaker 6>of Superman, his arms would go, you know, like they
<v Speaker 6>had they had an action with them, whereas the Marvel
<v Speaker 6>Secret Wars characters action figures were more flimsy rubber much
<v Speaker 6>like the gloobs. They still move, like you can move
<v Speaker 6>their joints. They had four you can move the arms
<v Speaker 6>and the head and the legs, but they didn't have
<v Speaker 6>like an action or something like that. You know, they
<v Speaker 6>were much more static than that. And like those are
<v Speaker 6>the I I used to love those figures. And yeah,
<v Speaker 6>the big four were always Batman, Superman, Spider Man, and
<v Speaker 6>the Hulk. They didn't have a Hulk, but I I
<v Speaker 6>always like liked the Hulk, and yeah, like that's it's
<v Speaker 6>it's it's kind of wild. What I think is also
<v Speaker 6>kind of wild is is that the Hulk came before
<v Speaker 6>Spider Man. Like they invented the Hulk before Spider Man,
<v Speaker 6>before Iron Man, before these the characters that are kind
<v Speaker 6>of the more of the of the the leaders of
<v Speaker 6>Marvel today. But the Hulk was one of the first.
<v Speaker 6>The Hulk was before all of them. It's pretty fucking wild.
<v Speaker 6>See that's not something I can handle. I know, I
<v Speaker 6>know I can't handle that coming first at all. I
<v Speaker 6>mean I also can't handle the Fantastic Four coming first.
<v Speaker 6>That that to me, to me in my mind, I
<v Speaker 6>always thought Spider Man was the game changer, right, but
<v Speaker 6>Spider Man's not.
<v Speaker 4>Right.
<v Speaker 6>Well, Superman was. Superman for sure was but in terms
<v Speaker 6>of Marvel, in terms of Marvel, it's like in terms
<v Speaker 6>of I should say this era where where where everything changed,
<v Speaker 6>you know, because obviously Captain America came first, you know,
<v Speaker 6>if you're talking about the long ones, Captain America was
<v Speaker 6>in the forties. But in terms of this the the
<v Speaker 6>rejuvenation of comic books, especially with Marvel and the success
<v Speaker 6>that Marvel had. It's like it starts with a Fantastic
<v Speaker 6>four and I just can't handle that. Well, that just
<v Speaker 6>doesn't work with me. To me, it's gotta be Spider Man.
<v Speaker 6>I always my mind of Spider Man. A Spider Man
<v Speaker 6>was number three. Spider Man was the third one out
<v Speaker 6>of all of them. It's fucking yeah, it's no forget.
<v Speaker 6>I mean about the history of action figures. You know,
<v Speaker 6>we've talked a lot, especially when we did the g I.
<v Speaker 6>Joe episodes under the Cinemat, about how you know it
<v Speaker 6>started in the sixties essentially Barbie dolls for boys exactly.
<v Speaker 6>This idea of the action figure was rightfully formed at all, Right,
<v Speaker 6>come the seventies, it's extremely clear that you can make
<v Speaker 6>action figures that boys will buy and play with. And
<v Speaker 6>if you're not going to say that's central to the
<v Speaker 6>whole covieing success, then I.
<v Speaker 4>Don't know you're looking at question. No, he came at
<v Speaker 4>the tail end of this merchandising phenomenon that was the
<v Speaker 4>action figure. Think about that, well, I mean he came
<v Speaker 4>at the glory period. Really, you know, he came. He
<v Speaker 4>came at them when it when it really went from
<v Speaker 4>being dolls to being you know, in the late seventies
<v Speaker 4>saw the debut of the Star Wars figures, which were
<v Speaker 4>these small, small figures, these not these these you know
<v Speaker 4>LJN sized, you know, doll like figures. Now we're talking
<v Speaker 4>about four in jail. End of the first wave of
<v Speaker 4>oh sure, yeah, yeah, that way. I'm looking here at
<v Speaker 4>a thor figure from seventy five that goes for three
<v Speaker 4>hundred and forty dollars on eBay yep, And it's like,
<v Speaker 4>it looks so basic, But to think about how much
<v Speaker 4>young boys coveted that, and it was so revolutionary at
<v Speaker 4>the time. The wrestling business wasn't set up to to
<v Speaker 4>set people up like that. But it did not take long.
<v Speaker 4>It did not take long from them first in Japan.
<v Speaker 4>They figured it out Japan first, like, hey, these these
<v Speaker 4>wrestlers are basically comic book characters. Let's make toys out
<v Speaker 4>of them. Yeah. Yeah, And and Hulk was perfectly timed.
<v Speaker 4>Hulk Hove and Terry Bolea was perfectly timed to be
<v Speaker 4>the guy that would lead that merchandising revolution in the
<v Speaker 4>United States as far as wrestling goes. Oh my god,
<v Speaker 4>I'm looking at that at that thword too. I didn't.
<v Speaker 4>That's crazy. I mean he looks. Imagine getting that and
<v Speaker 4>how excited you would have been, and how basic it
<v Speaker 4>is now.
<v Speaker 6>And now I look at it and I'm horrified. I
<v Speaker 6>want to like that's it's so horrifying. He's so scary looking.
<v Speaker 6>And also with the fucking like nineteen sixties or early
<v Speaker 6>nineteen seventies Mary Tyler Moore hair. Yeah, right, you know
<v Speaker 6>that's hilarious. That's wild. Yeah, all those are. It's it's
<v Speaker 6>it's it's really. It's really incredible, really really incredible. So
<v Speaker 6>fast forward mids mid nineteen sixties, and that's you mentioned before.
<v Speaker 6>That's when the Hulk had its first introduction to the
<v Speaker 6>small screen through animation. Now you got to watch. Actually,
<v Speaker 6>I'm going to send you a link.
<v Speaker 4>I didn't.
<v Speaker 6>I didn't take a take a bite of it. I
<v Speaker 6>should have, but I didn't do it. Or even if
<v Speaker 6>you do incredible Hult or if you do Hulk, I'll
<v Speaker 6>do it. Cartoon, nineteen sixties.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, this is in YouTube for those listenings. Ye, so
<v Speaker 4>just do that.
<v Speaker 6>Search that and yeah, click on the first one Hulk
<v Speaker 6>and the first one come up for me is Hulk
<v Speaker 6>Cartoon clip transformation.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, I get an incredible Hulk contro. So let me
<v Speaker 4>see incredible transformation. Let's see if typing that gets. If
<v Speaker 4>you're not, I'll get I'll send you the link here,
<v Speaker 4>the one I'm going to do here. I got the
<v Speaker 4>incredible Hulk transform the transformation sequence. It says Hulk cartoon
<v Speaker 4>clip here. I'm gonna send you the link in the chat.
<v Speaker 4>Go have it because we'll watch together, and I'll if
<v Speaker 4>I can try to send the audio. I mean, the
<v Speaker 4>audio doesn't matter as much, and then people can people
<v Speaker 4>can find it themselves. People can find it. But do
<v Speaker 4>you have it? Yeah, just give me one second here
<v Speaker 4>problem and we'll watch it together and you'll see how
<v Speaker 4>for the animation is. Oh I love how bad the
<v Speaker 4>animation was back then? I adore it. This is even worse.
<v Speaker 4>I'm ready all right, only one, three, two, one play.
<v Speaker 16>It just isn't right for you.
<v Speaker 3>Only one.
<v Speaker 4>It's like a comic book seller. Just the lips move right, exactly,
<v Speaker 4>It's exactly right. Nothing else moves, nothing moves besides the lips.
<v Speaker 4>They like, and they cut to things like you.
<v Speaker 3>Know, you'll blow up cont dtr banner the begun thinking
<v Speaker 3>with your fist.
<v Speaker 6>The funny thing is in certain uh parts, they actually used.
<v Speaker 4>Actual comic book cells from the comics. I'm sure they did.
<v Speaker 1>Good lord, what's that. It's a teenager.
<v Speaker 4>It's a teenager might sure sure, stroking his chin. Oh
<v Speaker 4>my god. Kids sitting on the carpet and a Saturday morning,
<v Speaker 4>six sixty six watching this, This would be fucking Monday.
<v Speaker 1>You get out of there, cool man. It's a free country,
<v Speaker 1>right quick. You fool into the protective prints before the
<v Speaker 1>bomb goes off. Hey bomb, I didn't.
<v Speaker 3>Know me and Whiler with no instructions. To the contrary
<v Speaker 3>from Igor fire go on. A finger presses the fatal.
<v Speaker 4>Finger presses the fatal. But they have they have to
<v Speaker 4>describe it.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 4>Whoa that nuclear destruction is Convade in nineteen sixty six animation.
<v Speaker 3>He's coming out of it now, Banner. It's a miracle
<v Speaker 3>that Joe was still alive.
<v Speaker 4>Sell I brought you.
<v Speaker 1>I'm Rick Jones.
<v Speaker 3>You saved my dumb life, and you're the first one
<v Speaker 3>that ever cared what happened to me, Rick Jones orphan, And.
<v Speaker 4>So whoever cares Rick Jones orphan, He says, that's the
<v Speaker 4>best thing.
<v Speaker 1>So much Gamma radiation, that something's bound.
<v Speaker 4>Too much gamma radiation.
<v Speaker 1>Are they're gonna spring us all?
<v Speaker 3>Buddy?
<v Speaker 10>I'm I'm beginning to feel strange different, I.
<v Speaker 4>Said Jim Barnett Right there, here's what the fuck?
<v Speaker 3>Oh I get a static.
<v Speaker 1>That's a guy your counter to measure radiation in.
<v Speaker 4>It is wild? What what's wearing a wild? Dude? Hey,
<v Speaker 4>you just dissolved into the green man.
<v Speaker 3>Ye out of my way.
<v Speaker 4>He's holding up, he's.
<v Speaker 12>Tearing the sher in here or one out.
<v Speaker 4>Alk wants out. He's pounding in the cage wall.
<v Speaker 12>Look what that man?
<v Speaker 7>Man?
<v Speaker 4>That's perfect. Look at this crunch am, it says of
<v Speaker 4>the TV.
<v Speaker 1>Screen to get older, Doc, wait to word.
<v Speaker 3>Wait for me, you saved my life. No, you need
<v Speaker 3>me wait silently. The Monstrous by England was once Bruce
<v Speaker 3>Benner broke Choose in the Shadows.
<v Speaker 4>Yes, I love it so much. Isn't that that's wild?
<v Speaker 4>That's the story. It's the ord story. And look you
<v Speaker 4>you think about Hulking up right transforming into this beast
<v Speaker 4>mode guy from Bruce Banner. You think about the fact
<v Speaker 4>that you see Hulk's shirt ripping and tearing the threads
<v Speaker 4>around his bulging muscula chuyup.
<v Speaker 6>It's all here. It all comes from it, It all
<v Speaker 6>comes from its.
<v Speaker 11>La Fan Wrestling podcast with Jack and and Jpisio.
<v Speaker 12>La Fan Wrestling Podcast.
<v Speaker 6>One funny thing about the about that, about that, that
<v Speaker 6>that little series. Do you know that there was a
<v Speaker 6>significant amount of talent from the Rank.
<v Speaker 4>And Bass Rude alf Red Nose Reindeer. Are you serious? Really?
<v Speaker 6>Like the voice of of Bruce Banner was the fucking
<v Speaker 6>the dentist elf. What's his fucking name? Hermie, Hermie, Yep,
<v Speaker 6>that's Hermie. Uh, Donner is a voice, and uh the mom.
<v Speaker 4>Is also a voice. Yep. Yeah, I love it so yeah.
<v Speaker 6>Then by the nineteen seventies, Marvel and Universal are in
<v Speaker 6>a deal. Universal has licensed some of the properties, including
<v Speaker 6>Incredible Hulk and Universal Chief Frank Price contacted producer, writer,
<v Speaker 6>director Kenneth Johnson, who was He was fresh off working
<v Speaker 6>He had created The Bionic Woman that show, and he
<v Speaker 6>was also a director and producer on The Six Million
<v Speaker 6>Dollar Man, The Original Steve Austin. If you will there. Johnson, however,
<v Speaker 6>not a comic book fan. Here is a clip of
<v Speaker 6>him from a behind the scenes interview for the I
<v Speaker 6>Think the first season of the Incredible Hulk series.
<v Speaker 7>When Universal first came to me with the idea of
<v Speaker 7>doing one of the Marvel Comics superheroes, Frank Price called
<v Speaker 7>me and said, we've just acquired the rights to five
<v Speaker 7>of them.
<v Speaker 1>Which one would you like to do?
<v Speaker 7>And I said, gee, none of them, Frank, I just
<v Speaker 7>don't connect to people in spandex and primary colors.
<v Speaker 1>And my wife Susie had.
<v Speaker 7>Given me a lot of books and I was in
<v Speaker 7>the middle of reading it, and this is Victor Hugos
<v Speaker 7>Leamy's Robb the story of Jean Valjean. So I had
<v Speaker 7>all of that sort of Victor Hugo story in my head,
<v Speaker 7>and uh, and I realized that now there was a
<v Speaker 7>way to take a little bit of Victory Hugo, a
<v Speaker 7>little bit of Robert Lewis Stevenson and this ludicrous thing
<v Speaker 7>called The Incredible Hulk and turn it into a serious,
<v Speaker 7>psychological adult drama. I wanted it to not be comic
<v Speaker 7>bookie in any way.
<v Speaker 4>All Right, it's so funny because everybody accused Vince of
<v Speaker 4>going comic book ye to the whole presentation. No, exactly right.
<v Speaker 4>Yet everyone that adopted Hulk for the screen didn't think
<v Speaker 4>they were doing a comic book presentation.
<v Speaker 6>They didn't like this guy is so, I mean, I
<v Speaker 6>love how anti comic book this guy is. The disdain
<v Speaker 6>in his voice is it's very recognizable to pro wrestling thing. Yes,
<v Speaker 6>it absolutely is. It's like basically, you know, it's uh,
<v Speaker 6>it's it's I don't know. It's like Ad Asner, I
<v Speaker 6>did a wrestling movie. Exactly, that's the extent of it.
<v Speaker 6>It's exactly right. But I didn't really, I wasn't really
<v Speaker 6>doing wrestling. I didn't do it for the wrestling, you know.
<v Speaker 6>I did it for the drama of it all. Okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 6>you did it because you needed a fucking paycheck, your dumbass. Essentially,
<v Speaker 6>So one change, one big chance. He made one huge change.
<v Speaker 6>What's the Hulk's regular name, Bruce Banner? Right, he changed
<v Speaker 6>it to David Banner. Oh really, yes he did. Supposedly
<v Speaker 6>this was to distance the character from any relation to
<v Speaker 6>Bruce Hart.
<v Speaker 4>Not true. Here's his actual reason. This is it.
<v Speaker 7>One of the things I first things I did was
<v Speaker 7>changed David Banner's name from Bruce Banner. Why because the
<v Speaker 7>Bruce Banner thing is like Lois Lane, Peter Parker.
<v Speaker 1>It's all alliterativity.
<v Speaker 7>It all hearkens back to comic book roots, and I
<v Speaker 7>was trying to do everything I could to get the
<v Speaker 7>show away from comic book roots, and that kind of feeling.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, that's enough of that.
<v Speaker 6>I really, I really like, I can't. I can't even
<v Speaker 6>It's like, then then why do this?
<v Speaker 5>Then?
<v Speaker 4>Why do you know what you said? He has to
<v Speaker 4>I mean, and so because he has to, he's gonna
<v Speaker 4>I'm gonna gussy it up in his own mind.
<v Speaker 6>I know, I know, I mean, fortunately it obviously worked
<v Speaker 6>out fairly well.
<v Speaker 4>But there isn't there isn't that always the way these
<v Speaker 4>fucking cootal touchdowns. You go back and scratch the surface
<v Speaker 4>and there's some someone at the very corvid who didn't
<v Speaker 4>believe in it. That's the miracle, if it's a wonderful
<v Speaker 4>life to me, More than anything about the movies we've
<v Speaker 4>done on the cinemat, that's the one where the creator
<v Speaker 4>from the very beginning was like fuck, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 4>you know know, like it's gonna suck. Although the movie
<v Speaker 4>did not receive as we talked about, great critical acclaim
<v Speaker 4>upon its release and was pretty much a box office flop.
<v Speaker 6>Right, but longevity stands for something absolutely. You know that
<v Speaker 6>always is important, is that if it's if it if
<v Speaker 6>it can, if it can be timeless, if it can
<v Speaker 6>be timeless. I mean, hey, look, we know we'll think
<v Speaker 6>about it. Last year we talked about Wizard of Auz,
<v Speaker 6>same fucking thing right now, because he ended up doing
<v Speaker 6>timeless shit exactly exactly.
<v Speaker 4>Uh.
<v Speaker 6>There is another supposed reason. I read an interview with
<v Speaker 6>UH with Lou for Rigno, and I guess Stanley also
<v Speaker 6>said this, but the there is a suggestion that CBS,
<v Speaker 6>the uh you know, UH network that was going to
<v Speaker 6>air Incredible Hulk, that they requested that they change the
<v Speaker 6>name from Bruce because Bruce, I guess, was considered to
<v Speaker 6>be a gay name. Really yeah, and they didn't want
<v Speaker 6>it to be associated with any sort of homosexual.
<v Speaker 4>Say, Bruce Banner sounds a little bit like Bruce Jenner.
<v Speaker 4>I guess anybody knew where he was headed.
<v Speaker 6>I mean, did anyone know who Bruce Jenner was in
<v Speaker 6>nineteen seventy eight? Either eight it was eighties. I think
<v Speaker 6>the eighties is when he like, wasn't it the LA Olympics?
<v Speaker 6>But I don't know, like it was. It's it's it's
<v Speaker 6>it's I don't know. I don't know if that's true
<v Speaker 6>or not. I have no idea.
<v Speaker 4>One is seventy six, seventy six, oh a, right, seventy
<v Speaker 4>six to Carol on Yeah, all right, Caitlyn Jenner today.
<v Speaker 4>Maybe maybe that's it. Maybe they didn't.
<v Speaker 6>Maybe they wanted to know association with Bruce Jenner too.
<v Speaker 6>I don't know either way. It just I don't I
<v Speaker 6>don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like David,
<v Speaker 6>although you know they I guess they go from the
<v Speaker 6>David Bruce Banner is what he okay actually, and then's
<v Speaker 6>when they.
