Watching this episode makes me feel nine years old again. This was absolutely my favorite episode as a kid because this episode had what nine-year old boys want to see: The Hulk battling another creature!  Quasimodo ain't the Abomination or the Rhino but at this point I was ready to take what I could get!  This is just an all around good episode and though I had grown fond of Rick I was so thrilled that I didn't notice he wasn't in it until it was over.  Even with 1980's standards the ... err... "slugfest" was good fun.  (Punches WERE thrown even though they didn't connect.)  I was also never too fond of the army base setting of the show even though it is a staple of Hulk history. So having Paris as a backdrop made this even more fun for me. In my cynical old age it seems awfully selfless of Bruce to give a potential cure to a villainous man.  But at nine years old the logic of giving the cure to Quasimodo because Bruce was "a monster only part of the time" rang true to me. It may be nostalgia overwhelming me but I gotta give this one four stars.

     
Once of the main criticisms of the 1982 Hulk show, is that the Hulk hardly ever faced any foes from the comics, most notably the Abomination. Although not in this episode, thankfully we finally do get a worthy foe in the form of Quasimodo. It's the only time in the whole series that the Hulk fights an opponent with similar strength and at last get treated to some long overdue smashing! Quasimodo himself successfully comes across as a darker, more intense version of the Hulk. With the episode being set in Paris, with only Bruce and Betty, more time is given to their relationship, which really brings home to me just how maturely some aspects of the show were treated. After all, there weren't too many early 80s cartoon characters who were engaged, let alone as romantically involved as these two! Another very likeable aspect of this episode is that it is a refreshing change of pace - there are no world-threatening plots here, no Gamma Base under attack again, just a tale of two tragic monsters in a city, rather than the desert. I do think that having Betty just happen to be the one who had the key to the gold vault was a bit contrived, but at least a half-decent explanation was given.