"Greek" and "Roman" are something most folks can identify with. "Scythians" not so much.
I don't know, they didn't have much trouble with "the Riders of Rohan" which I'm pretty sure at least 75% of the audience hadn't ever heard of. I sure hadn't. And I think "badass Bronze Age women warriors" translates pretty well no matter what they're called.
I suppose there's no reason the art director and production people can't look at some history books when they're designing the look of Paradise Island, but I suspect that most people who buy a ticket to a WONDER WOMAN movie are going to want the traditional comic book trappings, regardless of whether they're historically accurate or not.
Lord knows XENA butchered History As We Know It, and it never hurt the ratings.
Next you're going to be telling me that the ancient Egyptians didn't actually have a mysterious "Nth Metal" that allow reincarnated pharoahs to fly like hawks, and that "Shazam!" is not really a genuine mystical incantation . . .
Hee! Like I said, accuracy isn't the point. Changing the rationale behind the relationship of the Amazons to, and therefore Wonder Woman's reason for being in, the rest of the world is. The thing is, I was raised a feminist. I marched for the ERA when I was 8 years old. My mom gave me the hard back collection of 1941 Wonder Woman comic reprints with the introductory essay on Amazons by Gloria Steinem that same year. It totally worked in the 70s. But today, you have to either figure the Amazons as some bizarre extremist society with the whole no men thing, or you have to basically ignore them. Plenty of good contemporary comics stories do ignore them and maybe that's why this seems immaterial.
But if you're talking about a movie, you're talking about having to deal with it. Movies are also prime opportunities to retool characters, and Wonder Woman's backstory, along with her costume, is in deep need of retooling. It's the main reason no one can get the character to screen. You're a good writer, Greg, I've read some of your books. Try to sit down and work up a treatment for a Wonder Woman origin movie and see how well it goes, and look at what the problems are. You're going to sell in this day and age Perez's reincarnated female victims of abuse sending an ambassador to the rest of the world? Is Wonder Woman going to sit down with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and preach to her about how Patriarch's World just needs to understand that women are powerful? I mean, just look at that, "Patriarch's World" - it's completely unwieldy and feels like soooo Women's Studies circa 1983.
If someone doesn't come up with a good idea to reboot all that, Wonder Woman's never going to make it to the screen and that would be a tragedy because she is an icon. But what's iconic about her? It's not the Greek trappings, at least not to the public at large who probably do remember the invisible plane, big boobs and star spangled panties more than anything else. And this new historical information, I think, is a rich pool of untapped potential which the character desperately needs. Diana is a character that emerges out of ancient history and this stuff opens up the mythological background she's set in - you could totally mix it up with the Greek stuff if you wanted to, go crazy and invent freely, whatever. Or forget about it and do whatever you want, I just think it's rich material to mine. The point is a movie is a chance to redefine the Amazons and soldifiy the changes in the character that have been accumulating since Kingdom Come. In fact, I'd say she's already changed signficantly, just no ones bothered to update her backstory to catch up to that. I can feel the mismatch, and I'm pretty sure the Warner Brothers people can too which is why they keep axing screenplays.
But that's just the opinion of one lone fangirl...
)