<v Speaker 4>Call him the whole thing.
<v Speaker 6>And important to say here, Stanley very supportive of the show.
<v Speaker 6>He loved it, and he for the most part liked
<v Speaker 6>Ken Johnson. And you know, one of the smart things
<v Speaker 6>that he that that one of the changes should say
<v Speaker 6>that Stanley thought was very smart was taking out any
<v Speaker 6>dialogue that the Hulk would say, the Hulk is just growls,
<v Speaker 6>whereas in the comics the Hulk would say, you know, Hulk, mad, Hulk,
<v Speaker 6>smash whatever. And because his reasoning was, you know, you
<v Speaker 6>just didn't want to have a blank page, you know,
<v Speaker 6>you you know, having dialogue was essential, or having some
<v Speaker 6>kind of communication was essential in a comic book, but
<v Speaker 6>you know, for the TV it just it just wouldn't work.
<v Speaker 6>So they took that out. And there was another thing.
<v Speaker 6>There was one thing, though, that stan Lee was adamant about,
<v Speaker 6>and this could have been, honest to god, if Ken
<v Speaker 6>Johnson had his way, I think it would have been
<v Speaker 6>an absolute catastrophe and disastrous for the show. But here's
<v Speaker 6>a Here's Johnson one more time. From that behind the
<v Speaker 6>scenes interview.
<v Speaker 7>I fought endlessly and unfortunately lost the battle about the
<v Speaker 7>color of the Hulk. I called stan Lee. He was
<v Speaker 7>a wonderful guy, and I said, stan what is he
<v Speaker 7>the envious Hulk? Why is he green?
<v Speaker 5>You know?
<v Speaker 1>Is he the jealous Hulk?
<v Speaker 14>You know?
<v Speaker 7>I said, when people are angry, they get red with rage.
<v Speaker 7>You know, the color of rage is red. He would
<v Speaker 7>be flushed with anger, and also, ps, of course it's
<v Speaker 7>a human color. Green is not. So I was anxious
<v Speaker 7>to try to pull it that way, and stan said, well,
<v Speaker 7>you know why we made him green was because he
<v Speaker 7>started out gray, but the printer couldn't make a good gray,
<v Speaker 7>and I thought he could make a pretty consistent green.
<v Speaker 7>So they said we can make green and I said okay,
<v Speaker 7>and I said, gee, Stan, that's really organic, you know.
<v Speaker 7>And I couldn't win that battle. So the Hulk unfortunately had.
<v Speaker 4>To remain green.
<v Speaker 7>There was no green makeup available, and we finally found
<v Speaker 7>I just.
<v Speaker 6>Want to pause here for a second. Yeah, please do
<v Speaker 6>this guy fucking sucks. Yeah, dude, if you turn the
<v Speaker 6>incredible Hulk red, you would not. He's sitting for this
<v Speaker 6>interview right now.
<v Speaker 4>There there, there is a red Hulk. But it's not
<v Speaker 4>like no one cares about it. I wonder why. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>I mean, you know, it's it's not Bruce Banner.
<v Speaker 8>You know.
<v Speaker 4>It's funny when when Terry first took on the Hulk name,
<v Speaker 4>everyone said he was green.
<v Speaker 6>Too, and he would wear red and yellow, that's what.
<v Speaker 4>But like I I can't.
<v Speaker 6>And then and the fact that he still seems bothered
<v Speaker 6>by it, it's like, do you understand?
<v Speaker 4>Stop dude, like you lost exactly, Like why are you
<v Speaker 4>relitigating this that that you could be let down gracefully?
<v Speaker 4>Like why why do you?
<v Speaker 11>Like?
<v Speaker 6>I get that you don't have clearly have no respect
<v Speaker 6>for comics. Okay, I see that, I get it, But
<v Speaker 6>do you understand that the Hulk sells because he's green.
<v Speaker 4>No, he doesn't understand that? Well why did? Why does?
<v Speaker 4>Why is Spider Man blue and red? Anyway, It's aren't
<v Speaker 4>even colors of a spider Let me make him black? Well?
<v Speaker 4>I mean who could? Also?
<v Speaker 6>I mean? Also, how does somebody get powers from a
<v Speaker 6>spider right?
<v Speaker 4>Exactly? Come on? Like, how much does it make that? Read?
<v Speaker 4>I a Superman wearing blue? Right? What's so super about that?
<v Speaker 14>I mean?
<v Speaker 4>Why would he wear blue? I don't know. I don't know, buddy.
<v Speaker 4>How about whatever takes off in the public's imagination is
<v Speaker 4>what you have a duty to a pold.
<v Speaker 6>How about the fact just because you don't agree with
<v Speaker 6>it doesn't mean it doesn't fucking work.
<v Speaker 4>How About some some things are beyond your purview as
<v Speaker 4>someone who's being asked to leverage an existing creation, as
<v Speaker 4>opposed to make up something to your own. Go make
<v Speaker 4>your own, Red Hulk. See if anyone I got a
<v Speaker 4>better idea? W don't you fucking bear your head in
<v Speaker 4>the sand? I think you said it? Well, bust this
<v Speaker 4>guy sucks, of course he does. There's always something like
<v Speaker 4>that when we cross the surface, some doubter who somehow
<v Speaker 4>got it across the finish line. Even though the.
<v Speaker 6>Can or there's always somebody who like who thinks they
<v Speaker 6>know better. Right, It's like, you don't, man, you really don't.
<v Speaker 6>You don't know what's better.
<v Speaker 4>He looks like the jolly Green Giant to me, right,
<v Speaker 4>No one ever said, why is the jolly green Giant green?
<v Speaker 4>Just the worst? Just the fucking worst? Wants I know?
<v Speaker 4>I mean, I don't know. I think I'll tell you what.
<v Speaker 6>Like it's supposed to be gamma radiation is supposed to
<v Speaker 6>come from nuclear whatever, nuclear.
<v Speaker 4>Yes, And he wants this guy to look like he's
<v Speaker 4>human flesh and blood.
<v Speaker 6>Like he's basically Santa Claus. Idiot fucking moron, Ken Johnson.
<v Speaker 6>But enough about slick. I hope I wonder if I
<v Speaker 6>wonder if Ken has a brother, Jim composer. Oh well, hey,
<v Speaker 6>maybe he's so disgusted with Ken that he put it
<v Speaker 6>that he out of the tee.
<v Speaker 4>I think I think there was a concern that Johnson
<v Speaker 4>sounded homosexual, So.
<v Speaker 6>I know, isn't isn't created by Ken Johnson a little
<v Speaker 6>more homosexual than Bruce Banner.
<v Speaker 4>Let's talk about that. God, especially we considered Ken's high
<v Speaker 4>school nickname. I like to Swallow Johnson. Oh yeah, I know,
<v Speaker 4>and that would never caught on. I can't imagine why
<v Speaker 4>this is what happens when you suggest the Hulk be
<v Speaker 4>ready exactly because we're not those guys. Well, you know what,
<v Speaker 4>when you it's not even that you you you The
<v Speaker 4>problem is this, This is this is where the problem is.
<v Speaker 4>It's not that he suggested the Hulk be read and
<v Speaker 4>then he lost the battle and said, ah, you know what.
<v Speaker 4>It's the fact that he said that.
<v Speaker 6>He didn't say, you know what, and I was wrong, yes,
<v Speaker 6>and that was it was the smart move. It's the
<v Speaker 6>fact that he still thinks it would have been to
<v Speaker 6>it that if he'd been read, and it's like, no, dude, know,
<v Speaker 6>you're a fucking idiot.
<v Speaker 4>Oh god.
<v Speaker 6>Now the actor they'd bring in to play David Bruce
<v Speaker 6>Banner is a man by the name of Bill Bixby,
<v Speaker 6>who's sad lead passed away in nineteen ninety three. You know,
<v Speaker 6>they were gonna make a they were going to make
<v Speaker 6>another TV movie before he passed away, but he died
<v Speaker 6>and they couldn't make it. I mean, this would be
<v Speaker 6>his kind of, in a way, his life's work. Bill
<v Speaker 6>Bill Bixby, I don't really do a profile on him.
<v Speaker 6>He's we have we have too much to talk about,
<v Speaker 6>and he didn't really play too much into the into
<v Speaker 6>the game of things. But they did need an actor
<v Speaker 6>to play the Hulk, and the first actor they had
<v Speaker 6>play the Hulk was a man by the name of
<v Speaker 6>and we and we actually know this guy pretty well,
<v Speaker 6>a man by the name of Richard Keel. Oh so
<v Speaker 6>it wasn't it was, No, it was not Richard Keel,
<v Speaker 6>who we know from our James Bond journey as playing Jaws. Yes,
<v Speaker 6>it's that fucking you know, Bigfoot silver right, the guy
<v Speaker 6>that we like. You can't help but assume he must
<v Speaker 6>be a wrestler, but he's not. He never had a
<v Speaker 6>wrestling career, but he should have.
<v Speaker 4>The movie qualifies because of how much he looks like.
<v Speaker 4>He's also in a happy Gilmore.
<v Speaker 6>Yes, yes he is, Yes he is, and so he
<v Speaker 6>and may actually went so far as to shoot some
<v Speaker 6>of the pilot with Richard Keel.
<v Speaker 4>Yes, as the whole as massive as Richard Keel was.
<v Speaker 4>Let me tell you, if he gets the job instead
<v Speaker 4>of Loof for Rigno, Terry Bolea does not get called
<v Speaker 4>the Hulk, can get called the Hulk. He doesn't resemble
<v Speaker 4>him anymore. In fact, Andre would resemble the Hulk more
<v Speaker 4>than Yes, yeah, he absolutely would. Now here here again,
<v Speaker 4>thank thank god for someone who actually fucking reads comics,
<v Speaker 4>because the son of Universal chief Frank Price, he was
<v Speaker 4>on set and he looked up at Keel. This is
<v Speaker 4>the story anyway, he saw Richard Keel and his Hulk
<v Speaker 4>makeup and he said, that's not the Hulk. He looks fake. Wow.
<v Speaker 4>So yep. And the best part is Richard Keel was like, great,
<v Speaker 4>I don't I'm not right for this anyway. Yeah, he
<v Speaker 4>probably hated the fucking makeup.
<v Speaker 6>He's got the he's got the height, he doesn't have
<v Speaker 6>the whiff. You know, he's just he's not a big guy.
<v Speaker 6>He's not a bodybuilder. He's just tall, you like, hiring
<v Speaker 6>Giant Baba to do it exactly, exactly, lanky, awkward, like
<v Speaker 6>he would just look like a stumbling moron instead of
<v Speaker 6>a Hulk write maniac exactly. And so you know, he
<v Speaker 6>was happy to go, and and you know what, it
<v Speaker 6>ended up being great because he after this, he booked
<v Speaker 6>the Spider who left Me and we go there you go.
<v Speaker 6>You know, he's like he got Jaws out of that,
<v Speaker 6>so they needed to repeat Richard Keel gets the job.
<v Speaker 6>We don't have Hulk Hogan exactly. These are all, like,
<v Speaker 6>you know, all these things. If if stan Lee had
<v Speaker 6>quit YEP in nineteen sixty, we would not have Hulk Hogan.
<v Speaker 6>Maybe Jack Kirby would have done it. I don't know,
<v Speaker 6>we don't know. We don't know these things. We don't
<v Speaker 6>know how influential either one was over. We just know
<v Speaker 6>that then Johnson turned the.
<v Speaker 4>Red, we would not have Hulk exactly. Okay, everything is
<v Speaker 4>hanging on by a tiny fucking thread, thank you? All right?
<v Speaker 6>Yes, like one change, one of these changes goes through
<v Speaker 6>and it's over, and we're not even Hell, we might
<v Speaker 6>not even be doing this.
<v Speaker 4>We want to have a podcast, no exactly does Hulkamania
<v Speaker 4>was where it all starts. That created the lifelong obsession.
<v Speaker 4>That's why exactly laps fans of our vintage are still
<v Speaker 4>around copiously consuming a podcast like this, because that was
<v Speaker 4>the true north. That's what you keep trying to go
<v Speaker 4>back to in your heart of hearts. I mean, hell,
<v Speaker 4>maybe you know, who knows what what what what what? What?
<v Speaker 4>Would have maybe the whole maybe maybe the world would
<v Speaker 4>have ended. You know, well, if the world would have ended,
<v Speaker 4>then yes, we wouldn't have had Hull cokein that's a
<v Speaker 4>good one.
<v Speaker 6>Well, no, I'm saying the world. I'm saying what if
<v Speaker 6>if we didn't have hull Cogan. We were saying, we
<v Speaker 6>wouldn't be here. What if we if for some reason,
<v Speaker 6>if the if the Timeline happened and the hul Cogan
<v Speaker 6>didn't have maybe the world ends, you know, maybe something happened,
<v Speaker 6>you know in that in that in that version of
<v Speaker 6>the of the of the Timeline, and it caused some
<v Speaker 6>kind of.
<v Speaker 4>Self there's no one to stand up to sodom usin exactly,
<v Speaker 4>it takes over the whole world exactly, or any sort
<v Speaker 4>of foreign tola. Yeah, absolutely, the eyetotala. You can keep going, yep,
<v Speaker 4>totally yeah. I mean then there's no one to beat.
<v Speaker 4>Then then iron Chik is world champion for twenty years
<v Speaker 4>and we're all speaking farsie. Thanks.
<v Speaker 6>Do you imagine and eating lovely pillowy bread. Oh all right,
<v Speaker 6>that's fine. I'm okay with that. I'm totally okay with that.
<v Speaker 4>Sounds delicious.
<v Speaker 6>So there would be some other guy who would wind
<v Speaker 6>up playing the Hulk and Lewis Jude for Rigno was
<v Speaker 6>born November ninth, nineteen fifty one, also in New York City.
<v Speaker 4>Okay.
<v Speaker 6>He is the first of two sons to Matthew and
<v Speaker 6>of Victoria for Rigno, both first generation Americans. Matthew's parents
<v Speaker 6>immigrated from this. I should have fucking plugged in, I
<v Speaker 6>should have fucking the town Tala.
<v Speaker 4>Well look there's another parallel, right you got, yeah, you
<v Speaker 4>got you got a son of Italian immigrant, right, I mean,
<v Speaker 4>for hope it was one more generation, but still.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, exactly, yeap. So Matthew's parents from Salerno and Victoria's
<v Speaker 6>from BMSC. Matthew served in the army in World War Two,
<v Speaker 6>so along with Stanley, but he was not part of
<v Speaker 6>the right, not part of the playwright division. But he
<v Speaker 6>joined the NYPD. There was a neat article in there
<v Speaker 6>about him that I found where he actually inherited a
<v Speaker 6>bunch of land.
<v Speaker 4>Luf Rigno did. No, No, his dad, matt for rigand
<v Speaker 4>his dad, yeah, he it out in New Hampshire where
<v Speaker 4>he could lift the boulders.
<v Speaker 6>No, no, it was still in Italy. It was still
<v Speaker 6>in Italy. He inherited like a ton of land. And
<v Speaker 6>you know, I don't know if he didn't. There was
<v Speaker 6>no follow ups saying because he wasn't sure if he
<v Speaker 6>was gonna, you know, take it all. But he could have.
<v Speaker 6>He might have made a ton of money with that land,
<v Speaker 6>but I don't know. I don't know. Again, there was
<v Speaker 6>no follow up with it. But he did join the
<v Speaker 6>after he was out of the Army, he joined the NYPD.
<v Speaker 6>There was a I did find a story in the
<v Speaker 6>Daily News dated July twenty ninth, nineteen fifty four. They
<v Speaker 6>were listing a couple of different police stories and one
<v Speaker 6>of them was about Matthew Ferrigno. Patrolman Matthew Ferrigno, twenty nine,
<v Speaker 6>of thirteen forty two East Fifth Street in Brooklyn, out
<v Speaker 6>for a drive with his wife. Was out for a
<v Speaker 6>drive with his wife and two small sons. He stopped
<v Speaker 6>a rough rider on Avenue and an Ocean parkway, but
<v Speaker 6>the motorists roared off when the cop identified himself. After
<v Speaker 6>a sixty mile an hour chase punctuated by three pistol shots,
<v Speaker 6>the car got away.
<v Speaker 4>Jesus fucking find out and now, thanks to the Daily News,
<v Speaker 4>that guy knows exactly where this cop lives.
<v Speaker 12>Exactly right.
<v Speaker 6>I fucking put the goddamn address in exactly like you.
<v Speaker 4>I never understood why they do that. Why do they
<v Speaker 4>I definitely don't understand why they do it for a
<v Speaker 4>police officer, But why do I do it?
<v Speaker 6>Anyway? Would why I think that kind of personal information away?
<v Speaker 4>It wasn't it wasn't you know? Do you think about
<v Speaker 4>the phone book right? Your ship was in there? Anyway?
<v Speaker 4>I think it was more just to be like that
<v Speaker 4>Matt Ferrigno and not another one, you know, to like
<v Speaker 4>I guess, but why couldn't you say Matt Frigno from Brooklyn?
<v Speaker 4>I never got it either, I mean, like I mean,
<v Speaker 4>I've seen so many stories where they give the exact
<v Speaker 4>addresses to people. Never understood that, so bizarre. So we
<v Speaker 4>know Lou has a very distinct talking voice. Do you
<v Speaker 4>know where it stems from? Are you? I don't know
<v Speaker 4>how family?
<v Speaker 6>It doesn't he have a speech impediment. He has a
<v Speaker 6>speech impediment, but it's due to severe hearing loss because
<v Speaker 6>when he was an infant, Figno apparently had suffered from
<v Speaker 6>some some undiagnosed ear infections that caused significant damage to
<v Speaker 6>his hearing.
<v Speaker 4>And if you think Terry Boleya is not going to
<v Speaker 4>find a way to thread that into his mythmaking about
<v Speaker 4>how he came to be the whole.
<v Speaker 6>Course, of course, so he had to wear these fucking
<v Speaker 6>big ass hearing aids. And it's pretty safe to assume
<v Speaker 6>that he wasn't, you know, obviously when in the nineteen sixties.
<v Speaker 16>Uh.
<v Speaker 6>And if you're wearing some big ass fucking hearing aids,
<v Speaker 6>you're not going to be ridiculed, bullieder made fun of.
