It’s funny to say this now, but throughout the 20th century, DC was the leader in getting their properties translated to the screen. They gave us two iconic Superman actors in George Reeves and Christopher Reeve, two different major pop-culture phenomena in screen versions of Batman, both Adam West in the 1960s and the Keaton/Kilmer/Clooney trifecta in the 1980-90s. Their best animated work ranged from the Fleischer brothers’ great shorts in the 1940s all the way to Bruce Timm’s unparalleled set of animated series in 1990s and early 2000s. All Marvel had to show for themselves were a lot of mediocre movies, a lot of second-rate animated series (though one at least had an iconic theme song), and only really one TV show that worked (The Incredible Hulk).
However, it’s instructive to look at DC’s failures as well as successes, including both their versions of Wonder Woman and the first attempt at Supergirl.
The 1974 TV movie Wonder Woman was a failed pilot, and actually the second attempt to get WW on the small screen. The first was developed by William Dozier during the heyday of the West Batman, about which the less said the better, and thank goodness it didn’t get past one awful promo piece.
At the time the movie was in development, the Wonder Woman comic was going through a phase when Diana was depowered and depending solely on her hand-to-hand skills. They also dropped her military connection and she opened a mod boutique. (Hey, it was the 1970s.) That storyline was dropped and her original status quo retained by the time this movie aired, but the 1974 film was obviously inspired by it.
A year later, Batman veteran Stanley Ralph Ross was tasked with creating something closer to the comic book, which starred Lynda Carter. Unlike the Crosby film, Carter’s interpretation went to series.
Jump ahead a bit, and DC took a second shot at a female hero, banking on the popularity of Reeve’s three extant Superman films to give us his comic book cousin Supergirl in her own movie.
“Wonder Woman, I love you.”
Wonder Woman
Written and produced by John D.F. Black
Directed by Vincent McEveety
Original release date: March 12, 1974
In Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul (not Constantinople), and London, Military Police officers all steal codebooks and bring them to a guy named George, who then has his two thugs kill them all.
On Paradise Island, Diana says goodbye to her dearest friends as she is sent by her mother Hippolyta to the outside world to be a wonder woman (yes, Hippolyta really says that). She is tasked with bringing justice and love to the rest of the world.
Now she’s working for Steve Trevor, who is in charge of an intelligence agency, and he calls in a bunch of top people (including two military personnel) to report on the theft of the ten codebooks, which reveal the location and mission of all 39 deep-cover agent they have in the field. The decoy books they planted in other locations were left untouched.
They’ve identified three people with the resources to pull this off, one of whom, Abner Smith, has never been photographed. Trevor sends them off to come up with a plan to get the books back and save the agents. Diana has been eavesdropping and then tells Trevor she has a dentist appointment and has to leave early, and may be out for a few days. It’s clear that Trevor knows damn well that she is going to try to track down the bad guys in this case.
She travels to France to check out Smith and despite the fact that she’s wearing civilian clothes, she’s instantly recognized as Wonder Woman. Okay, then. One of the thugs from earlier sees her and calls in. George wants her killed, but Smith feels that violence and mayhem is gauche, and just orders her to be kept in check for 72 hours.
The thug tries to kidnap her, but she kicks him in the chest, so George tries a more friendly approach, asking her to dinner. After refusing champagne and requesting a more pedestrian wine, she then turns down his invitation to go sailing by asking if it’s Mr. Smith’s yacht. George works his rather sleazy version of charm, though Diana makes it clear that she’s not buying any of it. So he doubles down and says he’d like to make love to her, which doesn’t strike me as the right move. She doesn’t quite laugh in his face, but she comes close and walks out on him.
While she’s in the middle of checking in with Trevor, the phone booth she’s in is run down by a car. Diana saves herself with some quick thinking and acrobatics, then puts a tracer on the car. She tracks it to a mansion where there are the sounds of a party, but all she finds is a bottle of the same wine she requested at dinner with George and a tape recorder playing sounds of a party. The phone by the empty pool rings, and she talks to Smith, who says that George will be disciplined for trying to run her down. He also makes it clear that the only way to get the codebooks back is to fulfill the ransom request.
