So, I finally broke down and bought the complete first season of the Wonder Woman series from the seventies, starring Lynda Carter, on DVD. And yes, the series is kinda cheesy... but still, I think Lynda Carter manages to pull it off. She wears that bathing-suit costume and yet acts perfectly comfortable in her own skin, and she delivers those hokey lines with complete sincerity, and as a result, they're *not* hokey... sort of like Christopher Reeve's first Superman movie. (And hey, she even did many of her own stunts-- including hanging onto a helicopter 100 feet in the air and flipping a football star over her shoulder.)
So, I got curious, and I found out a couple of interesting factoids about Wonder Woman's past...
Firstly, the Lynda Carter series was not the first time Wonder Woman appeared on television. There were two tries to bring her to the small screen before that, both of which thankfully failed. The first is barely worth mentioning-- a 4-minute spoof presented to Warner Brothers by William Dozier in 1967, then-producer of Batman. It was fairly well agreed to be awful, and Warner Brothers turned it down for a series. The second-- and this one's even more amusing-- was a 1974 made-for-TV movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby as a blonde Wonder Woman in a star-spangled track suit. Ricardo Montalban (remember Fantasy Island? Same white suit) was part of the supporting cast, and by all accounts it was even worse than the first try. It had nothing to do with the original character concept at all-- she had no powers, and acted more like a secret agent than superhero. It was supposed to be the pilot movie for a series, but it bombed so badly that they never continued with it (thank goodness). (After that flop, they decided to return to the character's roots and drop (most of) the camp for the third go.)
My second little factoid is about Wonder Woman's *real* "origin story." Her creator, William Moulton Marston, was *not* your typical comic book writer. In fact, he was *Doctor* Marston, eminent psychologist and instrumental in the creation of the polygraph. (So *that's* where Wonder Woman's golden Lasso of Truth came from....) Marston was also a feminist theorist and wrote about the problems of gender stereotyping, and the need for a heroine "with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman." And he was the perfect person to create such a heroine-- in 1940, he'd been hired by as an educational consultant by Detective (DC) Comics. With the enthusiastic support of Max Charles Gaines, Detective Comics' publisher, he debuted his superheroine in Dec. 1941; in fact, he gave up writing articles on psychology and devoted himself to writing for Wonder Woman for the last six years of his life. How's that for turning one's theories into reality?
Oh, and one more tidbit about the TV show-- Oscar-nominated actress Debra Winger got her big start playing Wonder Woman's kid sister, Wonder Girl, in the series.
Posted by gris at July 31, 2004 11:01 PM