<v Speaker 4>Right, not at all.
<v Speaker 5>No.
<v Speaker 4>And here's here's kind hearted in those good old yes.
<v Speaker 5>And here's for ingoa confirming that for us, we're in
<v Speaker 5>the old fashioned hearing aids. You know, a kid that
<v Speaker 5>they'll call me named like death Louis, Depth, Nute and everything.
<v Speaker 5>And you know, children don't have the psychological defens it
<v Speaker 5>to defend himself. And I was one of those. So
<v Speaker 5>that's why I would connect with the character, because anytime
<v Speaker 5>I felm devastated emotionally secure, I would just read the comic.
<v Speaker 5>It would give me a lot of information and hope,
<v Speaker 5>well when it happened. Anytime something happened to me. One
<v Speaker 5>time I got a five with some friend and I
<v Speaker 5>got into a fight that gave me a beaten. I
<v Speaker 5>remember I went home and I told my father my
<v Speaker 5>father gave me another beating. He said, they'll ever come
<v Speaker 5>home and tell me you got to beat and you
<v Speaker 5>did fight for yourself. So I learned at the early age.
<v Speaker 5>He instilled an incredible work ethic and you know how
<v Speaker 5>to love and hate relationship with my father. But that
<v Speaker 5>from the beginning had me focused to fight for myself,
<v Speaker 5>never taking second seat to anyone. Always fight harder than
<v Speaker 5>the average person to succeed and get one on what
<v Speaker 5>I want out of life, because no one couldn't give
<v Speaker 5>you anything. And I had to learn to have a
<v Speaker 5>platform to survive to do that, able to fight for
<v Speaker 5>myself because I never wanted to be the kind of
<v Speaker 5>person that people feel sorry for me, be a has
<v Speaker 5>been or be like a person that would they put
<v Speaker 5>labels on you.
<v Speaker 4>Was there some story about Terry saying his dad beat
<v Speaker 4>the shit out of him for getting shit beat out
<v Speaker 4>of him or something? Huh? Wasn't there a story like, yeah.
<v Speaker 6>We heard some of that, or at least he yelled
<v Speaker 6>at him, or was like this yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
<v Speaker 4>By the way, is it is it bad? Of me
<v Speaker 4>to say that despite him not having a hearing problem,
<v Speaker 4>Brunos ounds exactly like.
<v Speaker 6>It's totally true. Okay, Now he talks about reading the comics,
<v Speaker 6>Yes he does.
<v Speaker 4>By the way, it was people lay us screaming at
<v Speaker 4>him for coming home with an injured leg. That's right.
<v Speaker 4>I mean, there there is a significant I mean, you know.
<v Speaker 4>Frignan also says that he his father rejected him for
<v Speaker 4>not being the first like the hearing the hearing loss.
<v Speaker 4>His father resented the hearing loss, and because he wasn't
<v Speaker 4>a perfect he wasn't a perfect son, and so he
<v Speaker 4>also fucking you know, fregnances.
<v Speaker 6>He rejected him. Now, but but I want you to
<v Speaker 6>you know, he he he dove into the comic books. Okay,
<v Speaker 6>I I'm gonna play someone else first because I want
<v Speaker 6>to I want you to hear. I want you to
<v Speaker 6>hear Maddy for Rigno talk about the hearing loss and
<v Speaker 6>talk about lose young, young life, because it all plays
<v Speaker 6>into something that I'm going to talk about in a moment.
<v Speaker 6>But there's a clip from Pumping Iron, which we're going
<v Speaker 6>to talk about more in detail. But I actually thought
<v Speaker 6>it was interesting that this clip kind of said a lot.
<v Speaker 6>But this is Lou's dad, Maddy. This is him talking
<v Speaker 6>about the ear infection, like I said, and talking about
<v Speaker 6>the young life.
<v Speaker 17>Louis was only an infant in the crib and he
<v Speaker 17>developed this ear infection. We didn't know it at the time,
<v Speaker 17>and so Louis was about three years old we found
<v Speaker 17>out he was hot at here and I guess that's
<v Speaker 17>why Louis never took an interest in things other kids
<v Speaker 17>would take an interesting like television. He was late and
<v Speaker 17>learned to speak and everything. Louis would become a lip reader.
<v Speaker 17>Louis was a real skinny kid. I remember he couldn't
<v Speaker 17>even make the football team because he was too skinny.
<v Speaker 17>And then it started to buy muscle magazine. I remember
<v Speaker 17>I would take him to a bookstore and he would
<v Speaker 17>buy up all the old muscle books and he would
<v Speaker 17>read for hours. I remember two or three o'clock in
<v Speaker 17>the morning. I would find his light on and he
<v Speaker 17>would be reading the muscle books. So Louis decided to
<v Speaker 17>do a little body building.
<v Speaker 4>I had an Ald waightlifting.
<v Speaker 12>Set in the cellar.
<v Speaker 4>I used to do a little bit of it myself.
<v Speaker 4>Oh yeah, oh yeah, I mean is he is?
<v Speaker 3>That? Is that?
<v Speaker 4>People.
<v Speaker 6>Ayah, Now I wanted There are a couple of things
<v Speaker 6>I want to say here that I want to point
<v Speaker 6>out because I am I am skeptical of some things
<v Speaker 6>that have been said of these last two clips.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, first of all, the guy sounds like a fucking
<v Speaker 4>pro wrestling aulture.
<v Speaker 6>Seriously, Oh, for God's sake, Yeah, I mean listen, he
<v Speaker 6>he would have made he would have made so much
<v Speaker 6>money working for Vince Senior. Oh yeah, he would have
<v Speaker 6>made so much fucking money. And he came and his
<v Speaker 6>his involvement is absolutely fucking money.
<v Speaker 4>In a moment.
<v Speaker 6>So you heard, first of all, for Rick No talking
<v Speaker 6>about because of the bullying, he turned to comic books. Yes,
<v Speaker 6>his dad says, because of the bullying, he turned to
<v Speaker 6>muscle magazines.
<v Speaker 4>Yes.
<v Speaker 6>Now obviously that's from Pumping Iron, So it's I think
<v Speaker 6>it's interesting. The other interview was from much later, so
<v Speaker 6>after he's identified as the Incredible Hulk. So now he's
<v Speaker 6>using comic books, but in the seven he's using muscle magazines. Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>and it's like, hmm, Okay, something's a little off here.
<v Speaker 6>And I will tell you this too. This this to
<v Speaker 6>me and now you tell me this, I could be
<v Speaker 6>completely off base here by saying this. So he gets
<v Speaker 6>and he's skinny, and he's rejected, right yep. So would
<v Speaker 6>it surprise you if I told you that Lou Farigno,
<v Speaker 6>as an eleven year old was a fucking good, old
<v Speaker 6>fashioned slugger for his little league team?
<v Speaker 4>Oh my god, here we go. I asked you to
<v Speaker 4>do the incredible Hulk in this Retino, not Hulk Hogan
<v Speaker 4>and Terry Bolea. I mean, what the fuck is going
<v Speaker 4>on here?
<v Speaker 14>Like?
<v Speaker 4>Is the exact same story? You tell me?
<v Speaker 12>It?
<v Speaker 4>Seriously?
<v Speaker 8>Is?
<v Speaker 4>Now?
<v Speaker 6>You tell me I don't know it as well? You know,
<v Speaker 6>my kid doesn't play baseball. But if you're a slugger
<v Speaker 6>and you're written up in numerous times in the Brooklyn
<v Speaker 6>Paper the King's Courier for hitting multiple home runs per.
<v Speaker 4>Game, oh my god, here we go.
<v Speaker 6>Are you a skinny guy who can't fucking whatever? Don't
<v Speaker 6>you have to be, don't you? But don't you have
<v Speaker 6>to have a good arm, like strong arms to be
<v Speaker 6>able to fucking heal multiple home runs in a game?
<v Speaker 4>Sure? Sure it helps, yes, Like highly, you have to
<v Speaker 4>have some power. I mean, also, if you're so ridiculed,
<v Speaker 4>why the fuck are you playing sports? What do you mean, Like,
<v Speaker 4>if you're being made fun of by everybody, what makes
<v Speaker 4>you say I want to get involved with people? Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>well it's a fair point, but it's actually a way
<v Speaker 4>to try to give yourself a shot of.
<v Speaker 6>Maybe okay, maybe that's that's the case. But again, they're
<v Speaker 6>making him sound like he's this fucking yea And I
<v Speaker 6>was saying he's not an introvert. But I found it very,
<v Speaker 6>very interesting when I was looking him up that lou
<v Speaker 6>leuis j Farigno in Brooklyn is fucking hitting home runs
<v Speaker 6>all the time.
<v Speaker 4>I mean, I'm not going to be able to come
<v Speaker 4>off this. I had no idea this was coming, that
<v Speaker 4>this parallel with Terry Bullet's life was coming, right. I mean,
<v Speaker 4>I'm like, you know, here, I am thinking that he
<v Speaker 4>just cut copied loof Forerigno's gimmick in wrestling. He may
<v Speaker 4>have copied his whole fucking life story. Or you know,
<v Speaker 4>That's one thing Terry Bulay does is he hears that
<v Speaker 4>somebody else experienced something and he waits long enough and
<v Speaker 4>then pretends it happened to him, like Ready Savage being
<v Speaker 4>scouted by Major League Baseball teams, for instance.
<v Speaker 6>I'm also though of the idea that Louno is a worker,
<v Speaker 6>that he's a fucking Carney. He's making ship up to
<v Speaker 6>Arne's just like exactly like I'm just like I was.
<v Speaker 6>I I honestly was stunned. I mean again, maybe it's
<v Speaker 6>not a big of a deal for the people, but
<v Speaker 6>to me, it just didn't fit the narrative that he's
<v Speaker 6>that they're creating this image of a kid who can't
<v Speaker 6>fucking do anything for himself. Essentially, yeah, interesting, and yet
<v Speaker 6>he's he's he's certainly doing something very athletic. But he
<v Speaker 6>does start weight training at age thirteen, which like, well, shit,
<v Speaker 6>that seems I don't know, maybe I'm crazy as seems young.
<v Speaker 6>But he starts doing like serious weightlifting at age thirteen.
<v Speaker 6>And he attended the Brooklyn Technical High School. He learned
<v Speaker 6>how to weld there, and he he did, he did
<v Speaker 6>have a they do talk about it in in pumping
<v Speaker 6>in and he was He did work in like this
<v Speaker 6>in the steel business for a little while. Not the
<v Speaker 6>George steel business either, but.
<v Speaker 4>Well, Hogan attempted attended Tampa Technical Wrestling College at the
<v Speaker 4>Sporatorium U.
<v Speaker 6>Now here we go again. His His Wikipedia page says
<v Speaker 6>that he won his first his first bodybuilding competition right
<v Speaker 6>after high school in nineteen sixty nine. This is supposedly
<v Speaker 6>the Mister America competition, hosted by a masked man with
<v Speaker 6>a blonde handled bar mustache.
<v Speaker 4>Yes, yeah, this is this is Infinity's end days if I'm.
<v Speaker 6>Not day Yeah right, Well, I couldn't find any evidence
<v Speaker 6>of this at least in nineteen sixty nine. The first
<v Speaker 6>time he won or even placed in the Mister America
<v Speaker 6>competition was in nineteen seventy three, okay, when he won
<v Speaker 6>the tall division and overall competition. So the first evidence
<v Speaker 6>of him in a competition that I could find, at
<v Speaker 6>least that was that was noteworthy enough to be in
<v Speaker 6>the newspaper was in nineteen seventy one he placed fourth place,
<v Speaker 6>fourth place in the Mister Teenage America. But still not
<v Speaker 6>right after high school. That's still two years after high school.
<v Speaker 6>So again I'm feeling I'm feeling a constructed narrative here
<v Speaker 6>about this person. And yeah, he competed for his first
<v Speaker 6>IFBB Mister Universe in nineteen seventy three in Geneva, and
<v Speaker 6>he won. He won that one. No, wait, did you
<v Speaker 6>know who didn't? Yes, he did win. He won that one.
<v Speaker 6>What I loved is that in the Irish independent newspaper
<v Speaker 6>they spelled his name l E W I S for Rigno,
<v Speaker 6>and it was very much not that, but I liked that.
<v Speaker 6>He repeated the win in nineteen seventy four. Also in
<v Speaker 6>nineteen seventy four he entered his first Mister Olympia competition,
<v Speaker 6>and this is of course ring Arnold Schwarzenegger's Reign of Terror,
<v Speaker 6>where he wins six in a row.
<v Speaker 4>That was that was.
<v Speaker 6>That was number five in nineteen seventy four. Frigno won
<v Speaker 6>second place in nineteen seventy four. They don't really talk
<v Speaker 6>about that much in the in the movie that that
<v Speaker 6>Forigno also was in the seventy four Mister Olympia. They
<v Speaker 6>kind of make it like saying like that, this is
<v Speaker 6>the first time he's competing against Arnold Schwarzenegger.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, yeah, you're right, you know.
<v Speaker 6>And then the following year they're in they they returned
<v Speaker 6>to Mister Olympia, and this time there is this documentary
<v Speaker 6>crew filming right around them in what would become Pumping Iron,
<v Speaker 6>featuring clips like this.
<v Speaker 18>The greatest feeling you can get in the gym or
<v Speaker 18>the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym
<v Speaker 18>is the pump. Let's say you train your bieseps, blood
<v Speaker 18>is rushing into your muscles, and that's what we called
<v Speaker 18>a pump. Your muscles get a really tight feeling, like
<v Speaker 18>your skin is going to explode any minute. You know,
<v Speaker 18>it's really tired. It's like somebody blowing air into your muscle.
<v Speaker 18>It just blows up and it feels different. It feels fantastic.
<v Speaker 18>It's a satisfying to me as a coming is, you know,
<v Speaker 18>as having sex with a woman and coming. So can
<v Speaker 18>you believe how much I am in heaven. I'm like
<v Speaker 18>getting the feeling of coming in the gym, I'm getting
<v Speaker 18>the feeling of coming at home. I'm getting the feeling
<v Speaker 18>of coming backstage when I pump up, when I bose
<v Speaker 18>out in front of five thousand people, I get the
<v Speaker 18>same feeling. So I'm coming day and night. I mean,
<v Speaker 18>it's terrific, right, so you know I'm in heaven.
<v Speaker 4>Fremendous stuff. Now, tremendous stuff that is, without my doubt,
<v Speaker 4>my favorite fucking quote, that's amazing, our favorite clip from
<v Speaker 4>that fucking movie. I'm coming. When I'm on stage, I'm
<v Speaker 4>coming when I'm warming up backstage, I'm coming when I'm
<v Speaker 4>in Bubba's bedroom.
<v Speaker 6>I'm coming in Linda's pussy. I'm coming in Bubba's wife
<v Speaker 6>in Missus love sponges pussy. Jeez, have you seen You've
<v Speaker 6>seen it, right? Have you seen Bumping In?
<v Speaker 3>Oh?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah I have.
<v Speaker 12>Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, that's a fucking wild movie. It's a wild It
<v Speaker 4>seemed like it could be real. It seems like they
<v Speaker 4>put on it's a good thing. You said that. Actually,
<v Speaker 4>that's an interesting thing, you said. So let's talk about
<v Speaker 4>the history of this movie a little bit here. So
<v Speaker 4>in nineteen seventy four, uh photographer George Butler and writer
<v Speaker 4>Charles Gaines, So they collaborated with Schwarzenegger to write a
<v Speaker 4>book called Pumping Iron and this actually it's kind of
<v Speaker 4>it's funny this the book actually was the first real
<v Speaker 4>mainstream uh like door opening to the world of bodybuilding.
<v Speaker 4>It just happened to be overshadowed by the movie, right,
<v Speaker 4>But for three years, basically the book was was kind
<v Speaker 4>of the thing, and it kind of opened a lot
<v Speaker 4>of peop people's eyes to the world of bodybuilding. And
<v Speaker 4>so the next year they decided to turn it into
<v Speaker 4>a movie. And I don't. I mean, I imagine, obviously
<v Speaker 4>the book can't be like the movie is. Obviously, you know,
<v Speaker 4>it can't be the same thing, because the movie is
<v Speaker 4>about something very very specific. I don't know.
<v Speaker 6>Again, I didn't really read too much into the book,
<v Speaker 6>but they wont turned into the movie. But Arnold didn't
<v Speaker 6>want to do it because he was ready to retire.
<v Speaker 6>He was actually going to retire after number five. But
<v Speaker 6>so they had to convince him. I think they convinced
<v Speaker 6>him with fifty thousand dollars, yeah, to compete for a
<v Speaker 6>six mister Olympia so they could follow him around. And
<v Speaker 6>at the same time, the publisher of Muscle magazine, a
<v Speaker 6>guy by the name of Joe Wheer, he's keeping an
<v Speaker 6>eye like, he become aware of Lou Farigno and he
<v Speaker 6>saw him as a threat to Schwarzenegger's crown, and essentially Weader,
<v Speaker 6>through his magazine, created and pushed this rivalry, which the
<v Speaker 6>movie then adopted to be the main focal point. And
<v Speaker 6>like you just said, you just said that it doesn't
<v Speaker 6>seem real and the making of the movie really, honestly,
<v Speaker 6>it has a lot of distinct similarities with pro wrestling. Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>personalities are jacked up like they're they're they're real personalities,
<v Speaker 6>but they just they kicked it up. They purposely kicked
<v Speaker 6>it up a notch. Some scenarios were created for the
<v Speaker 6>film that weren't real. It's fine, now, we heard lose
<v Speaker 6>Dad Matt, right, Yeah, the movie shows Matt as lous trainer.
<v Speaker 6>Now would it surprise you that a quote documentary added
<v Speaker 6>this in like this has made this into a fictional scenario,
<v Speaker 6>like this was not real. This is a clip from
<v Speaker 6>It would surprise me greatly. Yes, this is a clip
<v Speaker 6>from Raw Iron. This is hilarious. Raw Iron is a
<v Speaker 6>documentary about the making of the documentary Pumping Iron. Maybe
<v Speaker 6>there'll be a documentary about the making of Raw Iron
<v Speaker 6>about the making of Pumping Iron.
<v Speaker 4>Anyway, here, this is here. Listen to this.
