Has anyone pointed out yet that Mr. Leggit is played by Howard Honig, who plays a passenger in
both Airplane movies? I thought he looked familiar. That just makes it even harder to avoid thinking of
Airplane! while watching this.
Even if it was dying, the airplane disaster flick was still a current enough thing for a TV series hungry for story ideas to adapt for one episode. "747" may have been showing up at the party fairly late, but it didn't miss the party entirely. I don't find it an odd choice at all in that respect. It'd be different if the same episode had been done by a show in, say, the mid-'80s.
Sure, it wasn't odd from a production standpoint. The choice of movie footage they wrote scripts around may have been influenced by what movies they had access to. All the ones they used were Universal films, of course, and they probably chose them based on how effectively they could be adapted. I bet this one was chosen on the grounds that it was relatively inexpensive to make, being pretty much a bottle show -- and I'd assume that the 747 sets were themselves recycled from other productions. I wouldn't be surprised if most TV studios had their own aircraft-interior sets available for use by any number of productions as needed.
But it is an odd fit for the Hulk as a premise, because it's a scenario that really constrains what the Hulk can do and conflicts with his usual MO of rampaging and smashing things. I wonder if this is the sort of thing that was occasionally done in the '60s-'80s where a freelancer (or duo) would write a generic script that they could sell to whatever show happened to buy it and then rewrite it to fit that show's specifics. After all, most of its plot beats could've worked just as well in half the other adventure shows on the air at the time, and the emergency landing sequence would really have worked better with just about any series lead.
Off the top off my head, there was a martial arts master who appeared in a couple of episodes...other than that, I don't think so.
Yeah, there were a bunch of actors who had multiple guest appearances (especially Gerald McRaney, who was in four episodes), but as far as I recall, Mako was the only one who recurred as the same character. Even Diana Muldaur, who played David's sister in one episode, played a nun in a later episode.
It's more of a mental exercise on my part for wanting to keep track of these people. If somebody were attempting to fill in the missing years between the series and the TV movies, for example, in licensed or fan fiction, people that David might potentially go back to would have some story potential.
That's one thing that bugged me about the latter two revival movies,
Trial of the Incredible Hulk and
Death of the Incredible Hulk. They both treated David as someone who was entirely alone in the world, with no one to turn to, even though we'd seen his family alive and well in the series, not to mention the countless friends he'd made. (And given that both those movies were written by Gerald DiPego, it's contradictory that he'd end
Trial with Matt Murdock established as a stalwart new friend that David could turn to, then turn around a few months later and portray David as tragically alone and depressed.)