She tries to leave, but the fence is electrified. However, she manages to gimmick it open and return to her hotel. Suspecting foul play, she has someone in another room call her room on the pretense of waking her husband to let her in after she lost her key. But while she’s ready to jump George as he answers the phone, the two thugs get the drop on her. His plan is to put her in a trunk and take her on a boat ride for a few days. Diana takes all three of them down in about six seconds, then finds an airline ticket to New York in George’s pocket. She then flies to New York in her invisible jet (which we don’t see, and that’s not a joke, we cut from France to New York without observing her mode of arrival), and waits for Smith to arrive. Smith’s thugs plant a box with a poisonous snake inside under the couch in her hotel room. George calls to invite her to lunch and also remotely opens the box with the snake. Diana avoids being bitten by the snake thanks to some help from a porter with a saucer of milk.
To George’s surprise, she makes the lunch date. (He’s only waiting as a pretense for Smith’s benefit, as his attempts at murder are against Smith’s orders.) Since the snake plan failed, George does as Smith asks, and offers her five million dollars to form an alliance with Smith. However, Diana is only interested in getting the codebooks back and saving the field agents. George then makes his own offer: if he sees her again, he’ll kill her.
She smiles sweetly and leaves him a present, which turns out to be the snake.
Smith has sent a huge crate to Trevor, which has a donkey in it. The ransom is to be placed in the burro’s saddlebags and delivered to a place in Nevada. Trevor’s people have set up several methods of tracking the donkey.
Diana is informed that Angela, one of her fellow sisters from Paradise Island, has left the island without permission. We then learn that Smith has hired her, mainly to backstop George, who is talented, but heartless. Smith wants her to keep him in check.
Trevor and another agent deliver the donkey as instructed in Nevada. Diana’s there, too, hiding. She takes out the two thugs, who are set up with sniper rifles, and then she follows the burro into a shack, where it’s locked in a room and scanned, deactivating all the tracking methods Trevor put on it. Diana herself is trapped in the same room a moment later, after the donkey has disappeared, and it starts to fill with multicolored cement. She manages to kick the door down, and then continues to track the burro.
George and Angela are waiting for the donkey. George’s attempts to hit on her are about as successful as when he tried it on Diana, but instead she makes bets with him regarding her prowess with a javelin. She wins both bets, of course.
Diana arrives riding the burro. She and Angela fight with the two javelins. George takes the burro—and the ransom—and leaves while the two women continue to fight. Notably, Diana’s style is far more defensive, picking her moments to strike, and emerging victorious, though Diana won’t kill Angela.
When they were children, Diana saved Angela’s life. In defeat, Angela repays that debt by telling Diana where to find Smith. She goes off, promising that, should they meet again, Angela won’t hesitate to kill her.
Following Angela’s instructions, Diana arrives, and meets Smith. This is also the first time we see Smith’s face. They share a drink and Smith offers to leave the codebooks with Diana while he leaves on a helicopter with the ransom. But Diana is not willing to just let him escape. She sabotages Smith’s helicopter and tries to make off with both codebooks and ransom, but she is stopped. Smith refuses to let George kill her—people get much crankier over taking lives than about money, which is a refreshingly sensible attitude—but they do trap her while they get away.
Smith goes off, leaving George to pay the two thugs—instead, George kills them so he can keep their cut for himself. Then he confronts Smith and tries to take the money at gunpoint, but Smith deals with him easily and escapes in a rowboat, leaving George to drown.
Naturally, Diana is able to escape their cage. She finds a motorcycle (probably how George was supposed to depart) and tracks down Smith, capturing him and having him arrested. As he’s carried off, Smith declares his love for Wonder Woman. Um, okay.
Then she’s back to work as Trevor’s secretary.
“Sisterhood is stronger than anything”
The New Original Wonder Woman
Written by Stanley Ralph Ross
Directed by Leonard Horn
Produced by Douglas S. Cramer
Original release date: November 7, 1975
In Germany during World War II, Colonel Oberst von Blasko orders his top pilot to attack a bomb factory in Brooklyn. Von Blasko also mentions a double agent he has in the U.S. However, there’s a double agent among his people, too, and General Philip Blankenship orders Major Steve Trevor to intercept von Blasko’s pilot.
The pair of them have a dogfight over the Atlantic, and both their planes go down, with both pilots bailing out. The Nazi pilot shoots Trevor, but then lands in shark-infested waters and becomes lunch, while the wounded Trevor lands on Paradise Island.