<v Speaker 19>What Butler invented was Matti Ferignou's actual involvement in his
<v Speaker 19>son's bodybuilding career.
<v Speaker 6>What Butler invented? What Butler invented? Butler is the director
<v Speaker 6>of the film, invented.
<v Speaker 4>Not organic.
<v Speaker 5>I see, my father never really was really involving bodybuilding,
<v Speaker 5>and they asked him to be in the film, that
<v Speaker 5>that would be good to have father's son.
<v Speaker 14>In the movie, Maddy Fregno is a stage father to
<v Speaker 14>the best of intentions, and Maddie had a very clear
<v Speaker 14>idea of what Louis should be doing, and they would
<v Speaker 14>just unroll in front of my eyes when you.
<v Speaker 4>Step out there.
<v Speaker 20>Boy, remember all those grueling nights and mornings in the gym,
<v Speaker 20>and this is it, This is the reward, and we wanted.
<v Speaker 5>Be kept putting in my head this is your last chance.
<v Speaker 5>There's one seemed to see me killing dumbbells, one hundred
<v Speaker 5>pounds dumbell Afterwards my father go, boy, what a workout,
<v Speaker 5>Oh boy, what a workout. That's because he was holding
<v Speaker 5>one of the dumb bells.
<v Speaker 4>He's the one who tired.
<v Speaker 1>Remind me what you're going to show them?
<v Speaker 20>And then you go boom like you're saying, take a
<v Speaker 20>look at this, hanker man something like that.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, you're trying that.
<v Speaker 5>And he did the best he could the fact, because
<v Speaker 5>at the time I have the speech problem and everything,
<v Speaker 5>I was not able to conduct myself with interviewers to
<v Speaker 5>try to be my voice.
<v Speaker 19>The unfolding relationship between father and son added an unexpected
<v Speaker 19>layer of tension and emotional richness to the film, as
<v Speaker 19>Maddie demonized Arnold. He wore his son down.
<v Speaker 1>There's only one thing in mind, that's a big german.
<v Speaker 1>So we've got to beat Arnold.
<v Speaker 20>He's been up there too long, and you waited nine
<v Speaker 20>years for this shot, right.
<v Speaker 21>Be careful. He's going to try every trick. If he
<v Speaker 21>sees you look a little better, he's going to try
<v Speaker 21>and do something. He's going to try to make you
<v Speaker 21>look bad out there. Watch every movie. Makes try not
<v Speaker 21>to engage in conversation with him.
<v Speaker 5>And most of the time I really wanted to say,
<v Speaker 5>let me speak for myself, let me be who I am. Please.
<v Speaker 5>You know this is not how I want to conduct myself.
<v Speaker 5>That's not how I want to be in the film.
<v Speaker 20>Look, no, no, I was not rearding me.
<v Speaker 4>I was beating down. K fabe, k fabe. Yep, you
<v Speaker 4>know it's no fucking my story where this comes from.
<v Speaker 4>There's a reason bodybuilders and pro wrestlers have always made bedfellows.
<v Speaker 4>They're both professional liars. Yes, and I know this is
<v Speaker 4>a filmmaker putting this on Lou and not Lou concocting it.
<v Speaker 4>But man, is his dad ready his dad ready to
<v Speaker 4>take to to step into that role. No, stage right there.
<v Speaker 4>I mean, he sounds like a fucking wrestling manager. He
<v Speaker 4>sounds exactly. He sounds like Grand Wizard.
<v Speaker 6>Yep, he fucking does. You're absolutely writing here the seventies manager,
<v Speaker 6>I mean. And they further the manipulation in the way they.
<v Speaker 4>Do the movie.
<v Speaker 6>Schwarzenegger is always portrayed in the California sunshine, always with
<v Speaker 6>people happy, carefree, laughing, you know, like you know, just
<v Speaker 6>fully confident and and.
<v Speaker 4>Whatever, which is why Hull Cogan had to be from
<v Speaker 4>Venice Beach, California, by the way.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, with Farigno, they chose to film him in a
<v Speaker 6>dark Brooklyn gym, wow, with no other bodybuilders, no, no like,
<v Speaker 6>no scene, no like no scene community. You know, it's
<v Speaker 6>just it's just local, like his local friends and bums
<v Speaker 6>and whatever who are working out. Nobody in the same
<v Speaker 6>like league with him. And he's kind of portrayed like
<v Speaker 6>a fucking beast or a caged animal, which kind of
<v Speaker 6>helps pay off down the road. But it's like they're
<v Speaker 6>they're manipulating this whole thing. And I get it, you
<v Speaker 6>kind of have to, you have to tell your story,
<v Speaker 6>but to what degree, Yeah, it.
<v Speaker 4>Completely introduce like characteristics is kind of a crossing the line. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>it's it's it's really it's it's bizarre. It's bizarre to
<v Speaker 4>look at Lou and be like, wouldn't it be great
<v Speaker 4>if for some reason his dad cracked whip the whole time, right, Like,
<v Speaker 4>that's like, where do you get that from? Why is
<v Speaker 4>that necessary? I mean, I guess he saw the potential
<v Speaker 4>of it, and it I mean, obviously it plays well
<v Speaker 4>in the film, there's no question about it does. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>but it's a totally different.
<v Speaker 6>Character, but it but it also destroys Lou as a
<v Speaker 6>person like he as well, we'll you know, we'll talk
<v Speaker 6>about in a moment. He kind of infantile, right, he
<v Speaker 6>looks infantile.
<v Speaker 4>He looks like just like a slave, yeah, and helpless,
<v Speaker 4>like right, actually severely disabled almost.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, and it it fucks with his head for a
<v Speaker 6>few years afterwards, like his legit head, because he's he's
<v Speaker 6>being played in a way, you know, he's being played.
<v Speaker 4>Here.
<v Speaker 6>This is a This is a clip from from the
<v Speaker 6>film from Pumping Iron. Come on anyways, he injecting himself
<v Speaker 6>with steroids.
<v Speaker 4>It's different on audio, let me tell you, with no video.
<v Speaker 1>God, come on enough one most same way that I'm
<v Speaker 1>not notified. The more way, let's go, I need time,
<v Speaker 1>peril sometimes a need signed.
<v Speaker 5>Here.
<v Speaker 1>You can come on, I want to see you. You're
<v Speaker 1>gonna do.
<v Speaker 12>You're gonna wipe him out.
<v Speaker 1>Come on, come on, you're gonna do it.
<v Speaker 4>Come on, she'sus Christ. What sounds like Patterson and Steve
<v Speaker 4>Lombardi in the hotel. For the guy's sake. This is
<v Speaker 4>guy's working out. That's what I do in the gym.
<v Speaker 4>I'm screaming Arnold Arnold, donld Nold and the prize. Baby.
<v Speaker 4>It's amazing that this is the guy that Terry Bulea
<v Speaker 4>would Oh my god.
<v Speaker 6>I mean he you know, uh he had you know
<v Speaker 6>Freekno admits Listen, Arnold was his hero. He was the
<v Speaker 6>guy that he admired. He's the guy he wanted to beat.
<v Speaker 6>He wanted to beat his hero. You know, he had
<v Speaker 6>that dream. So I get it. But they're also like
<v Speaker 6>the dad is is like pushing this this agenda on him.
<v Speaker 6>And that's not even including Schwarzenegger. Which Schwarzenegger's psychout techniques
<v Speaker 6>in this fucking movie are unbelievable. I mean, he admits,
<v Speaker 6>and I want to play a clip where he admits this,
<v Speaker 6>he admits to using mind games to fuck with his opponents,
<v Speaker 6>especially if he thinks they might beat him, and he
<v Speaker 6>does it with such ease and confidence it's actually frightening.
<v Speaker 6>It's actually frightening, honestly. And what I find to be
<v Speaker 6>funny is that they keep portraying Arnold as the hero.
<v Speaker 6>Oh no, is he healed, but he's not, like and
<v Speaker 6>they keep calling him like they they call for Rigno
<v Speaker 6>the antagonist, and I'm like, no, I don't feel that
<v Speaker 6>I cheer for for Regino in this movie. I don't
<v Speaker 6>cheer for Arnold, you know. And and even in the way,
<v Speaker 6>like it's kind of funny again, they're trying to make
<v Speaker 6>this kind of babyface thing with him out being in
<v Speaker 6>the son and being happy, but I actually think of
<v Speaker 6>it as being spoiled and entitled, and I think of
<v Speaker 6>the guy who's coming from nothing to come and try
<v Speaker 6>to get the get the you know, get the win,
<v Speaker 6>get the throne. So it's very interesting, like, but but
<v Speaker 6>they really believe that they portrayed Schwarzenegger as the good
<v Speaker 6>guy in this movie, or that's what they were trying
<v Speaker 6>to do, And I'm like, I don't think that at
<v Speaker 6>all I think if Schwarzenegger as a dick, complete dick like,
<v Speaker 6>I don't think he's out smarting anybody. I think he's
<v Speaker 6>I think he's being manipulative. Right, And I'm going to
<v Speaker 6>play another clip from the movie. It's actually kind of
<v Speaker 6>a compilation of a couple of clips, but it's it's
<v Speaker 6>both Matt and Arnold in their own way, psyching out
<v Speaker 6>lou and also swarzing explaining his techniques that he's done
<v Speaker 6>on other people as well.
<v Speaker 1>How do you feel, lou I'll never feel sorry for yourself.
<v Speaker 20>Remember, if you're training hard, he may be training twice
<v Speaker 20>as hard. You just got to keep coming back stronger.
<v Speaker 4>Right all the way, Louie.
<v Speaker 19>You'll never get this chance again, all the.
<v Speaker 1>Way, Okay, Louis, No, no, no, no. Listener.
<v Speaker 20>When you when you come out here and you're out
<v Speaker 20>of here right now, they're all waiting for you, Louie.
<v Speaker 20>They want to see what you got. They've never seen
<v Speaker 20>you before. You turn your legs right. Then you look
<v Speaker 20>at the crowd, Louis. They're all looking at your flesh.
<v Speaker 20>Bulbs are going to go up and everything. Then you
<v Speaker 20>put your arms like this. You look at your arms
<v Speaker 20>like you're admiring, right, you're admiring what you're going to
<v Speaker 20>show them, and then you go boom like you're saying.
<v Speaker 4>How does this fucking guy know what he's talking about?
<v Speaker 4>It doesn't. And it's now that you've revealed this to me, right,
<v Speaker 4>it's it's becoming much more obvious that he was just
<v Speaker 4>giving this most generic advice. It's like the UFC corner
<v Speaker 4>man that just says you got to turn it on,
<v Speaker 4>man rock, instead of telling you exactly what to do.
<v Speaker 4>You have no real strategy, you have no knowledge. He's
<v Speaker 4>a fucking more technical insight, no actual specific advice.
<v Speaker 20>Exactly take a look at this hanker man something like that. Okay,
<v Speaker 20>you're trying not look actually accident. No, no, down here, Louis,
<v Speaker 20>I tell you, look at your arms down here, look
<v Speaker 20>at bo right, that's it, Adam boy.
<v Speaker 1>Good.
<v Speaker 20>Now hold that pose because remember, your arms are bigger
<v Speaker 20>than all and they want to see them.
<v Speaker 9>Right.
<v Speaker 20>These people have never seen your arms. They're seeing honor.
<v Speaker 20>So hold that pose a while, and I say this post.
<v Speaker 20>Just touch your body a little, because there's people on
<v Speaker 20>this side of the theater, and there's people on this
<v Speaker 20>side of the theater.
<v Speaker 1>They want to see you.
<v Speaker 17>So just tut your body just slightly like this, right,
<v Speaker 17>try that alone.
<v Speaker 4>Oh the boy, you.
<v Speaker 18>Have to do everything possible to win. No, no matter
<v Speaker 18>what I said at the day of the contest, if
<v Speaker 18>he comes in his best shape and he's equally as
<v Speaker 18>good as I am, or if let's say it's a
<v Speaker 18>few percent better as I am, I spend with him
<v Speaker 18>one night, I go downstairs and put us together in
<v Speaker 18>a room, you know, to help him for tomorrow's contests.
<v Speaker 18>And and that.
<v Speaker 1>Night he will never forget will I will mix him up.
<v Speaker 18>He would come so ready to South Africa, so strong,
<v Speaker 18>but the time the nineties over the next morning, he
<v Speaker 18>will be ready to lose. I mean, I would just
<v Speaker 18>talk him into that. That's no problem to do you now.
<v Speaker 18>And so all those things you know are available, and
<v Speaker 18>so if they're available, he might as well use them.
<v Speaker 18>So that's why it doesn't matter if he comes in
<v Speaker 18>shape out of shape. If he comes out of shape,
<v Speaker 18>it he says, has less hustle.
<v Speaker 1>For me, you know. And if he's in shape, fine,
<v Speaker 1>I hope he is.
<v Speaker 4>But you couldn't pull us with Franco. Franco's pretty smart.
<v Speaker 18>Franko is pretty smart. But Franko is a child, and
<v Speaker 18>when it comes to the day of the contest, I'm
<v Speaker 18>his father. He comes to me for advices, so it's
<v Speaker 18>not that hard for me to give him the wrong advices.
<v Speaker 9>Eight years ago and some fellow came to me into
<v Speaker 9>the gym and said, I want to win, mister Munich,
<v Speaker 9>you know, and I am a perfect poser, and I
<v Speaker 9>have a fantastic body, and I just want to learn
<v Speaker 9>a new posing routine, a new style, you know, something
<v Speaker 9>way out which nobody expects. So I said, well, let
<v Speaker 9>me see you posing routine you have right now. But
<v Speaker 9>when the guy took his clothes off and post for me,
<v Speaker 9>he looked like nothing number one and his posing was
<v Speaker 9>pad I mean, he was just I think he was crazy,
<v Speaker 9>you know. I thought, well, okay, if he thinks that
<v Speaker 9>he's the best post I'm going to pull a little
<v Speaker 9>trick on him.
<v Speaker 12>And so that's what I did.
<v Speaker 9>I told him, I said, listen, I have a new
<v Speaker 9>posting routine from America, said I'm correspondence with all the
<v Speaker 9>top athletes in America. And I told him that the
<v Speaker 9>new thing is that he has to scream while he's posing.
<v Speaker 9>And he looked at me, and he says, wow, that's
<v Speaker 9>a new idea. He says, you know, they will really
<v Speaker 9>come out impressive. When you go out down stage and
<v Speaker 9>he scream, people can't miss you. They will look at
<v Speaker 9>you and I scream, and that's it. So I taught
<v Speaker 9>him how to scream, you know. And first of all,
<v Speaker 9>I oiled him obviously up his body, you know, it's
<v Speaker 9>really heavy oil and everything. So that was standing dinner
<v Speaker 9>in the shower room, and I taught him to how
<v Speaker 9>to do it. You know, I mean, the higher your
<v Speaker 9>arms go up, the higher you make a screaming noise.
<v Speaker 9>And the lower your arms come down while they're posing
<v Speaker 9>in the lower.
<v Speaker 1>The noise, you know, like a.
<v Speaker 12>Oh yeah, this kind of a thing.
<v Speaker 9>Well, I practiced with him for two hours, spent a
<v Speaker 9>lot of time on developing his new posing within and
<v Speaker 9>he mastered.
<v Speaker 12>It very well.
<v Speaker 9>He was screaming really loud and I and you know,
<v Speaker 9>the high and level. And he went to the Mister
<v Speaker 9>Munich contest and I told him and he walks out,
<v Speaker 9>he has to scream loud, you know, run out, and
<v Speaker 9>so he did. And obviously people weren't ready for that
<v Speaker 9>at all, you know, So he went out there he
<v Speaker 9>screamed cloud when three or four poses with some loud
<v Speaker 9>screaming and they carried him off his face swim.
<v Speaker 12>I was totally nuts.
<v Speaker 10>I have noticed it all.
<v Speaker 4>So he totally fucked that guy. Wow, this guy, if
<v Speaker 4>he keeps up this level of manipulation, he could become
<v Speaker 4>the governors.
<v Speaker 6>Just fush Now now he's now he's having breakfast with
<v Speaker 6>the frigos. Yes, okay, in South Africa, he's having breakfast.
<v Speaker 12>What can I say?
<v Speaker 9>The guys are sacking in the money, coming.
<v Speaker 17>Down what he was doing, lay down in the bus
<v Speaker 17>in the back.
<v Speaker 9>Hello, this is a master plan here this morning, right
<v Speaker 9>young Hey.
<v Speaker 18>I'm here.
<v Speaker 9>Know for six days nobody invited me for breakfast. This
<v Speaker 9>morning they say, come for breakfast with us. Come heavenize breakfast.
<v Speaker 9>She's talking about pumping up, he's talking about cycking, she's
<v Speaker 9>talking about my mother.
<v Speaker 4>You're the king of kings.
<v Speaker 12>Thanks rubbing it in?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 3>Are you?
<v Speaker 5>How are you doing?
<v Speaker 1>Some kind of word? It's a little tired. I kind
<v Speaker 1>of wake up.
<v Speaker 4>They don't come nicer than you want.
<v Speaker 20>I'm a nice I wouldn't turn my back on you
<v Speaker 20>on within five hundred yarbs.
<v Speaker 4>You trust me, I should have you early on, soverybody
<v Speaker 4>could relax.
<v Speaker 12>I should have it in a month for him. He's
<v Speaker 12>not even in shape yet.
<v Speaker 4>I mean she didn't.
<v Speaker 12>He didn't get the timing right.
<v Speaker 4>I'm telling you a month from that would have been
<v Speaker 4>perfect for you.
<v Speaker 9>But then I get bigger do it again, so you know,
<v Speaker 9>it doesn't matter. What the hell, let's get let's get
<v Speaker 9>it over and if you're a diet this year, you
<v Speaker 9>just never had the Olympia, but you had twice the
<v Speaker 9>universe with the health.
<v Speaker 4>That's a debate, doesn't one with elect five? Ye, that's amazing.
<v Speaker 9>Can you imagine the feeling I have six times miss Olympia.
<v Speaker 4>I you could go on forever.
<v Speaker 12>It goes in my mind when it's thing we're going
<v Speaker 12>to get so tough.
<v Speaker 9>I call my mother yesterday and I say that one's.
<v Speaker 4>Just congratulations on you know.
<v Speaker 5>This guy.
<v Speaker 4>Go to help him.
