And by “all the world” I mean “me” and by “you” I mean the complete first season of Wonder Woman on DVD, which according to Amazon shipped today! Woo-hoo! From the day I got my DVD player this is one of the things I’ve been waiting for most eagerly. IMHO the best by far comics-to-TV adaptation and one of the best translations of comic book to other medium ever. I haven’t read tremendous numbers of the Golden-era WW comics but the show’s first season really captures the flavor of those books (minus the pseudo-SM and lesbian love aspects of course, this being prime time from the 70s and all). Lynda Carter played WW/Diana Prince terrificly, capturing a great blend of confidence and self-assurance along with some naivete at being in an unfamiliar world and a complete guilelessness. While I still largely enjoyed the show after it moved to CBS, the seaons set in present-day never fully captured for me the magic of the first World War II-era season.
I’m sure Mockingbird probably had his set pre-ordered before I did; anyone else giddilly waiting by the mailbox?
Well, I seldom get “giddy” about anything. But I am expecting to get it as a birthday present; it’s in the mail, apparently. And I’m looking forward to it.
I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember its being just a fun, faithful, and goofy interpretation of the golden age comics. Not as campy as the “Batman” series, but almost as creative. And it did lose a lot when they updated it to the present day. Did Debra Winger appear in the first series, or only after they updated it?
(For the record, I think you would’ve gotten more responses if you’d used “In your satin tights, fighting for our rights” as the subject line.)
Yeah, I took a gamble that the WW die-hards would recognize the line (which you must admit is a better thread title) and that I’d pick up other people with the mouse-over preview.
Miss Winger appeared as Drusilla/Wonder Girl in three episodes of the first season.
Hmmm, all this time I’d thought I was looking forward to it just because I’m a fan of comic books and cheesy 70’s TV. Could there be some subtext here that I’m missing?
Is this like that time a friend of mine had to pull me aside and explain things to me after I’d said I was kind of unique among gay men because I really like the movie Bring it On?
I just feel bad for the parents. They’re giving me the WW DVD’s as a birthday present, and I hate to think I’m giving them false hope that the only reason I haven’t found the right woman yet is because I’m still holding out for Lynda Carter.
I resisted Bring It On for a while, finally only saw it when some (straight married) friends rented it (and only it) for movie night so it was that or bitter recriminations for spoiling movie night all around (which can also be entertaining). I loved it and now own the DVD and have held showings for my other straight married friends.
Just sit them down and explain, “Mom, Dad, I don’t want to do Wonder Woman, I want to be Wonder Woman!”
All righty then, my DVDs arrived a few days ago and I’ve been wallowing in all things WW on and off since.
First, the gripes. The graphics on the packaging are awful. They’re supposed to be 70s-style WW, which is a cool idea, but the drawings are really bad and they use the modern costume (with the stylized WW on the top) rather than the period-appropriate eagle. The DVDs are double-sided which I don’t like because my feeling is the discs are more easily damaged and there are no on-disc graphics. The special features are slim-to-none (one commentary track and one featurette).
That said, man it’s been fun digging back into the first season! As I said before, it was always my favorite because of the wide-eyed idealism that Lynda Carter played so beautifully. Which isn’t to say she didn’t do a good job playing somewhat more jaded in the second and third seasons but her 1st season performance really captured for me the innocence that someone with no knowledge of “modern” American life would display.
Overall I think the show holds up well, especially in comparison to, say, Batman or The Green Hornet or The Incredible Hulk. I’ve been having a blast spotting goofs to submit to IMDB (there aren’t any listed as I write this so when they start appearing in the next few days they’ll all be mine!) and catching some of the odd gaps in concept. For instance, in one episode Diana has no idea who Thomas Jefferson is but in the next she knows about Abraham Lincoln (although I suppose she could have studied up on presidents in the interim). Or WW’s sister, fresh from Paradise Island, knows how to use a telephone. Still, despite some of the goofy plot points and general silliness I’m enjoying the show as much now as I did when first watching it.
