Wonder Woman season one tonight.
I held off on this until I could get the pilot movie from Netflix. It's actually a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the first couple of Wonder Woman comics. The Paradise Island sequence follows her debut in
All-Star Comics #8 quite closely, and the following stuff in the US shares the broad outlines of the story's continuation in
Sensation Comics #1, right down to having Diana pose as a nurse before becoming Steve Trevor's assistant (although they wisely dropped the part about her just happening to run into a real Nurse Diana Prince who looked just like her and bribing her into letting Wonder Woman take her place).
And it's a pretty effective pilot aside from that. Lynda Carter is, let's face it, a mediocre actress, but that kinda worked for Wonder Woman's guileless and wholesome personality. And since I was seven when this show began, I don't think I ever really appreciated just how beautiful she was. She certainly has a radiant smile, and fantastic legs (though not quite as fantastic as Joanna Cameron/Isis). And whaddaya know, she really did wear satin tights!
She's also surprisingly tough in the pilot. In contrast to Jaime Sommers' preferred nonviolent uses of her bionics, Wonder Woman is shown punching people out, and she even crashes a plane into a Nazi sub and presumably kills everyone aboard it. Although that was toned down some in episode 2, where she was just shoving people around. And one thing featured prominently in both episodes so far are prolonged catfights with the villainesses. Why am I not surprised?
Interesting that in the early episodes, Wonder Woman's clothing are held in her hands after completing the magical spin, instead of disappearing as seen in later episodes.
Yeah -- I guess the original idea was that she was just stripping down so quickly that she seemed like a whirlwind, although the slow motion kind of works against that. Later they changed it to a simple fadeout and then added the big noisy flash of light that nobody ever sees or hears.
The episode was written by Margaret Armen, best known for being a prolific contributor to Star Trek, with no less than five stories (combined) for TOS and TAS.
And not that well-written, I fear. Maybe Armen was deliberately going for a stilted, comic-booky dialogue style, but it was laden with awkward "As you know, Bob" expository monologues.
This episode also features the debut of Beatrice Colen as Etta Candy, though you'd hardly know it. She's just kind of there in a couple of scenes in the back half without any prior introduction. I wonder where this episode fell in production order.
Plus we get some of the bondage that was so prominent in Marston's WW comics. Although they've changed the rules; in the comics, if Wonder Woman let herself be bound by a man, she'd lose her superstrength. Here, she was able to break free of the chains with no problem.
One thing I find rather silly in both episodes is the conceit that pinning back her hair and putting on comically oversized glasses is somehow supposed to make Lynda Carter look plain and unattractive. I mean, sure, it does hide her looks a little, but not to the extreme degree the dialogue implies. I wonder if the writers were deliberately poking fun at the conceit by exaggerating it that way. This is, after all, from one of the head writers of
Batman, Stanley Ralph Ross, so it has some of the same campy flavor. I also have to wonder whether Diana's feminist statements are being presented sincerely or being poked fun at like Batman's ultra-square wholesomeness.
But that theme song is rather amazing, isn't it? It's a hell of an earworm. And I love the lyrics. They're hilariously corny, but I also kind of admire their idealism, and their outright embrace of the feminism that Marston intended to promote with Wonder Woman but that his successors on the comic did their best to downplay.