<v Speaker 19>Pump up, calm him down, to help him.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, I don't screwing up this time. I don't want
<v Speaker 4>you to not pumping normally. D Wow, that's an aster at work.
<v Speaker 6>I mean, look at the way he fucking like just
<v Speaker 6>and I don't know how much of that was was
<v Speaker 6>a put on. I mean people, some people say that
<v Speaker 6>it was a put on or whatever, but I also,
<v Speaker 6>you know, based on what Friedino says, and I kind
<v Speaker 6>of believe him in this is that is that he
<v Speaker 6>is psyched out from a number of different reasons, not
<v Speaker 6>the least of which is his own dad. But then
<v Speaker 6>Schwarzenegger also is just fucking putting it all on. I mean,
<v Speaker 6>he's he's he's like, you know, like manipulating from so
<v Speaker 6>many different places. First of all, talking about the idea
<v Speaker 6>that you know all you're trying to like me out,
<v Speaker 6>You'll try to psy like me out.
<v Speaker 4>Oh my god, you're gonna get my head, and then
<v Speaker 4>saying about but you know, I go to call my
<v Speaker 4>mind told her I won. Can you imagine sixth time,
<v Speaker 4>mister Olimbia, you imagine six time? And you know what?
<v Speaker 4>It got to the point, Okay, this is an out
<v Speaker 4>take and going to play and I want you to
<v Speaker 4>hear this because it got to this fucking point. The
<v Speaker 4>mind games got to foriing know so bad that this happened.
<v Speaker 4>This was an outtake. It's featured in uh raw Iron.
<v Speaker 12>So where do you think it changed?
<v Speaker 1>This other day?
<v Speaker 12>I would lose our You have the beast thank you,
<v Speaker 12>insents everything.
<v Speaker 20>You're gonna do king a long time, Arnod, You're gonna
<v Speaker 20>be king a long time.
<v Speaker 4>Schwartzen. They asked us for Regno, what are your chances?
<v Speaker 4>What are your chances? I'm gonna lose, You're gonna win? Wow,
<v Speaker 4>do the job? I mean, I'm like, what, what the fuck? Like,
<v Speaker 4>I think this requires some quiz show style of federal investigation.
<v Speaker 6>Seriously, and you know what, That's exactly what happened, because
<v Speaker 6>freak no good. They go out and he says during
<v Speaker 6>the during the the pre judging segment, which I don't understand.
<v Speaker 6>I don't understand why there's a pre judging segment. Can
<v Speaker 6>you explain that to me? I think we talked about
<v Speaker 6>I think we talked about it with Yeah, But like,
<v Speaker 6>I don't understand pre judging.
<v Speaker 4>What I feel like there's like I don't know, I'm
<v Speaker 4>really foggy on it, but I feel like there's something
<v Speaker 4>you you have to do to impress the judges that
<v Speaker 4>you you want to hold off into the last second
<v Speaker 4>and then you want to do something different to show
<v Speaker 4>on stage, like the judges want to see you in
<v Speaker 4>a condition before you do those finishing touch embellishments, to
<v Speaker 4>look ideal on the stage. But I think when you
<v Speaker 4>do that, you hide certain things the judges want to
<v Speaker 4>look for as far as like develop definition. That that's
<v Speaker 4>my rough memory of it. Well, Farino says when he
<v Speaker 4>went for the pre judging, he knew he wasn't gonna win.
<v Speaker 4>He knew he could feel it. And schwarzlag your place first.
<v Speaker 4>The other Guyge new Bray, Org new Bray, I don't
<v Speaker 4>know Gary Stridem much better. Gary Stridem South Africa, Garrant
<v Speaker 4>Stridem Garan's plates place second, and for Reigno placed third,
<v Speaker 4>and because there are only three competitors, Forigno place last, right.
<v Speaker 6>Last, and Forerigno said in a later interview that all
<v Speaker 6>he wanted was to have fun, like like Schwarzenegger. That's
<v Speaker 6>all he wanted to do. You know, he wanted it
<v Speaker 6>like he he he watched like that's what that was
<v Speaker 6>his dream. Like Schwartzenegger's out there being carefree, he's fucking
<v Speaker 6>signing autographs, he's joking around, he's having you know, he's
<v Speaker 6>just having the best time. And Forigno is like.
<v Speaker 4>In this.
<v Speaker 6>The narrator of the film calls Forerigno as serious as
<v Speaker 6>a heart attack. Yes, and that's exactly what he was.
<v Speaker 6>He says, serious as a heart attack, and like having
<v Speaker 6>the cameras around him, the director forcing his dad to
<v Speaker 6>train him. It just really made this whole thing a
<v Speaker 6>negative experience. Like he he he lost before this thing
<v Speaker 6>even started, he'd lost because that of.
<v Speaker 4>The two, Arnold's the one who would go on to
<v Speaker 4>do w W Hall of Fame and right, say Hull
<v Speaker 4>Cogan mid wrestlers, so entertaining, right, right, He's the one
<v Speaker 4>that's gonna be right involved in wrestling. Not for Igno,
<v Speaker 4>I know, well think, I mean exactly, it's so fucking backwards.
<v Speaker 11>He's a lapsed fan wrestling podcast with Jack Ncarno m
<v Speaker 11>jp Soo's.
<v Speaker 12>Fan Wrestling Podcast.
<v Speaker 6>Now, when they wrap the movie, they they actually so
<v Speaker 6>they filmed this in nineteen seventy five and they shot
<v Speaker 6>over one hundred hours of footage, but they ran out
<v Speaker 6>of money and so the film was delayed for two
<v Speaker 6>years until they could raise enough money to finish the
<v Speaker 6>movie and then release it. And when it did come out,
<v Speaker 6>and this is two years later, Farigno is horrified of
<v Speaker 6>what people are going to think of him after they
<v Speaker 6>see him. And again this is from raw Iron.
<v Speaker 5>When I sew it for the first time, made me
<v Speaker 5>very angry because I saw him as sure how I
<v Speaker 5>portrayed to Fay, people wouldn't like me. I want to say,
<v Speaker 5>people are going to look down on me because to
<v Speaker 5>the factory here to kifferent books, and she's deaf, he
<v Speaker 5>can't speak, she looked dumb in the film. Well, I'm
<v Speaker 5>trying to say to you. Without the time, I felt
<v Speaker 5>like a freak. But it wasn't like that. I didn't
<v Speaker 5>realize that within time. Have you one embraced me?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah? Everyone embraced him. Yeah.
<v Speaker 6>That and that is one of the key reasons what
<v Speaker 6>brought him to The Hulk. You know, this movie, this
<v Speaker 6>movie was important because it brought him into in the
<v Speaker 6>public spotlight in a way that he hadn't been before,
<v Speaker 6>and it resulted in him getting cast in The Hulk. Now, curiously,
<v Speaker 6>it is funny, so before I don't know the exact time.
<v Speaker 6>A lot of the timeline, the dates and whatnot in
<v Speaker 6>regards to the Incredible Hulk are a little bit fuzzy.
<v Speaker 6>I don't know when everything happened with The Hulk, Like,
<v Speaker 6>there's not a lot there's not a lot of dates
<v Speaker 6>in what I've been reading. So I don't know when
<v Speaker 6>Pumping Iron came out in relation to When the Hulk
<v Speaker 6>when they were filming The Incredible Hulk pilot, but I
<v Speaker 6>do know that what they supposedly they did actually talk
<v Speaker 6>to before they hired Richard Keel, they talked to Arnold
<v Speaker 6>Schwarzinger and Lou Farigno about doing it, but they both
<v Speaker 6>either they both of you had chose not to do it,
<v Speaker 6>or they decided not to go with them, and they
<v Speaker 6>went with Richard Kiel and Forno was he said he's
<v Speaker 6>convinced he could born. He was like he was born
<v Speaker 6>to play the Hulk. He said, there's no question about it.
<v Speaker 6>And he he said he could do it, and and
<v Speaker 6>they did. They they hired him. And obviously it's the
<v Speaker 6>role that even today that that's most recognized as is
<v Speaker 6>the Incredible Hulk. And of course, as we've said many times,
<v Speaker 6>it's for Reigno's association with the whole character that is
<v Speaker 6>the reason that brings us here today, of course, and
<v Speaker 6>the success of the of the TV series, and we're
<v Speaker 6>gonna talk about more about it later. But like I
<v Speaker 6>said before, there was uh, there were there were there
<v Speaker 6>was the pilot film and then there was a second
<v Speaker 6>So after the pilot film, the first TV movie, they
<v Speaker 6>did not not get picked up. CBS was not convinced
<v Speaker 6>that they could make a series out of it. Weren't
<v Speaker 6>convinced they could do a series. It was very successful,
<v Speaker 6>so that that's important to note. It was a very
<v Speaker 6>very successful TV movie. But yeah, this is seventy seven
<v Speaker 6>is the first one we can Yeah. But and so
<v Speaker 6>they ended up again we'll talk about in detail, but
<v Speaker 6>the second TV movie was made and after that they said, Okay,
<v Speaker 6>you know what, we can do a series like that.
<v Speaker 6>That convinced them they could do a series, and that
<v Speaker 6>helped it become the smashing success and the incredible pop
<v Speaker 6>culture phenomenon. That was the incredible whole TV series. And
<v Speaker 6>as we you know, we talked about and as we
<v Speaker 6>will talk about it, so you're going to go into
<v Speaker 6>there was a certain professional wrestler who was bulking up
<v Speaker 6>and making the rounds in the Southeast and I just there,
<v Speaker 6>I just wanted to read a couple of things to
<v Speaker 6>kind of connect some some dots here. Oh yeah, because
<v Speaker 6>as we know, and I'm sure we're going to read
<v Speaker 6>this again, but I actually wanted to I wanted to read.
<v Speaker 4>Did you?
<v Speaker 6>I mean, I know you have you have you read
<v Speaker 6>both both uh stories that hul Cogan has given about
<v Speaker 6>this in in both of his books.
<v Speaker 4>Yes, yeah, I'm going to read them both. Feel free. Yeah.
<v Speaker 6>Later on, well, I was still wrestling for Louis toillett
<v Speaker 6>Is Tillette or tille I should have had a morning
<v Speaker 6>show at a morning talk show in Mobile, Alabama to
<v Speaker 6>run a wrestling event. The other guest was a guy
<v Speaker 6>named Lou Farigno who was starting with Bill Bixby on
<v Speaker 6>a TV show called The Incredible Hulk. I Farida was
<v Speaker 6>traveling around the country to plug his series, which wasn't
<v Speaker 6>doing so well in the ratings, so in between shooting schedules,
<v Speaker 6>they kept him on the road, you know, working all
<v Speaker 6>the local markets. When I got on the show, the
<v Speaker 6>host looked at for Rigno and he looked at me
<v Speaker 6>and said, oh my god, you know you're bigger than
<v Speaker 6>Lou for Rigno, You're bigger than the Hulk. And I said,
<v Speaker 6>that's because I'm the real Hulk.
<v Speaker 22>Now.
<v Speaker 4>I had the gift of gab and Lou had a
<v Speaker 4>bit of a speech impediment at the time, as hearing loss.
<v Speaker 4>I didn't want to run him down. But I did
<v Speaker 4>have the upper hand. I ran with it a little.
<v Speaker 4>Plus the host did my job for me. Oh gosh,
<v Speaker 4>he said, you know, your arms are bigger, so much
<v Speaker 4>bigger than his. You know, it looks as if you
<v Speaker 4>arm Restlan you'd break him. You know. Actually, Lou Frigno
<v Speaker 4>was an unbelievable specimen, a real dedicated bodybuilder, and his
<v Speaker 4>arms were in much better shape than mine. But I
<v Speaker 4>had more bulk on me, and my clothes were probably tighter,
<v Speaker 4>so I looked larger. You know.
<v Speaker 6>That night I got into the arena and went back
<v Speaker 6>to the locker room, all the boys started calling me
<v Speaker 6>a hulk, and they said they saw me on television
<v Speaker 6>and I was bigger than Lou Forigno. And then name
<v Speaker 6>just stuck. That's from Hollywood, Hulk Cogan.
<v Speaker 4>That's true.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, two thousand and two one. Now the I do
<v Speaker 6>like that. In the Hulk Hogan My Life Outside the Ring,
<v Speaker 6>he spends a lot of the time talking about his
<v Speaker 6>life in the ring, right, you know, and so this
<v Speaker 6>is his version, and I do love the differences here.
<v Speaker 6>As I started rising in Memphis, jareded has me to
<v Speaker 6>go on TV and then to promote matches. So I
<v Speaker 6>went from Moby to Memphis. I could certainly talk the talk,
<v Speaker 6>you know, after all those years listening to Dusty Rose
<v Speaker 6>and interacting with audiences and all those bands, I was natural.
<v Speaker 4>I will say.
<v Speaker 6>I wasn't saying hey, brother and that real Hulk cog
<v Speaker 6>style stuff quite yet, but I could say, Hey, you know,
<v Speaker 6>this is Terry Boulder, and I want and I want
<v Speaker 6>you to come down to the Mobile Civic Center where
<v Speaker 6>you'll see the greatest wrestlers in the world. One day,
<v Speaker 6>I went on a local talk show and wound up
<v Speaker 6>sitting on here right next to Lou Forarigno. That's right,
<v Speaker 6>the guy who played the incredible Hulk, who was all
<v Speaker 6>over people's TVs with his green body makeup.
<v Speaker 4>At that time. He was a real nice guy, and
<v Speaker 4>everyone was so impressed by how huge you look for
<v Speaker 4>those big bulging muscles a thing was sitting next to
<v Speaker 4>me at that point in my life. The guy looked
<v Speaker 4>kind of small. That blew Jerry Jared away and I
<v Speaker 4>got in back to my dressing room after the show,
<v Speaker 4>and Jared was like, good god, Terry, you know you
<v Speaker 4>were sitting on TV and you were bigger than the Hulk.
<v Speaker 4>From that moment on, Jerry Jared started to build me
<v Speaker 4>as Terry the Hulk Boulder wherever I wrestled. Now, I
<v Speaker 4>don't know if you'd call that fate or coincidence. I
<v Speaker 4>think much of at the time, But what are the
<v Speaker 4>odds of that Lou Farigno would wind up on the
<v Speaker 4>same talk show as me, sitting right next to me
<v Speaker 4>in the middle of Tennessee. It's weird, right, because if
<v Speaker 4>it weren't for that moment, there's a very good chance
<v Speaker 4>I would never have acquired the Hulk nickname. Now, without
<v Speaker 4>the Hulk nickname, could Terry Boulder or whatever other name
<v Speaker 4>I might have picked up along the way have conquered
<v Speaker 4>the world the way Hulk did now, which is wild
<v Speaker 4>because those that talk show didn't happen, and he still
<v Speaker 4>became Hulkogan.
<v Speaker 6>Right, I mean I did. I did search long and hard.
<v Speaker 6>No one's ever found anything close. And you know, I
<v Speaker 6>even went the route of I'll tell you what I
<v Speaker 6>did too, what I did, what I also did, because
<v Speaker 6>I was like, okay, you know what, maybe there's no footage,
<v Speaker 6>but I was like, if there was a local talk show,
<v Speaker 6>they would be promoting the fact that Lou Farigno was
<v Speaker 6>on it in the newspaper, I would think so, and
<v Speaker 6>so I went. I went long and hard, long and
<v Speaker 6>hard part of why I put you on the mission. Yep,
<v Speaker 6>long and hard looking for it, and no, there is not.
<v Speaker 6>But what I did find was, I thought, is something more,
<v Speaker 6>in my opinion a little more interesting because I also
<v Speaker 6>looked up Terry Boulder, and I looked up Sterling Golden,
<v Speaker 6>you know, just kind of like seeing maybe they were
<v Speaker 6>promoting him on a talk show and I could find
<v Speaker 6>out what the name of that talk show was and
<v Speaker 6>maybe get some more information. Of course, But what I
<v Speaker 6>find interesting is that he always talks about in both
<v Speaker 6>those things, talks about Terry the Hulk Boulder. Yes, yet
<v Speaker 6>I find in the Knoxville New sent Sentinel on November eleventh,
<v Speaker 6>nineteen seventy nine that, let me see if this was one,
<v Speaker 6>Oh no, this is about so, this is about Bob
<v Speaker 6>Polk buying Southeast Wrestling. Bab Polk has a background in
<v Speaker 6>the sporting goods business, coaching, and in insurance. Has it
<v Speaker 6>kept it a new challenge? The former web schools stand
<v Speaker 6>out in football and basketball put together a group of
<v Speaker 6>investors to buy Southeastern Wrestling Incorporated from Ron Welch and
<v Speaker 6>Don Curtis, Jacksonville, Florida. He investors are Fred Ward and
<v Speaker 6>James Barnett, successful TV wrestling promoters in Atlanta. The new
<v Speaker 6>group will be known as Southeastern Wrestling Corp.
<v Speaker 4>Two things.
<v Speaker 6>There are two things I hoped to accomplish. Number one,
<v Speaker 6>at some point I want to get my hands on
<v Speaker 6>the Snake Man.
<v Speaker 8>Now.
<v Speaker 6>First, I feel we should bring in the top wrestling
<v Speaker 6>town across the country. Tony, Atlis Sterling Golden, Sterling Golden
<v Speaker 6>in parentheses three hundred and twenty pounds and known as
<v Speaker 6>the wrestling Hulk yep, Sterling Golden, though not Terry Boulder yep.
<v Speaker 6>And then in the same newspaper about two weeks later
<v Speaker 6>there was an there was an ad for All Star
<v Speaker 6>Championship Wrestling, and in there they were listening all the matches,
<v Speaker 6>and in there there was in a box first of
<v Speaker 6>All Southeastern title match macher Man Ready Savage versus Bob Roup.
<v Speaker 6>And underneath that Hulk challenge Bob Rup again. So he's
<v Speaker 6>wrestling twice in the card versus the Hulk Sterling Golden. Okay,
<v Speaker 6>then you got Memphis the Hulk Terry Boulder and yeah,
<v Speaker 6>and then this this one. I just this one is honestly,
<v Speaker 6>it has nothing to do with the Hulk thing, but
<v Speaker 6>it just it may be one of the it's one
<v Speaker 6>of those great hilarious articles that.
<v Speaker 4>Completely uh uh.