Queen Hippolyta is not happy about a man being on their island and she wants to get rid of Trevor as soon as he’s healed. Her daughter Diana has never seen a man before and is intrigued (it’s probably Lyle Waggoner’s perfect cheekbones). Hippolyta announces a competition among the Amazons to see who will escort Trevor back to the outside world once he heals—but she forbids Diana from entering, as she won’t risk her only daughter on escorting a savage.
However, Diana puts on a blond wig and enters anyhow, and wins the competition handily—including the final contest, bullets and bracelets. (Where Paradise Island got a gun is left unsaid.) Hippolyta is mildly miffed at Diana’s deception, but she can’t deny that she won fair and square (and blonde), so off they go in an invisible jet, with Diana wearing a spiffy red-white-and-blue combo corset and bathing suit, a belt that makes her stronger, bullet-proof bracelets, and an indestructible lasso that compels anyone wrapped in it to tell only the truth.
Back in Washington, Blankenship gets news of Trevor’s apparent demise. He and Trevor’s secretary, Marcia, raise a toast in his honor. But Marcia is von Blasko’s double agent, and she reports what happened to the colonel. Now (justifiably) worried that he has a double agent in his ranks, von Blasko decides to try bombing Brooklyn again, and this time he’s flying the plane his own self.
Taking on the moniker “Wonder Woman” at Hippolyta’s suggestion, Diana flies Trevor home. Blankenship is pleased that he’s alive, and Marcia pretends to be, then reports to another fifth columnist that he’s alive.
Diana tries and fails to shop for clothes, and also stops a bank robbery. A talent agent convinces her to perform her bullets-and-bracelets trick on stage, but she doesn’t like her first performance and quits. The agent turns out to be Marcia’s fellow Nazi, and he reports that he failed to occupy Wonder Woman.
Blankenship tells Trevor that von Blasko is going to try again, and Trevor volunteers to be the guy to intercept the attack again. But the talent agent and two thugs kidnap him and interrogate him, finally using truth serum to get him to reveal where the plans for the bomb site von Blasko’s after are.
Marcia takes that information and breaks into Trevor’s office, but Diana stops her, despite Marcia being the Nuremburg Judo Champion. Using the lasso, Diana learns where Trevor is being held.
Her bigger concern, though, is von Blasko. She uses her invisible jet to intercept the Nazi plane and stop him, dropping the bomber into the sea and dropping von Blasko at a police station. (I’d love to read that arrest report…) Then she rescues Trevor.
Later, Blankenship introduces Trevor to his new secretary: Yeoman (1st class) Diana Prince—really Wonder Woman, of course.
“Where’s the wimp?”
Supergirl
Written by David Odell
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
Produced by Ilya & Alexander Salkind
Original release date: November 21, 1984
We open in Argo City, a Kryptonian city that apparently survived the destruction of Krypton by traveling through inner space (as opposed to outer space). Kara, a young woman who is cousin to Kal-El, knows that Earth is the planet where Kal-El wound up. She speaks with Zaltar, the founder of Argo City. He gives her a magic wand that can build things, and also shows her an omegahedron he borrowed—it’s Argo City’s power source. Kara plays with it and accidentally blows a hole in the city. Zaltar barely saves her from being blown out into space by closing the hole, but the omegahedron is lost, which will eventually doom Argo City.
Zaltar has a ship he says he will use to leave Argo City and go to Earth—or Venus—or Saturn—he can’t make up his mind, really—and Kara, out of guilt, takes it out of Argo City to retrieve the omegahedron.
The omegahedron itself lands on Earth in the middle of a picnic date with Selena, a woman who wishes to learn the ways of black magic, and Nigel, who wishes to show her those ways. Selena can feel the omegahedron’s power, and she tells Nigel she’s outgrown him. She drives off—even though Nigel has the keys, which he points out rather obnoxiously—as the omegahedron is able to power the car. (It also turns on the radio, which airs a news story about how Superman is negotiating a peace treaty in another solar system, thus explaining the lack of Christopher Reeve in the movie.)
Kara navigates the ship to Earth near where the omegahedron went, and emerges in a full costume similar to Superman’s for no reason that the script bothers to adequately explain. She enjoys exploring nature, as there’s nothing like trees and flowers in the sterile landscape of Argo City. Additionally, she discovers her ability to fly, her vision powers, and her super-strength. Her first flight takes her over a lake, a horse stampede, and also a rather peeved Nigel.
