Avengers<\/a>, if they\u2019d been able to make anything work in addition to the Hulk. They just needed other popular heroes to team him up with.<\/p>\nPlans were made for crossover episodes between The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man early on, but the concerns over Spider-Man\u2019s young fanbase prevented the MCU-style team-up. After both series ended, actors Bill Bixby and Nicholas Hammond pitched a Hulk\/Spider-Man TV movie, and while more Hulk TV movies were made, they never brought Hammond\u2019s Spider-Man back.<\/p>\n
If the crossovers had happened, they easily could have evolved into Dr. Strange and Captain America joining up for a campy \u201970s Avengers TV event. Inconsistent ratings were a hurdle for CBS, attempting its TV version of the MCU, but it also faced two major corporate problems.<\/p>\n\nOne was that CBS was nervous about becoming synonymous with superheroes, which at the time were thought of as being only for kids. That\u2019s at least a part of why Spider-Man was canceled, despite its ratings success.<\/p>\n
The other is that Marvel itself was increasingly dissatisfied with CBS and worried about the network creating new characters of their own, spun off the shows they owed to Marvel. It was that paranoia which led Marvel to the creation of She Hulk, in an attempt to stop CBS from owning the idea of a female Hulk.<\/p>\n
The interconnected universe has been a huge part of Marvel comics since the 1960s, and CBS almost brought that to the small screen nearly 50 years ago. While the campy style of the CBS productions might have prevented MCU-level popularity, a full universe with the impact of The Incredible Hulk could have shifted the whole genre.<\/p>\n\nWhile the idea feels very modern, shared superhero universes easily could have become the hot trend of the 80s, if even one of those CBS projects besides the Hulk had taken off. It didn\u2019t happen. The world wasn\u2019t ready.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s for the best, because if any of the Marvel plans of the 70s, 80s, and 90s had worked they never would have turned out as well as what we have now. Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark was worth waiting for.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decades before Iron Man kicked off the MCU, plans were in place to create a different Marvel universe, one that would culminate in an Avengers team-up. It started on the television network CBS and spawned numerous superhero movies. The network fully established a handful of heroes and made plans for a crossover. If CBS had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2057920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[383244,311034,342831,372035,305487,335599,373697,383245],"class_list":["post-2057919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-bill-bixby","tag-captain-america","tag-lou-ferrigno","tag-marvel-universe","tag-mcu","tag-peter-parker","tag-the-incredible-hulk","tag-tv-movie"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/The-Superhero-Team-That-Became-An-80s-Live-Action-Disaster.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2057919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2057920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}