<v Speaker 6>Pull the pull the curtain behind the business. Okay like
<v Speaker 6>that we think we think people weren't doing this. This
<v Speaker 6>is one of those ones that we've you know, we
<v Speaker 6>always talk about these, How how far back have people
<v Speaker 6>been revealing that wrestling's fake?
<v Speaker 4>Okay?
<v Speaker 6>But before that though, like I'm looking at the timeline
<v Speaker 6>here is basically im looking at the dates. Now these
<v Speaker 6>are all from nineteen seventy nine. Now, I also went back.
<v Speaker 6>I wanted to look at when did this start? When
<v Speaker 6>did the Hulk start? Because that was also one of
<v Speaker 6>my things I was trying to figure out. Maybe I
<v Speaker 6>can figure out course what show this is. So basically
<v Speaker 6>what I'm saying is it started around summer of nineteen
<v Speaker 6>seventy nine is when at least that I found the
<v Speaker 6>first time that he's being called the Hulk. And I
<v Speaker 6>think that is a I think it's interesting because that
<v Speaker 6>would be after the first season of The Incredible Hulk
<v Speaker 6>would have wrapped, would have been done. Okay, in summertime, right,
<v Speaker 6>that's why we're here, yep, And it's summertime, and so
<v Speaker 6>it's off season and yeah, so but again there's no
<v Speaker 6>there's no there's this talk show. There's not, I mean,
<v Speaker 6>especially if he even fucking contradicts himself in his own books.
<v Speaker 6>In one point it's in Mobile and and one point
<v Speaker 6>it's in fucking Memphis. Like you gotta make up your
<v Speaker 6>mind on that, all right, you got to fucking make
<v Speaker 6>up your mind. And I want to check out one
<v Speaker 6>thing too here because it's on my mind and I
<v Speaker 6>didn't think my man I would look this up for
<v Speaker 6>later on.
<v Speaker 4>But so it was the first book that said Mobile,
<v Speaker 4>in the second book that said yeah Memphis.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, now, okay, okay, this is great. So in In
<v Speaker 6>in nineteen seventy eight, the nineteen seventy nineteen seventy nine season,
<v Speaker 6>it was number forty four for the season, tied with
<v Speaker 6>Hawaii five oh and Deer Detective. The Incredible HAWLK Show
<v Speaker 6>first season. It's good like it did well, let's a Yes,
<v Speaker 6>Hawaii O is A is a top show to be
<v Speaker 6>you know, to be tied with. I mean, it's still
<v Speaker 6>it's it's last legs, but still nonetheless, I yeah, I
<v Speaker 6>don't this this idea that it's not doing well. Also,
<v Speaker 6>I'm sorry, but he also would not be doing local
<v Speaker 6>talk shows. He's way too big of a star. Even
<v Speaker 6>if the show wasn't doing well, He's way too big
<v Speaker 6>of a star to be doing the local talk shows well.
<v Speaker 4>And further, he says the talk show story and mobile,
<v Speaker 4>and he has Jerry Jarrett giving him the name and
<v Speaker 4>the second one right, right, right, right, he says, right.
<v Speaker 6>He says that the talk show happened, and then the
<v Speaker 6>people the guy started in the backstort of calling him Hulk.
<v Speaker 6>He should read it. He should write his own fucking
<v Speaker 6>book before he wrote. How many times have we done that?
<v Speaker 6>I mean, it's been a huge through line for the
<v Speaker 6>complete Hull Cogin is the reason there's confusion about what happened.
<v Speaker 6>Is Hulk himself and his own self published books told
<v Speaker 6>two different stories. I know that couldn't possibly be reconciled
<v Speaker 6>because he just runs his mouth off for six hours
<v Speaker 6>to a ghost writer. Yeah, with no concer, you know,
<v Speaker 6>because he's just been for him. It's just like the
<v Speaker 6>hustle that's in front of him, like the idea that
<v Speaker 6>someone would go back and rewatch something he did or
<v Speaker 6>reread something he did, never really sunk in with him.
<v Speaker 3>I know.
<v Speaker 4>I think you're absolutely right with that. Yep. It's making
<v Speaker 4>these adjustments, probably based on static he gets by the
<v Speaker 4>first law. He tells, Yeah, yep, yep. That's probably by
<v Speaker 4>the time the second book comes out, more politically convenient
<v Speaker 4>for him to credit Jerry Jarrett for giving him my
<v Speaker 4>name than to mention at all that he ever even
<v Speaker 4>was in Mobile, which is a huge thing we're going
<v Speaker 4>to get to complete. Hulk, Covian said, Man, this is
<v Speaker 4>the context, yes, that explains why Hulk became Hulk.
<v Speaker 6>Yes, And this is the article from the Making News
<v Speaker 6>November sixth, nineteen seventy nine, in their Life Scene section.
<v Speaker 6>The title of the article, written by David Beddingfield, Championship Wrestling,
<v Speaker 6>A bit of circus, a bit of sport, and a
<v Speaker 6>whole lot of theater.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah.
<v Speaker 6>After one last coquettish flip of his long blonde hair
<v Speaker 6>and one more flex of his bulging biceps, Sterling Golden
<v Speaker 6>stomps across the ring and jerks Gerald Finley to one side,
<v Speaker 6>pulls him high over his head, slams him hard on
<v Speaker 6>the canvas, the blue rubber surface quivering as Finley gasps,
<v Speaker 6>all actually, hold on, let me get a that's the
<v Speaker 6>right one. Golden wastes no time. Oh, he screams as
<v Speaker 6>he brings his three hundred pounds of bone and fat
<v Speaker 6>and muscle. He says, fat, what a shot down on
<v Speaker 6>Finley's chest. Finley, however, isn't phased. At the count of two,
<v Speaker 6>he lurches forward off the canvas and oomph. Golden is
<v Speaker 6>bounced off and they're up at it again. Golden grabs Finley,
<v Speaker 6>tosses him into the ropes, and then hacks him hard
<v Speaker 6>across the chest as he flies past. On the rebound
<v Speaker 6>on the first row, five elderly men and women lean forward,
<v Speaker 6>small grins, working at the corners of their mouths. One
<v Speaker 6>white haired matron, who looks to be around sixty can
<v Speaker 6>stand it no longer. She leaps up and rushes to
<v Speaker 6>the ring to the edge of the ring, raises a
<v Speaker 6>silver whistle to her lips, and blows hard. Ten seconds later,
<v Speaker 6>Golden wraps Finley up in the famous Sterling Golden bear hug, which,
<v Speaker 6>by the way, as a hold he has so much
<v Speaker 6>confidence in he's offered one thousand dollars to anyone who
<v Speaker 6>can break it, and the fight is over. Finley waves
<v Speaker 6>his hand at the referee, who waves at the Master
<v Speaker 6>of Ceremonies gongong, and Golden drops. Finley PLoP and stalks
<v Speaker 6>off for a victory strut around the ring, grinning malevolently
<v Speaker 6>at a crowd that has now turned hostile. Golden slips
<v Speaker 6>out of the ring, but not before flexing his muscles
<v Speaker 6>one last time, and his new found elderly enemy follows
<v Speaker 6>him almost back to his dressing room. He bouncing a long,
<v Speaker 6>long blonde mane flapping on bronze muscled shoulders, She shuffling behind,
<v Speaker 6>alternately blowing her whistle and cursing him roundly. It's Georgia
<v Speaker 6>Championship Wrestling, a bit of a circus, a bit of
<v Speaker 6>a sport, and a whole lot of theater. It's a
<v Speaker 6>theater where huge acrobatic actors get the point. Aromatic actors
<v Speaker 6>that's a beautiful one whack each other around until someone
<v Speaker 6>falls as they portray absolute cold good and absolute evil.
<v Speaker 6>While several thousand onlookers with a heavy bloodlust in their
<v Speaker 6>eyes were all approval, most of the fans of the
<v Speaker 6>Colosseum every Tuesday. Are regulars, and most are dead serious fans.
<v Speaker 6>No circus show for these folks. This stuff is on
<v Speaker 6>the level, yes, number one. But the referees cheat. Yes, yeah, now,
<v Speaker 6>yes they do, says one fan who wanted to remain naghless,
<v Speaker 6>probably because he didn't want coworkers to know he was
<v Speaker 6>a fan. Yeah, they can't see everything, now, I understand that,
<v Speaker 6>she says, wiping the sweat off. Sorry, it's a woman
<v Speaker 6>wiping the sweat off away from her brow. It's hot
<v Speaker 6>on the colosseum and getting up and shouting is hard work.
<v Speaker 6>But you can bet they do cheat. She's from Warner
<v Speaker 6>Robbins and she and her daughter come to the matches
<v Speaker 6>every Tuesday. We wouldn't miss him, the daughter says. Behind us,
<v Speaker 6>two men are exchanging the latest wrestling gossip. You heard
<v Speaker 6>about Anderson? Yet me gone straight and he's not a
<v Speaker 6>bad guy anymore, one is saying, Ollie, Anderson never believed
<v Speaker 6>that unless I'd seen it. Another man chuckles, and we
<v Speaker 6>probably figured out he could make more money and being
<v Speaker 6>a good guy. Indeed, he might, but that's not always
<v Speaker 6>the case. Sometimes the bad guys develop a following, or
<v Speaker 6>rather an anti following and can fill the stadium every week.
<v Speaker 6>The wrestlers in Georgia are always the ones at the
<v Speaker 6>very top of their profession. Most of the wrestlers, most
<v Speaker 6>of the wrestlers who take to the ring and Macon
<v Speaker 6>are very wealthy, the leading attractions and pro wrestling in
<v Speaker 6>America today. It's because I don't know how this person sounds,
<v Speaker 6>but it's because of Channel seventeen in Atlanta, says Choot
<v Speaker 6>choo Lyn. Do you know Cheot chew Lin No, the
<v Speaker 6>assistant promoter of the fight it's here at the coliseum
<v Speaker 6>and former big time wrestler himself, Choot chu Lyn. Do
<v Speaker 6>you not know Choot Chulyn?
<v Speaker 4>Sorry, I've never heard the name father of Jerry Lynn.
<v Speaker 4>Perhaps a lot of big names in wrestling. I want
<v Speaker 4>to come to Georgia's again on that station. Show is
<v Speaker 4>seen in forty states and you can become a drawing
<v Speaker 4>card all over the nation if you make that show.
<v Speaker 4>And at the back door of the coliseum Tuesday Night
<v Speaker 4>at the wrestler's entrance, the nineteen seventy nine Cadillacs and
<v Speaker 4>Riviera's seem to bear Lynn out. These guys ain't just
<v Speaker 4>grappling because they love it. There's money to be made
<v Speaker 4>in these rings, as Ernie Ladd discovered after quitting the
<v Speaker 4>San Diego Chargers football team three years ago. He told
<v Speaker 4>somebody he used to make sixty thousand dollars a year
<v Speaker 4>getting his head beat in a football, Lynn says, and
<v Speaker 4>now it makes one hundred thousand dollars a year wrestling.
<v Speaker 4>He says he wished he started earlier. Of course, Lynn
<v Speaker 4>is familiar with the charges that wrestling is a put
<v Speaker 4>on or a fake. I answer questions like that.
<v Speaker 6>By asking if the people want to get in the
<v Speaker 6>ring with the wrestler, He says, chuckling, no thanks. Those
<v Speaker 6>guys are all huge. One wrong move bones would crack
<v Speaker 6>like so many potato chips under a sledgehammer, but the
<v Speaker 6>wrestler's size. It's proof pro wrestling has to be faked,
<v Speaker 6>says George Reid, the coach of the University of Georgia's
<v Speaker 6>wrestling team.
<v Speaker 4>You get those chidre and fifty pound characters running into
<v Speaker 4>each other with no pads. You've had some crack. You'd
<v Speaker 4>have some crack next. They didn't have it. Rehearsed Preede says,
<v Speaker 4>not true. Not true, said County's Lynn.
<v Speaker 6>The reason these guys don't get hurt is because they're
<v Speaker 6>in good shape. They know how to take a punch.
<v Speaker 6>These wrestlers are professionals, they're experienced, and they are so
<v Speaker 6>built up with weight and everything that they can take punishment.
<v Speaker 6>It's a show. Reed maintains they're good, and the guys
<v Speaker 6>are good athletes, don't get me wrong. But the holes,
<v Speaker 6>but the holes they get each other in. You know,
<v Speaker 6>they could keep those holes all if they weren't in
<v Speaker 6>collusion with each other. The biggest joke, the biggest joke
<v Speaker 6>is when one rustler pins another on the mat, always
<v Speaker 6>right up the counter to the one of the mat
<v Speaker 6>sort of lurches and the god on top goes flying.
<v Speaker 6>That's comical. You ought to get down and try that.
<v Speaker 6>Sometimes those guys that they were serious, could stay on
<v Speaker 6>top all night. A trip to ringside seems to offer
<v Speaker 6>evidence supporting read these fights couldn't be real or I'm sorry,
<v Speaker 6>these fights couldn't be for real. Golden is a massive man.
<v Speaker 6>He could grab anybody's head, any human head, that is,
<v Speaker 6>and not let go until sleep overcame him. Yet here
<v Speaker 6>he's forced by his opponent to drop his hold Over
<v Speaker 6>and Over, of course, then Golden slams him with his
<v Speaker 6>famous bear hug, and that's that. The matches in Macon
<v Speaker 6>are sponsored by the Noonday Optimist Club. The Optimists get
<v Speaker 6>seven and a half percent after expenses, says Lynn, a
<v Speaker 6>member of the club as well as assistant promoter. The
<v Speaker 6>club has used its money for a variety of worthy causes,
<v Speaker 6>ranging from sponsoring little league teams to building baseball diamonds
<v Speaker 6>to helping six children. The promoter of the matches and
<v Speaker 6>making his Fred Ward, who operates out of Columbus. He
<v Speaker 6>lines the bouts up each week, says Lynn, usually through
<v Speaker 6>the wrestler's booking agents. Most of the time big Time.
<v Speaker 6>Most of the Big time wrestlers use agents much as
<v Speaker 6>actors or writers or other professional people as other professional
<v Speaker 6>people do. Do you have an agent? Do you have
<v Speaker 6>an agent?
<v Speaker 4>Or your professionals the hell?
<v Speaker 6>Three or four times a year, Ward goes to a
<v Speaker 6>National Wrestling Alliance convention, where promoters and booking agents from
<v Speaker 6>all over the country meet to sign contracts and coordinate
<v Speaker 6>their next couple of months schedules. The greatest story That's
<v Speaker 6>the greatest story ever. WA is an alliance that loosely
<v Speaker 6>governs wrestling in many states. There are other associations, however,
<v Speaker 6>and the NWA really doesn't do much beside providing referees
<v Speaker 6>with a certification and host these conventions. Wrestling on the
<v Speaker 6>circuit is not an easy life. The hard knocks of
<v Speaker 6>the ring are one drawback, but then after slamming each
<v Speaker 6>other around all night, wrestlers usually go home to a
<v Speaker 6>motel room. They're always on the road. It's a hard life,
<v Speaker 6>says Lynn. And I wouldn't do it. I could have
<v Speaker 6>traveled when I was wrestling, but I'd rather it's a
<v Speaker 6>steady job and just wrestle here and making Lynn was
<v Speaker 6>quite a wrestler when he was active. He and he was,
<v Speaker 6>and he is a strong man the wrestler. He uses
<v Speaker 6>brute strength to grind opponents down, but he could move too.
<v Speaker 6>There's a plaque on Lin's wall that a tests he
<v Speaker 6>has wrestled the world heavyweight champion end quote, never lost.
<v Speaker 6>But then he also never won, he admits with a grin.
<v Speaker 6>In wrestling, the line between winning and losing is always
<v Speaker 6>just a bit blurred. And in that again, he's damn
<v Speaker 6>fucking right. That's the context the industry at the time. Yes,
<v Speaker 6>Terry adopts the yes, and one last thing on Lu
<v Speaker 6>Forrigno though before we go in that you know, as
<v Speaker 6>if the nickname wasn't enough, obviously the Hulk name and
<v Speaker 6>character isn't enough of a connection here, because there's also
<v Speaker 6>one other you know, let's not forget that Lou Ferrigno
<v Speaker 6>himself was part of another Vince McMahon enterprise.
<v Speaker 16>Full Legend is back. Former Mister Universe Lou Figno has
<v Speaker 16>signed a six figure contract with a recently formed World
<v Speaker 16>body Building Better Wag and being a seventeen year absolute
<v Speaker 16>from competition for Rigno adopt and Beating in nineteen seventy
<v Speaker 16>five and when he became the star of the television
<v Speaker 16>series The Incredible Home One. But he told a group
<v Speaker 16>of reporters and friends that his love of the sport
<v Speaker 16>is bringing him back and all.
<v Speaker 23>The little boys, all exvenience of being the greatest bodies
<v Speaker 23>over in the world. I've continued throughout the years where
<v Speaker 23>in there, well, I've always fell fancy, an unfulfearable.
<v Speaker 4>It's what I didn't achieve my name, and.
<v Speaker 1>Today I am so excited to be here.
<v Speaker 23>But now have the opportunity that they come back to
<v Speaker 23>be a fett fivey food in.
<v Speaker 16>The world for Rigno says, although he's in here forties,
<v Speaker 16>he's in the prime of his life and plans to
<v Speaker 16>condde at the nineteen ninety two WBF World Champion Dibbin
<v Speaker 16>at two hundred and eighty five pounds, But admittedly he's
<v Speaker 16>got He's worked out out with Brian Dippron, Rating champion
<v Speaker 16>Gary Tridam or American Muscle I'm John Gobert.
<v Speaker 4>Unbelievable, isn't it.
<v Speaker 8>Now?
<v Speaker 6>I'll talk about full circle seriously, and I mean I
<v Speaker 6>love the idea that he came back for his love
<v Speaker 6>of competition. Or are you sure it wasn't a six
<v Speaker 6>figure salary.
<v Speaker 4>That's the six figure salary, which is we've talked about
<v Speaker 4>including our WBF body stars coming. Yes, yes, deeply upset
<v Speaker 4>the WWA flocker room at a time when deep cuts
<v Speaker 4>were being made because Hulk Cogan had exited stage right
<v Speaker 4>and business was plunging and payoffs.