Selena returns home to her roommate/partner in witchcraft Bianca, who is drowning in bills and suggests forming a coven so they can charge admission to it. Selena, though, feels that all their financial difficulties are over now, and puts the omegahedron away somewhere safe.
Kara works her way to Chicago, using a bracelet from Argo City to track the omegahedron. She lands and encounters two skeevy truck drivers (hey, that’s Matt Frewer!), thus giving her her first experience with sexual harassment. One epic (and effortless) beat-down later, she flies off.
Selena is holding a party at her place. Nigel is there, trying to inveigle himself back into her life, but she’s having none of it, and kicks him out.
Eventually, even Kara must sleep, and she dozes in a park behind a school in the suburb of Midvale, awakened by a rabbit. Her first encounter with the bunny population goes far more smoothly than her first encounter with the human population. Then she stumbles across a girls’ softball game between two schools. She makes her uniform transform into one of the school’s uniforms, er, somehow, and also makes herself a brunette, and goes to the principal’s office. She pulls the name Linda Lee out of her ass and then the principal asks where her letter of recommendation is. Before she can respond, Nigel comes in—apparently, his day job is as a teacher—with an issue, and while the principal is gone, she uses super-speed to create a letter of recommendation from Clark Kent. She’s put in a dorm room with Lucy Lane, Lois’s sister, and they bond over both knowing Kent and Superman.
Bianca drives Selena to the school. Both Kara’s bracelet and the omegahedron go wacky for a moment, and then Selena drives off after deciding that Ethan, the groundskeeper, is dreamy. “Linda” also spoils a couple pranks by resident mean girls Myra and Muffy.
Friday rolls around, and it’s a three-day weekend, so most of the girls are going home or away. Kara takes advantage of the downtime to continue her search for the omegahedron. For her part, Selena creates a love potion to use on Ethan—who’s kind of an asshole, in truth—but Nigel shows up in a leisure suit, which distracts her long enough for a dazed Ethan to stumble out onto the street.
Selena stumbles her way into using the omegahedron to make her mirror a scrying mirror, and then is able to remotely control a backhoe to scoop Ethan up and bring him back.
Kara goes into Midvale and meets with Lucy and her friends—including Jimmy Olsen—for lunch. They see the runaway backhoe, and Lucy tries and fails to get it under control. Her head is knocked aside and she’s rendered unconscious. Kara changes into Supergirl, first putting out fires and neutralizing electrical wires, then she yanks the scoop off the backhoe and saves Ethan, leaving the unconscious Lucy behind. (Really?)
When Ethan opens his eyes, the first thing he sees is “Linda Lee” (she changed back into her civvies for no compellingly good reason) and the love potion kicks in. Lucy wakes up in time to see Ethan kissing her. For some reason, Lucy does not complain that her roommate is kissing some dude while she’s unconscious in what was a runaway backhoe.
Selena is angry that Ethan is love with “Linda” now (how she misses the fact that she is also Supergirl is never explained, as she talks about them like they’re different people), and she’s also convinced that Linda (who wears the uniform of the school where Nigel teaches) was sent by Nigel to mess up her plans. She sics an invisible shadow creature on “Linda,” who has returned to school and is all goofy over being kissed, as it’s a new experience for her.
Before she can muse further on this new experience, the shadow creature attacks the school. Kara changes to Supergirl and tries to fight the shadow creature. She defeats it, to Selena’s chagrin (and she again doesn’t see that Supergirl is also “Linda”—hilariously, the drunk matron, Mrs. Murphy, instantly recognizes Linda in the Supergirl outfit and tells her to get out of that ridiculous costume and into her uniform).
Selena opens the box containing the omegahedron and it starts to go apeshit. Kara sees the bracelet activating, and she follows its signal to Selena’s home. Ethan follows her with chocolates and flowers and tries to ply her with awful love poetry, then proposes. They’re about to smooch when Selena shows up and attacks. Kara changes to Supergirl and confronts her. Selena’s ability to manipulate the omegahedron have improved tremendously, but Supergirl is still able to imprison her temporarily and then save Ethan.