So far I’ve only had time to watch the pilot and most of the next episode. I’m torn.
On the one hand, there’s some brilliant stuff going on – the credits sequence, of course, and the theme song. And the comic-book style captions. And all the period cars and costumes with 70’s disco music playing in the background. (I’m guessing the reason they updated the series was so that it’d be cheaper to produce?) And of course, Lynda Carter was just smoking hot. And always remembered to check her boustiere and tiara after every transformation.
And I had completely forgotten that Cloris Leachman was the Queen of Paradise Island! Or that Fannie Flagg was the head doctor! Or that Red Buttons and Artie Johnson played bumbling Nazis!
But on the other hand: there’s no focus. It’s like they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to make a campy “Batman”-style superhero show, or a straight-ahead 70’s action/adventure series. Which would be okay, except that they didn’t get everybody in the same scene to agree – in any scene, you’d have two people camping it up and the rest trying to play it straight.
And then the usual complaints: inept editing, “special” effects only in the modern euphemism sense of the word, “blue-for-night,” the laughable invisible plane, and all kinds of continuity errors.
It’s a big shot of nostalgia, though. I totally remembered the bit where the old lady pulls out a machine gun to shoot at WW onstage. And apprently the whole trying-out-to-be-Wonder-Woman sequence made more of an impression on young me than I ever imagined; I kept getting this weird sense of deja vu of women in masks and white bathing suits chucking spears at each other. Get out of my brain!
And I was reminded of the uncomfortably confusing tingling feeling I got whenever they showed Steve Trevor with his shirt off.
I think she’s supposed to be checking that her magic belt is securely in place, although her magic belt never seemed to be securely in place.
Oh lord, what was she on during filming? I’d completely forgotten how flat-out bizarre her performance was.
Hm. Not sure that I agree with that critique. I think perhaps rather than choosing they were trying to strike a balance between the two. The over-the-top acting I think you have to lay at the feet of some of the hammy guest stars and the directors who failed to rein them in.
You know, actually, I liked the invisible plane more than I remembered. I mean sure it was a silly effect but it was still kinda neat.
They movedinto the 1970s when the show went from ABC to CBS because it was cheaper to produce.
Lynda checked her tiara and bustier because she tended to fall out of them during a spin initially. I got that bit of information from Donfeld, who designed the costumes through the three season run of the show.
All three women who played Hippolyta(Wonder Woman’s mother) were Oscar nominated actresses. Beatrice Straight(the third actress to play Hippolyta) won for Network and Leachman won for Last Picture Show.
Lyle Waggoner appeared in an early Playgirl spread when he was on Wonder Woman.
A website curiously devoid of any pictures of this alleged early Playgirl spread. And you call yourself an authority.
That’s pretty cool; I hadn’t realized that the different versions of the show were on two different networks. I must’ve seen the show only when it was in syndication, because I remember the switch from the 40’s to the 70’s being a complete non-sequitur. In fact, they’d often run episodes from the two different eras back to back with no explanation.
Well, I got that impression from the pilot episode, mostly. It seemed like Cloris Leachman and Artie Johnson and Stella Stevens were “in on the joke,” and everyone else was playing it relatively straight. I guess I wish they had gone farther in the campy direction; some of it (especially the Baroness episodes) is pretty dry.
Indeed. I kind of wish I didn’t wear glasses, so I could get that contact lens catalog in the mail more often.
Well, just as I don’t have naked pictures of Lynda on the site(which I have because of some visitors who wanted me to start a section on that), I don’t put Lyle’s up(which I also have).
When people ask for pictures of Wonder Woman being chloroformed, tied up, or unconcious(I have had multiple requests for all three), I send them a picture of Lyle.
I’m so glad they didn’t go too far in the camp direction. Check out the original WW attempt on Mockingbird’s site (“Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince?”) for an idea of how disasterously wrong going that route could have been.