<v Speaker 6>Well this was this was announce in ninety one. Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>it was even before Hogan left. Yeah, I guess he
<v Speaker 6>wasn't there. I mean, he wasn't there until they're supposed
<v Speaker 6>to be appear at at the ninety two one but
<v Speaker 6>this happened. This press conference was in ninety one, ninety one. Yeah,
<v Speaker 6>they were already feeling the pinch though in terms of
<v Speaker 6>Hogan was cooling off. Even when he was there, he
<v Speaker 6>was cooling off, which is part of the reason that
<v Speaker 6>they wanted WrestleMania eight to be a big hiatus for him,
<v Speaker 6>not just because he was going to do movies. They
<v Speaker 6>wanted to intimate that he was going to retire basically.
<v Speaker 6>And you know, they were starting to feel a lot
<v Speaker 6>of the heat from this orient thing as well, because
<v Speaker 6>the Orian went away in ninety one and they started
<v Speaker 6>to get you know wind in the summer of ninety
<v Speaker 6>two that you know, the the grand jury had been
<v Speaker 6>convened and they were feeling you know, they were getting
<v Speaker 6>subpoenaed and stuff like that. So they could feel a
<v Speaker 6>lot of pressure. And immediately they started cutting the wrestling
<v Speaker 6>budget and then they come up with all this money
<v Speaker 6>for these WBF signings, and it really pissed everybody off.
<v Speaker 6>Of course, for Igno never competed for never even showed,
<v Speaker 6>never even showed. He did a appearance on Primetime Wrestler
<v Speaker 6>at one time, right with Sean Mooney and Bobby Heenan yeah.
<v Speaker 6>He actually objected strenuously to the the drug testing thing.
<v Speaker 6>He was like, no, if you're going to steroid test,
<v Speaker 6>because that had to happen after Zahoorian, you know, the
<v Speaker 6>events came out in television and said we're going to
<v Speaker 6>have the you know, higher standard than the Olympics for
<v Speaker 6>it for steroid testing and the WWF, and of course
<v Speaker 6>is perfect luck. He had just launched a fucking bodybuilding federation, right,
<v Speaker 6>which cannot exist without steroids. Right, He's trying to bring
<v Speaker 6>a clean bodybuilding product to market after signing all these
<v Speaker 6>guys up without that promise, without that pretense, and all
<v Speaker 6>of a sudden after signing these contracts, Oh yeah, guys,
<v Speaker 6>by the way, you can't roid because on the wrestling side,
<v Speaker 6>we're under the gun by the FEDS. So fuck, I
<v Speaker 6>am not competing if I can do steroids. I mean,
<v Speaker 6>that's basically the accepted stories to why he left before competing.
<v Speaker 6>But it's just how remarkable is it that we go
<v Speaker 6>from a young, impressionable seeking to make an impact, Terry
<v Speaker 6>Boleya adopting Lufa Rigno's hult cara during likeness yep, to
<v Speaker 6>have something to hang his hat on as he begins
<v Speaker 6>as a regional wrestler in nineteen seventy nine, and fast
<v Speaker 6>forward twenty years, well less than twenty years, fast forward
<v Speaker 6>to the nineties, and the ww needs the WWF.
<v Speaker 4>It's absolutely hilarious. It's like hul Cogan is run away
<v Speaker 4>with the ball, right.
<v Speaker 7>What.
<v Speaker 4>Broller?
<v Speaker 8>Who?
<v Speaker 7>What?
<v Speaker 4>Frigno? Push? Brother, Oh my god, Hulk push.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>You can see the world. You can see the world
<v Speaker 4>of Terry.
<v Speaker 6>Bull and the eyes of Loof for Igno. You know
<v Speaker 6>that that fucking that that freaked him out. Hulk's gone pregnant.
<v Speaker 4>Push. Yeah. When they brought Fregno in, there had to
<v Speaker 4>be a long sit down with Terry, which will dry heat.
<v Speaker 4>Darry One knows, you know, someone just want to you know,
<v Speaker 4>just want to, you know, keep you up to date
<v Speaker 4>with things. But I want to let you know that.
<v Speaker 4>And uh, we're gonna bring you know, We're gonna bring
<v Speaker 4>somebody to the w BF. All right, the w I'm sorry,
<v Speaker 4>the wbe the World Bodybuilding Entertainment. Well all right, brother,
<v Speaker 4>Well okay, dude, well who you bringing in? Brother? Well,
<v Speaker 4>if I'm being you know, uh uh uh quite honest,
<v Speaker 4>and that notwithstanding, we are bringing in the Hulk. You
<v Speaker 4>got me wbe brother? Well do Stridham? Brother?
<v Speaker 23>What do you doing?
<v Speaker 4>Dude? Why did you have the Hulk? Dude? Do you
<v Speaker 4>have a Hulk? I'm here, brother? You want to go
<v Speaker 4>w B Do you want to jump ship? Brother? Not Terry,
<v Speaker 4>Terry nor I mean bringing in the the original Hulk. Brother,
<v Speaker 4>I am the original Hawk. Dude, I'm in the Hulk forever.
<v Speaker 3>Brother.
<v Speaker 6>No, Dry, Terry, I'm sorry, I'm bringing it. We're bringing
<v Speaker 6>Loop for rig No, the incredible Hulk. Brother, I'm the
<v Speaker 6>incredible Halk. Dude, Terrence, you can't be Terrance.
<v Speaker 1>Brother.
<v Speaker 4>Well, which Hulk youre going with?
<v Speaker 2>Brother?
<v Speaker 4>Well, Terry, that's kind of the idea. We got two Hulks.
<v Speaker 4>He's fucking freaked out. Vince literally brought in the guy
<v Speaker 4>who stole the name from We're not getting sued, dude,
<v Speaker 4>not Terry pretty soon? Well, I thought we said this
<v Speaker 4>old ready with Marvel. Dude. Why are we getting suit again,
<v Speaker 4>my brother? Well, Terry, we're not gotting sue. We're just
<v Speaker 4>we're bringing in the Hulk and he's gonna We're gonna
<v Speaker 4>we're gonna give him a push. You get Bush, not
<v Speaker 4>the other Hulk? What ship base in his voice, not
<v Speaker 4>what what?
<v Speaker 6>Completely horrified, so confused, and Vince not making a fucking
<v Speaker 6>as even an ounce of effort to be clear about
<v Speaker 6>it all. He knew this ship was gonna happen when
<v Speaker 6>he agreed to lose to Warrior. Yes, and when we
<v Speaker 6>figure you know, you know, listen, you know you're taking
<v Speaker 6>that time off. I didn't say I was taking time
<v Speaker 6>off one, no, but we're telling you you're taking off.
<v Speaker 6>What Terry, have we talked about this after wrestling? You
<v Speaker 6>gotta take time off because you know, just you know,
<v Speaker 6>things going on. What's going on, Darry? The steroids, you know,
<v Speaker 6>but I don't dose steroids, dude. But I've used steroids,
<v Speaker 6>but I don't use steroids and I don't abuse them. Darry, Listen,
<v Speaker 6>we need you to take it, to take some time off,
<v Speaker 6>all right. You know, Warrior is gonna come in, all right,
<v Speaker 6>Maury is just gonna you know, hold your spot for
<v Speaker 6>a little while. Brother, And I figured, you know what SummerSlam,
<v Speaker 6>why don't we do a Warrior, you know, and have
<v Speaker 6>Hulk versus Warrior. Well, you said I'm taking time off, brother,
<v Speaker 6>but oh you you know I'm taking hell Wigan Forigno
<v Speaker 6>and we'll just call it a rematch from WrestleMania Russemania six.
<v Speaker 6>But there brother, well, no, it's going another difference. Just
<v Speaker 6>just say that, you know you're you turned green like
<v Speaker 6>Statue Liberty here or Bruce Banner, Oh god.
<v Speaker 4>I mean Bruce Banner turned green and Hulk turned the
<v Speaker 4>WWF green. There you go. I'd say that's a good comparison.
<v Speaker 4>And anyone who watched him for a nhim number of
<v Speaker 4>years knows copyright Titan Sports, copyright and agreement with Marvel Comics,
<v Speaker 4>and so you better believe that hul Cogan from a
<v Speaker 4>legal perspective and Vincent Company from a WWF legal perspective
<v Speaker 4>did not get away Scott free. No building this guy
<v Speaker 4>up as Hulk.
<v Speaker 6>Nope, especially calling him the incredible Hull Cogan. Incredible Hulk,
<v Speaker 6>not a good god, not a good move.
<v Speaker 4>So that is all still to come on the complete
<v Speaker 4>Hull coget, a full dissection of how all of those
<v Speaker 4>legal maneuverings went. But suffice to say, here and now
<v Speaker 4>and under the cinemat, we know what was in the
<v Speaker 4>in the air culturally absolutely, mister Bolea and whatever promoters
<v Speaker 4>he happened to be bore for nineteen seventy nine, just
<v Speaker 4>reached into the cultural ether and just yanked this one
<v Speaker 4>out and co opted it for themselves.
<v Speaker 6>Now, of course there's not just the Hulk. There is
<v Speaker 6>the human counterpart to the Hulk, right, and that is
<v Speaker 6>the well in this ridiculous iteration, David Bruce Banner. But
<v Speaker 6>he's played by Bill Bixby, and I thought, you know,
<v Speaker 6>give him a little bit of a give him a
<v Speaker 6>littleit of shine here.
<v Speaker 4>And Bill Besy's time.
<v Speaker 6>It's Bill Bixby's time, all right, especially with this fucking name.
<v Speaker 4>Are you ready? Wilfred Bailey Everett Bixby.
<v Speaker 6>The third off to a great start, was born January
<v Speaker 6>twenty second, in nineteen thirty four in San Francisco, California.
<v Speaker 6>Everybody who knew him as a kid all said he's
<v Speaker 6>a day dreamer, lots of energy, lots of imagination. And
<v Speaker 6>the best part was is that this was a direct
<v Speaker 6>juxtaposition to dear old Dad, really very proper, very disciplined. Well,
<v Speaker 6>that name kind of gave it away. I know, seriously,
<v Speaker 6>I'm sorry. If you're the third, you better be fucking disciplined,
<v Speaker 6>all right, or you're gonna give your Wilford Bailey Everett
<v Speaker 6>the third in particular. Yeah, fucking straight woo. I wasn't
<v Speaker 6>expecting that. With Bill Bixby. I thought for sure it
<v Speaker 6>was just going to be you know, William Harold Bixby,
<v Speaker 6>but not Wilfred Wilfred. It's not when you hear much anymore.
<v Speaker 6>I don't think you even heard it much back then.
<v Speaker 4>No, not really. I can't think of a single one
<v Speaker 4>besides Wolf Brimley. That's right.
<v Speaker 6>And he's a will Ford too. I believe that only
<v Speaker 6>he is Wilfred. I think he's Wilford.
<v Speaker 4>I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. So would Bill Bixby
<v Speaker 4>be Terry Bulaya and Luf f Rigno's Hulk Coogan?
<v Speaker 6>Exactly? Okay, good, It's exactly what it is. Bill Bixby
<v Speaker 6>is Terry Blay inside the house. The incredible Hulk is
<v Speaker 6>everything else everything outside the house. At an open door,
<v Speaker 6>he went to this, I thought, was this? This really
<v Speaker 6>stumped me, and I'm sure it's going to stump you too.
<v Speaker 6>He went to Lowell High School excuse me, in San Francisco. Oh, okay,
<v Speaker 6>got it?
<v Speaker 7>I know.
<v Speaker 4>I sat there like what. He went to fucking Lowell
<v Speaker 4>High with John Cena's dad, exactly.
<v Speaker 6>No, there is a there is a Lowell High School
<v Speaker 6>in San Francisco named after James Russell Lowell, the poet.
<v Speaker 6>Of course, both his dad served waitit did his dad
<v Speaker 6>served in World War Two? I forget if his dad, well,
<v Speaker 6>he served in one of the World Wars. And then
<v Speaker 6>Bill Bill joined the Marines and served during during the
<v Speaker 6>Korean War, but he didn't go anywhere. He was the
<v Speaker 6>station in Oakland. And of course I gotta tell you so, Okay,
<v Speaker 6>I don't know if I got a clip of this.
<v Speaker 6>I really I should have done it. I just didn't
<v Speaker 6>think to really get it just dawning on me right now.
<v Speaker 6>So he has if you look at so for some reason, Okay,
<v Speaker 6>I sat here and I was wondering, why does he
<v Speaker 6>have an ai A biography? Why does this guy fucking
<v Speaker 6>qualify for an ane biography? Not that he didn't do
<v Speaker 6>some stuff and he had quite a career, I'm not
<v Speaker 6>I'm not denying that, but like, I'm like, is he
<v Speaker 6>really worthy of an A and E biography?
<v Speaker 2>Like?
<v Speaker 6>What has he fucking done outside The Hulk and a
<v Speaker 6>couple other TV shows? But I realize it's because his
<v Speaker 6>his biography came out everyone was milking the original Hulk
<v Speaker 6>movie that came out in two thousand and two, the
<v Speaker 6>ang Lee Hulk that came out during the UH during
<v Speaker 6>the beginning of the superhero boom, and and so everybody
<v Speaker 6>was getting you know, everyone was milking that, just like
<v Speaker 6>they did with the Attitude era and wrestling being hot.
<v Speaker 6>Like everyone's milking the fucking wrestling stuff. And so I
<v Speaker 6>was watching this biography of him and his mom's interviewed. Okay,
<v Speaker 6>Jane Bixby is interviewed, and do you know that whenever
<v Speaker 6>her husband, Wilfred Bailey, Everett Bixby the second or Junior,
<v Speaker 6>I don't like that name, right, is brought up that
<v Speaker 6>she calls him either Bill's father or mister Bixby.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, there's no way this guy didn't do highly inappropriate thing. Absolutely.
<v Speaker 4>Let me tell you this.
<v Speaker 6>I don't believe Jane had I don't believe Jane had
<v Speaker 6>free reign over the house. Okay, no, no, there was
<v Speaker 6>very little in the way of free will.
<v Speaker 9>No.
<v Speaker 4>Oh, listen.
<v Speaker 6>The only will that was free was Wilfrid Will, Daddy Bixby,
<v Speaker 6>Daddy Bixby. I washt there and I was, I said,
<v Speaker 6>but I said, this is his isn't that his mom?
<v Speaker 6>That's his mom though, right, Why the fuck is he calmed?
<v Speaker 6>But he and I was like, and I get I
<v Speaker 6>get really confused because I was like, why is his wife?
<v Speaker 6>Why is the mom calling her husband mister Bixby? But
<v Speaker 6>she was she was, Okay, that's the kind of household
<v Speaker 6>we are, And that's the kind of father who demands
<v Speaker 6>that you go study pre law and UC Berkeley.
<v Speaker 5>You do that.
<v Speaker 6>But Bill or bix actually as they call him, bix
<v Speaker 6>is the nickname for for for Bill Bixby, bix not
<v Speaker 6>having it. He dropped out, dropped out with only two
<v Speaker 6>credits left before he could graduate.
<v Speaker 5>Like you.
<v Speaker 4>Want, Matt Wilfrid Junior, fuck you? So he dropped out
<v Speaker 4>of college?
<v Speaker 6>You say, yes, yes, all right, there are way too
<v Speaker 6>similar way too many similarities.
<v Speaker 4>I remember the time of my life doing this because
<v Speaker 4>it is it.
<v Speaker 6>Is, without a doubt, one of the most bizarre uh.
<v Speaker 5>Uh, Like.
<v Speaker 6>You know that these two hulks really have so much
<v Speaker 6>more in common than than we ever wanted to believe.
<v Speaker 3>Uh.
<v Speaker 6>And here I'm gonna play clip here clip this is
<v Speaker 6>from from that anti biography.
<v Speaker 8>Uh.
<v Speaker 6>And this is Bicks wanting to be an actor, despite
<v Speaker 6>his parents, of course, disapproval.
<v Speaker 24>Bill always used to say to our friends when they
<v Speaker 24>talk to Bill, Billy, what do you want to be?
<v Speaker 24>Will you grow up a fireman, a policeman, a lawyer,
<v Speaker 24>or whatnot? I'm going to be an actor, he say,
<v Speaker 24>very seriously, and everybody'd laugh, including his father and mother.
<v Speaker 4>Also, she just referred to herself. I'm a third person
<v Speaker 4>and this is who again, that's his mom. This is
<v Speaker 4>ruth right pretty much an insert guitar playing a role band. Yes, yes, yes,
<v Speaker 4>here he continues.
<v Speaker 25>Then Bill still had his sights set on stardom after graduation,
<v Speaker 25>but his parents had all their plans for it. They
<v Speaker 25>worried about their only son's chance and success in the
<v Speaker 25>cutthroat world of entertainment.
<v Speaker 6>They didn't how about the cutthroat world of family? How
<v Speaker 6>about ball cutthroat world?
<v Speaker 4>Huh? I do love this so much? It almost sounds
<v Speaker 4>like real American on the piano playing in the background.
<v Speaker 4>Does it does? Really? To necessarily cope with this?
<v Speaker 22>They wanted him to become a professional or in a profession, wrestler,
<v Speaker 22>a lawyer, dennis doctor.
<v Speaker 6>All gimmicks, all gimmicks you get doing wrestling right there? Oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 6>here gives emmick.
<v Speaker 22>That's right, one of those professions that required a lot
<v Speaker 22>of study that meant success just by the title alone.
<v Speaker 25>The eighteen year old had nothing against higher education and
<v Speaker 25>began attending San Francisco City College in nineteen fifty two.
<v Speaker 25>Then he transferred to Berkeley, his parents alma mater. His
<v Speaker 25>mother and father felt their son was on the right path,
<v Speaker 25>but he was still torn between their hopes and his
<v Speaker 25>own passion for performing. Bill turned to the only person
<v Speaker 25>who always supported him, his aunt, Hellen.
<v Speaker 22>Mom basically would say, try whatever you want, whatever you like,
<v Speaker 22>whatever you think that you would desire the most.
<v Speaker 1>If it doesn't work out, fine, you haven't lost anything.
<v Speaker 12>What an actor?
<v Speaker 1>In our family?
<v Speaker 24>That was the attitude that had to be overcome, because
<v Speaker 24>we never thought for two minutes, but it.
<v Speaker 4>Would ever be a professional actor.
<v Speaker 1>Wrestler Never entered our bonnets?
