The big green guy gets another chance on the tube...

Hellboy franchise helmer Guillermo Del Toro is teaming up with Battlestar Galactica exec producer David Eick to bring Marvel's The Incredible Hulk back to our TV screens after an absence of nearly thirty years. The high-powered pairing are in late stages of negotiations to get ol' greenskin a new TV incarnation on ABC, with production split between ABC and Marvel Studios.

The project will mark the first collaborative effort from the recently-formed Marvel TV division, as well as the first TV venture for Pan's Labyrinth director Del Toro. There is apparently no planned continuation or link with the two previous movies, Ang Lee's Hulk (2003) and Louis Leterrier's 2008 semi-reboot The Incredible Hulk. Rather the series will start from scratch with the origin story of Bruce Banner as his awry experiments with gamma radiation give him an unwelcome and uncontrollable muscular personality when he gets angry.

Predictably the age of Bruce Banner will be much lower than any previous outing, with the genius scientist now reputed to be in his mid-twenties for the new project. Bill Bixby was 44 when he took on the part for the CBS show which ran from 1978-82. Eric Bana was in his mid-thirties for Ang Lee's take on the comic legend, as was Edward Norton in his slightly more coherent, action-oriented Hulk outing.

Besides his involvement with the Galactica universe, including the forthcoming new series Blood & Chrome, David Eick is also behind Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and the less successful Bionic Woman 1970s reboot. Eick calls the new Hulk TV project a "dream opportunity to join one of my all-time filmmaking heroes, Guillermo del Toro, in a faithful but unique retelling of the primal, emotionally-rich tale of one of my all-time comic book".

Del Toro commented: ""I have always been attracted at the combination of comic book heroics and monsters, Jack Kirby's Demon or Kamandi or DC's Deadman or Marvel's Dr. Strange, Morbius, Metamorpho, Mike Mignola's Hellboy, etc,", noting that he had pursued the Hulk property as a feature film when Blade II was released. Del Toro promises that the new TV Hulk will provide "a respectful but powerful way of retelling the Banner/Hulk story in a fresh way."

One of the key successes of the original Hulk TV series was actually the way that star Bill Bixby insisted that the stories not descend into the same shoot-em-up, monster-of-the-week fare into which the Bionic Man/Woman series had accompanied Wonder Woman. Consequently the show was a frequently poignant affair about an itinerant fugitive whose strange powers had a life-changing effect on the situations that he would run into on the road. And who can forget that sad piano refrain...?

One can only presume that the new version is not going to be quite as restrained. You don't hire Guillermo Del Toro and then tell him he can't have monsters.

Deadline

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