In retrospect the Thing Ring was much more user friendly.
Oh, god. I've been watching this show recently, since I loved it as a kid (mainly due to the actual transformation sequence) and I found the whole thing on YouTube.
Several episodes reveal that "Benjy" is really the adult Ben Grimm stuck in a scrawny teenage body, which is something I'd thought I'd remembered from back then, but a couple of episodes make it clear that that's the case.
(In turn, that makes it a bit creepy that Benjy has a crush on and keeps trying to get together with a school-age girl, the older daughter of the scientist who accidentally turned him into a teenager in the first place. Fortunately, she's not interested in him, and he seems to show no interest in her as the Thing. There's definitely some "The Mind Is The Plaything Of The Body" going on there)
Er... anyway. Back to Dredd.