<v Speaker 4>Did you hear her? Just then? Excuse me? Never entered
<v Speaker 4>our bonnet. Never entered our bonnets. Jesus Christ. She born
<v Speaker 4>in eighteen thirteen, like Hew kind of phrases that I know,
<v Speaker 4>I know.
<v Speaker 1>In nineteen fifty seven, Bill took his aunt's advice.
<v Speaker 25>He dropped out of college two credits short of graduation
<v Speaker 25>and headed.
<v Speaker 4>South to Hollywood, brother exactly Hollywood, exactly adventure comedies, the
<v Speaker 4>first on tap. He he was, you know, he did
<v Speaker 4>a bunch of like he was a lifeguard, like about
<v Speaker 4>a bunch of odd jobs. And he auditioned. So in
<v Speaker 4>like the late fifties, I think it was, Lucille Ball
<v Speaker 4>taught workshops at brand at the Brandeis Barden Institute, HM
<v Speaker 4>and he and I believe I'm pretty sure this was. Yeah,
<v Speaker 4>this was after I love Lucy. So she was already,
<v Speaker 4>you know, a megastar. So it's a pretty big deal
<v Speaker 4>that she's teaching these things. So he wanted to be
<v Speaker 4>a part of it, and he auditioned, and he brought
<v Speaker 4>it up years later we did what what the fuck
<v Speaker 4>did I use it for? I don't remember I've used
<v Speaker 4>this this radio show before, but Lucy Lucille Ball had
<v Speaker 4>a little chat show on the radio called Lucy Talks
<v Speaker 4>for a while, and all these have been they've been
<v Speaker 4>discovered recently and they now they're up on like Sirius
<v Speaker 4>XM owns them now and has put them up on
<v Speaker 4>on on uh, you know, Apple and stuff like that,
<v Speaker 4>and how you do it folks, exactly how you do it?
<v Speaker 4>Put it out there and sitting in your vault, throw
<v Speaker 4>some programmatic ads against let us hear it.
<v Speaker 6>What's the problem? Why are you making no problem? At
<v Speaker 6>and so he bring he actually brought up and she
<v Speaker 6>was doing the best thing is this is like podcasting
<v Speaker 6>back in the sixties. Absolutely, because she's doing this at
<v Speaker 6>her house. She's recording this at her house, all right,
<v Speaker 6>Like it's it's insane. Like whatever she was doing, she
<v Speaker 6>was doing a way ahead anybody even fucking had an
<v Speaker 6>idea what that what what obviously podcasting was It wasn't
<v Speaker 6>even closer being a thing because you have to actually,
<v Speaker 6>you know, audition and get a job someplace to be
<v Speaker 6>able to do this shit.
<v Speaker 16>Right.
<v Speaker 6>And but here she is, and this is a clip,
<v Speaker 6>this is him and the two of them talking about
<v Speaker 6>how he, you know, tried to get into her workshop.
<v Speaker 13>Now, you told me something that surprised me today. You
<v Speaker 13>said that you were one of the entrants that I
<v Speaker 13>turned down at the beginning.
<v Speaker 4>Of andres is that what she's goddamn right, my workshop.
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't that you turned me down. It was that
<v Speaker 1>you did not feel that I was ready for your workshop.
<v Speaker 1>But you encourage me to go on to study with
<v Speaker 1>somebody else and learn a little bit more so that
<v Speaker 1>I would be ready for the level that you were
<v Speaker 1>working at at that time, because you were planning, as
<v Speaker 1>I recall, and did have the students.
<v Speaker 4>Work with you.
<v Speaker 1>You worked with all the students, and you actually put
<v Speaker 1>a show on television.
<v Speaker 13>Apparently you were way ahead of the students, and I
<v Speaker 13>wasn't very a student saying that.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I sort of messed up in one area. And
<v Speaker 1>when I came in, as you know, we all did
<v Speaker 1>a scene for you, a dramatic or a comedy or
<v Speaker 1>any kind of a scene. I seem to have picked
<v Speaker 1>the wrong scene. At that period in my life, I
<v Speaker 1>felt that everyone wanted a good dramatic actor. So I
<v Speaker 1>came in. I think I believe it was a Tennessee
<v Speaker 1>Williams scene, and I tried to be Marlon Branda, not
<v Speaker 1>Bill Bixby.
<v Speaker 13>And Bill Bixby is a very working concern, isn't it.
<v Speaker 1>Right Now, Well, I've been very lucky, I've been very busy,
<v Speaker 1>but I must go back now. I want to join
<v Speaker 1>the two ideas together. First, you encourage me to continue
<v Speaker 1>to go on and to study with a good teacher,
<v Speaker 1>get myself ready for professional work, which I did do.
<v Speaker 1>And I've been so lucky in between having worked with
<v Speaker 1>such mare tho professional people. For example, Sheldon Leonard, who
<v Speaker 1>is Danny Thomas's producer, got me on an open call
<v Speaker 1>one day. I think fifty of us read for one
<v Speaker 1>small comedy role. I got that role, and he liked
<v Speaker 1>me so much he used me the next week in
<v Speaker 1>a different role, and then he used me and an
<v Speaker 1>Andy Griffith show two weeks later in the lead and
<v Speaker 1>gave me my own separate guest star card. Who is
<v Speaker 1>Bill Mixby? You know I got a card anyway?
<v Speaker 12>Isn't that great? Now that you see?
<v Speaker 13>Everybody always asks how do you get started.
<v Speaker 1>In the business. Just keep beating your head against the wall,
<v Speaker 1>I guess until.
<v Speaker 13>Somebody make yourself available and you study and be ready.
<v Speaker 4>Lucy stuff, loosey stuff, all right, Oh yeah, oh yeah.
<v Speaker 6>And he does also he continues in this interview and
<v Speaker 6>he talks about what he did next, and in essence,
<v Speaker 6>he did what you'd consider working in the regional working
<v Speaker 6>in the regional circuit, because what he did was he
<v Speaker 6>started working in industrial films, which is absolutely wild. You
<v Speaker 6>know what those are it's like it's basically movies that
<v Speaker 6>are made like internal training. Yeah, exactly, stuff like that.
<v Speaker 6>Sometimes they even have plots like you know, just I
<v Speaker 6>know a lot of people who do industrials and stuff
<v Speaker 6>like that. It's you know, it's decent money.
<v Speaker 4>But this is Bill. Bill enjoys this brand exactly. Bill
<v Speaker 4>enjoys my brand.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 4>I'd love to seev versions of that, seriously. But here
<v Speaker 4>he is. This is again with Lucy.
<v Speaker 1>I did what I called motion Picture Summerstock in Detroit
<v Speaker 1>for two years working in industrial films, a jem Handy
<v Speaker 1>and wild incorporation.
<v Speaker 6>Working in Detroit with with the chic and everybody's gonna say, yeah,
<v Speaker 6>I like to hurt people and so on.
<v Speaker 1>That made just industrial films, films which would not be
<v Speaker 1>released in the public, but would give me camera experience.
<v Speaker 1>This is after I was with you great experience, and
<v Speaker 1>so I knew about the technical behavior that you must
<v Speaker 1>have around a camera before I made in mistakes in Hollywood,
<v Speaker 1>which is very very lucky.
<v Speaker 4>Can we aust for a second. Yeah, So he went
<v Speaker 4>to the industrial film guy aka here Matsuda, yes, to
<v Speaker 4>learn the technical side, Yes, before he could learn how
<v Speaker 4>to perform with the best of them. Yes, is that right? Yes,
<v Speaker 4>it and so that one.
<v Speaker 6>I don't think anyone breaks his leg though, but we'll
<v Speaker 6>see if he breaks something else. He broke a leg, however,
<v Speaker 6>that's true there.
<v Speaker 1>It is when I came back, in a sense, I
<v Speaker 1>was prepared to accept professional work, not just from an
<v Speaker 1>acting point of view, but also from a technical point of.
<v Speaker 13>View, which is very important on the set when you're
<v Speaker 13>working at top speed.
<v Speaker 1>But while I was doing that, I was making money
<v Speaker 1>at the same time, and I saved it for two years,
<v Speaker 1>and I saved enough money to be able to study
<v Speaker 1>for six months without working. That was the most important period.
<v Speaker 6>So he's like the only person I've ever heard that
<v Speaker 6>actually fucking followed through with that. Yeah, everyone has that plan.
<v Speaker 6>Everyone always says, I'm going to earn money for a
<v Speaker 6>year and then I'm going to stop working in audition,
<v Speaker 6>and d d da da dah. He actually fucking did it.
<v Speaker 4>So most probably either keep working or stop working in
<v Speaker 4>the don't audition. Most so home to get high, Most
<v Speaker 4>go home. Most quit. Most even you know, I came
<v Speaker 4>see that they quit. And I say this because I
<v Speaker 4>knew so many people who did. I knew so many
<v Speaker 4>people who said this exact same fucking thing. And I
<v Speaker 4>have so many people in my mind right now that
<v Speaker 4>when i'm even say it, all right, friends from college
<v Speaker 4>who said I'm just gonna work for a year and
<v Speaker 4>then I'm gonna then i'm gonna take the time off
<v Speaker 4>and I'm gonna audition, And they were gone before they
<v Speaker 4>even fucking saved money for a year, like they left
<v Speaker 4>l A. All right, So so I don't even fucking
<v Speaker 4>don't start. Don't fucking start because you did, because he
<v Speaker 4>didn't start. Got to get baristas somewhere. And I love
<v Speaker 4>my Starbucks baristas absolutely. Can you can see that glimmer
<v Speaker 4>in their eye. Yep, that that that sort of humiliating
<v Speaker 4>return to their hometown.
<v Speaker 6>And then and then and then you look at the
<v Speaker 6>manager and you realize, oh, that was the barista. They
<v Speaker 6>were a barista like five years ago, and now look
<v Speaker 6>where they are.
<v Speaker 4>Nothing else. We need these people, Okay, listen, strong job,
<v Speaker 4>I learn against it. I'm just saying there's a pipeline
<v Speaker 4>for people that take that job. I need people to
<v Speaker 4>make my pumpin spice. And that's okay, it's important that's
<v Speaker 4>one of them. Yes, exactly in my life because it's
<v Speaker 4>very difficult to work. It can be done, of course,
<v Speaker 4>but to work and try to be really attentive to
<v Speaker 4>your studying and still have responsibilities of paying your bills
<v Speaker 4>and being a normal citizen while you're studying at the
<v Speaker 4>same time. So I was lucky.
<v Speaker 1>I had six months to study without working at all,
<v Speaker 1>by watching my budget. And you happened upon a very
<v Speaker 1>good teacher, a very good teacher for me.
<v Speaker 13>A man or a woman.
<v Speaker 4>A woman.
<v Speaker 1>She was a very dynamic, a very strong person, very
<v Speaker 1>good for me. What's your name, Estelle Harmon? And she
<v Speaker 1>taught me discipline first, and what does discipline mean? Discipline
<v Speaker 1>to me for our listeners, to conduct yourself in a
<v Speaker 1>professional manner at all times. Whenever you're on a set,
<v Speaker 1>whenever you're on anybody, you're never late for a shot.
<v Speaker 1>Your temperament does not involve the time of other people
<v Speaker 1>or the production company. It's like any other job. You're
<v Speaker 1>paid to do a job. You're paid to be there
<v Speaker 1>and to know your material. Come in you with your words,
<v Speaker 1>learned in with some creative ideas. You can try them.
<v Speaker 1>If they don't work, fine, but at least you're offering
<v Speaker 1>more than you're being paid.
<v Speaker 12>Authority.
<v Speaker 1>That's right.
<v Speaker 4>I like that you're you don't preoccupy others time by
<v Speaker 4>your presence. Your preciice doesn't require other people's time. They
<v Speaker 4>give it to you if they choose to.
<v Speaker 6>I like that you come in with authority. Fucking Lucy,
<v Speaker 6>all right, Jesus fucking Christ.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, she is really hardcore format like she wants to
<v Speaker 4>run down What do you mean by that, She's like
<v Speaker 4>she suffers no fools that she's doing in the service
<v Speaker 4>to a listener.
<v Speaker 6>Yes, exactly, she is such. I mean, listen, I always
<v Speaker 6>I loved Lucy, no intendent, but I also always respected her.
<v Speaker 6>But listening to these interviews that the few that I
<v Speaker 6>have a whole different fucking monster, whole different monster. And
<v Speaker 6>I know, say whatever you want about her, you know,
<v Speaker 6>demons and all sorts of shit whatever. She is a
<v Speaker 6>brilliant mind, and she is a badass, and she was
<v Speaker 6>slitting throats for a good reason way before. Like, I mean,
<v Speaker 6>you think about the power, the amount of power she
<v Speaker 6>had as a woman in this business during the age
<v Speaker 6>that she was doing it. I mean, she was a
<v Speaker 6>she was a she was a force. She was a
<v Speaker 6>fucking force. So it was DESI but you know, she's
<v Speaker 6>just amazing. Wonder if about he taught Bill that he
<v Speaker 6>has to shake everyone's hand in the locker room when
<v Speaker 6>he first shows.
<v Speaker 1>Up to the town.
<v Speaker 6>That's part of the industrial work. I was actually I
<v Speaker 6>was hoping, I was hoping she could be that she
<v Speaker 6>would have been a little Jerry Briscoe and said that, Oh,
<v Speaker 6>I knew you had something. I just knew that, you know,
<v Speaker 6>you weren't ready for my thing. You know, ball is
<v Speaker 6>to Bill Bixby what Jerry Briscoe was to I love it.
<v Speaker 4>I mean she kind of did say that.
<v Speaker 6>Actually, she kind of did say it, like by saying, like,
<v Speaker 6>you know, I didn't even know what I was doing,
<v Speaker 6>like you you fucking you know, you were way ahead
<v Speaker 6>of the game, and I threw you away.
<v Speaker 4>Well, she had the whole like the whole thing of
<v Speaker 4>like it was it was for the better. Well he
<v Speaker 4>actually volunteered, he volunteer explanation that it was for the better.
<v Speaker 4>And she and she kind of admitted that, you know
<v Speaker 4>that that she fucked up. You know, it wasn't as
<v Speaker 4>it wasn't as.
<v Speaker 6>Whereas Jerry would be like, oh that's exactly where she
<v Speaker 6>wasn't saving face at all. She admitted, like, you know,
<v Speaker 6>she made the mistake. That's the difference. So Bill's first
<v Speaker 6>big break was he was one of the lead roles
<v Speaker 6>in My Favorite Martian, that TV show from the early sixties,
<v Speaker 6>opposite Ray Walston that ran for like three or four years,
<v Speaker 6>canceled nineteen sixty six, and then three years later he
<v Speaker 6>cast in the role of Tom Corbett in the Courtship
<v Speaker 6>of Vetty's Father. And I'll tell you I've never seen
<v Speaker 6>an episode of the court Thatt's Father. The only reason
<v Speaker 6>I'm familiar with it at all is because it's mentioned
<v Speaker 6>in Scrooged. Oh yeah, and and you know it's during
<v Speaker 6>the Ghost of Christmas Past segment and he's he's saying,
<v Speaker 6>there was this one time and I hit the home
<v Speaker 6>I hit the the you know, I hit a home
<v Speaker 6>run and I won the game, because that was the
<v Speaker 6>Courtship of Eddie's Father, says the ghost. That's you know,
<v Speaker 6>I always remember that, because I actually didn't. I wasn't sure.
<v Speaker 6>I knew later on, but when I first watched the
<v Speaker 6>film in like the early nineties, I didn't know if
<v Speaker 6>that was a show or not. It sounded so fucking like,
<v Speaker 6>what a stupid title. The Courtship of Eddie's father.
<v Speaker 4>Well, it's kind of like the scene from Miracle on
<v Speaker 4>thirty fourth Street and home alone, one that's playing on
<v Speaker 4>the kitchen television. Yes, it's the longest time to realize
<v Speaker 4>that that one. Yep, yep, Miracle on thirty fourth Yep.
<v Speaker 6>So many, Yeah, there's so many like that, even me
<v Speaker 6>too before I even when I was a kid watching
<v Speaker 6>Gremlins and you get fucking George Bailey smiss movie House.
<v Speaker 4>I had no fucking idea what that was.
<v Speaker 6>I was like, who's this idiot fucking running down the
<v Speaker 6>street like saying me Christmas to a building? Bill Murray
<v Speaker 6>with a little holly in his hat. But oh, just
<v Speaker 6>that's that's it. That's the season right there, Okay, and
<v Speaker 6>soon I wish I'm finding a way for Scrooge. That's
<v Speaker 6>the listen all my favorite Christmas movies.
<v Speaker 4>I'm I am.
<v Speaker 6>I'm always searching for a for a connection.
<v Speaker 4>That's pretty sure. Bill Murray was a wrestling fan growing up.
<v Speaker 4>He can't be a fan though everyone's a fan. I know,
<v Speaker 4>I know.
<v Speaker 6>He needs to have some kind of connection. But and
<v Speaker 6>that actually the court of Vetti's father, that that got
<v Speaker 6>uh uh, Bill Bicks his his first and only Emmy
<v Speaker 6>nomination for Best Our Outstanding Actor in a Comedy. And
<v Speaker 6>then while he was during the last season of the show,
<v Speaker 6>he started directing and that became another passion of his
<v Speaker 6>which is going to come into way way down the
<v Speaker 6>line on this episode. But yeah, he started directing. He
<v Speaker 6>loved doing that. And you know, then after Eddie, after
<v Speaker 6>the Eddie's Father thing was canceled, he dabbled another project
<v Speaker 6>before a you know one. Ken Johnson approached him about
<v Speaker 6>The Hulk, and much like Johnson, He's like, I don't
<v Speaker 6>want to be a fucking part of a comic book thing.
<v Speaker 4>The fuck is this shit?
<v Speaker 6>But Ken Johnson gave him his you know, lay mis
<v Speaker 6>esque script, if you will, and and he read it
<v Speaker 6>and he loved it, and so Bigs was like, get
<v Speaker 6>me on board, and he agreed to take the part.
<v Speaker 6>And that's you know, that's why he joins us here.
<v Speaker 6>That's how Terry Blay got into the business.
<v Speaker 4>If you will.
<v Speaker 11>He's a lapsed fan wrestling podcast with Jack and Carneo
<v Speaker 11>and JP Soro