OPINION: I’ve been loving Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. But I’ve got one BIG gripe with the Disney+ show. She’s too short!
The show centres on Bruce Banner/The Hulk’s cousin Jennifer Walters, a woman who juggles her career as a lawyer with her ability to transform into a giant green superhero. But in the MCU ‘giant’ is a relative term.
The Incredible Hulk appears around 246cm or 8ft.1 in the MCU movies, that’s a superhuman height matched by his superhuman muscles. A far cry from anything that exists in human reality. You know… literally superhuman.
Meanwhile the Disney She-Hulk is 200cm or 6ft7.
If all women looked like Ariana Grande that would be a super human height, but I’m a 6 ft 1 woman and I have shoes in my wardrobe that make me that tall! And I wear them!
SO SUPER? REALLY? I’m going to paint myself green, don some stilettos, and bam! I guess I can walk right into the Avengers.
Judging from recent photos Tatiana Maslany, the actress who plays She-Hulk is around the same height as Mark Ruffalo, so why this massive difference in the size of their Hulk forms?
‘The Hulk's not that much larger’ I hear you say. Um… please look at their hands!
We can get into the nitty gritty of the difference in gamma-ray exposure that gave Bruce Banner vs. Jennifer Walters their green Hulk-smash powers, and how ‘that means she’s less powerful according to the comics’ or some other BS.
But it’s 2022 kiddos. If the old story was sexist, we can fix that.
The Disney She-Hulk is basically just a green version of Valerie Adams - a stunning and powerful woman with a body-type shared by countless other REAL women. Meanwhile, the male Hulk gets to look like a cartoonish monster. It’s a double standard.
The show's creators are aware the MCU took a different approach to She-Hulk’s body than her Avenger cousin, but it doesn’t seem like they care.
In an interview for entertainment weekly they said "So she doesn't have a bodybuilder's physique, but she absolutely has a very strong physique that can justify the actions that she does in the show. I think people expected a bodybuilder and for her to have these big, massive muscles but she looks more like Olympians."
I’ve been enjoying She-Hulk; it’s a comedy about a woman with more traditionally masculine qualities like trouble controlling anger, ambition, physical strength and you don’t see that too often! But her character design lets the message of She-Hulk down.
It’s exactly the sort of thing I expect from the studio that waited 12 years to give Black Widow her own film.
Arlette Barraclough is a Digital Content Producer for The Edge