Swallowing her pride, Selena calls Nigel for help, asking him to get Ethan to her so Supergirl will follow. But instead, Nigel stops the love potion—or so he thinks. Ethan wakes up and talks like himself again, but he finds that he’s still in love with “Linda.” Kara tells him that “Linda” can take care of herself, and then kisses him for no compellingly good reason, although that’s enough for Ethan to figure out that “Linda” and Kara are the same person.
But then Nigel uses a Burundi wand, supercharged by the omegahedron, to kidnap Ethan and chain him up on Selena’s bed. Then Selena steals the wand, turns Nigel into a shabby, infirm old man, and then transforms her home into a mountain with a castle atop it.
Supergirl arrives at the mountain, where Selena imprisons her in the Phantom Zone. Her powers no longer work there, and she encounters Zaltar, who was banished there for losing the omegahedron.
Meanwhile, Selena has taken over Midvale, with the local police now her personal stormtroopers. Lucy and Jimmy are part of a protest movement, and Selena has them taken and imprisoned in cages dangling from the ceiling alongside Nigel.
Kara refuses to stay a prisoner. Zaltar says there’s only one way out, through a singularity, but it’s dangerous. But even as they proceed, the omegahedron shows Selena their tortuous process and she sends fireballs at them. However, they plow ahead, though Zaltar doesn’t make it. Emboldened by his sacrifice, Kara makes it through the maelstrom and through Selena’s mirror, er, somehow. Supergirl manages to free Jimmy, Lucy, and Nigel, and then she and Selena continue to battle. Selena animates a statue and enlarges it to super-size, and it starts to crush her. Supergirl almost gives up, but she remembers Zaltar and fights back. Ethan knocks the lid off the box that holds the omegahedron, and Supergirl is able to use it to send Selena and Bianca to the Phantom Zone.
Ethan promises to keep her secret and explain to the others why “Linda” disappeared. Jimmy and Lucy promise not to tell anyone about Supergirl (not clear as to why). Kara takes the omegahedron back to Argo City, and her home is saved.
“Oh, terrific, the old dangling-in-a-cage routine”
I went into this week’s rewatch expecting the 1974 WW film to be the most painful to watch, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was the one I enjoyed most. Oh, it has major problems, primarily being that it’s pretty much just a spy story spackled over with bits and pieces of the WW mythos, but it’s actually fun if you pretend it isn’t a WW film. Yes, it took many cues from the comics of the time. It was a storyline type that is often seen in mainstream comics, where they shake things up by doing a major change to the status quo, though said changes are almost always restored in the end. Superman doesn’t stay dead, Bruce Wayne goes back to being Batman, Steve Rogers goes back to being Captain America, Jean Grey doesn’t stay dead (for long), Tony Stark goes back to being Iron Man, Otto Octavius stops possessing Spider-Man’s body, etc. Diana losing her powers and becoming a hip martial artist was a temporary change, and one that the 1974 movie only partially embraces.
And the movie is fun, though the reasons for hiding Ricardo Montalban’s face for 75% of the film are never made clear, since it’s not like that voice could belong to anyone else. (It’s also amusing hearing that voice try and fail to fake a French accent, which is swimming upstream against his natural Mexican accent, not to mention the character’s incredibly white name of Abner Smith….) On top of that, just the act of casting Anitra Ford makes it obvious that Angela’s gonna be a bad guy, so her betrayal comes as little surprise.
However, Crosby deserves tremendous credit for playing Diana with a relaxed competence. She’s wonderfully in control of every situation, always on top of things, never one step behind her foes for very long, and dealing with every conflict with aplomb and talent and brains. (I particularly love that she tracks the burro by its hoofprints, a nice low-tech solution after Smith neutralized all the high-tech tracking devices on the donkey.) It’s not clear why she has to operate in secret, though. Only Trevor knows that his secretary is really a secret agent (another agent hits on Diana and is explicitly ignorant of her side job), but when she goes into the field, she’s instantly recognized as Wonder Woman, so what’s the point, exactly?
The 1975 movie does a much better job of embracing its source material. Stanley Ralph Ross was one of the finest of the Bat-writers on the 1966 series, and he takes his cues directly from the comics, down to the World War II setting. WW’s origin is less enmeshed in that conflict than, say, Captain America’s. With Wonder Woman it was more a case of William Moulton Marston happening to create the character in the shadow of a great war, whereas Cap was specifically created as a response to that war. (It’s why the 2017 Gal Gadot film worked just fine in World War I, and why the 1979 Reb Brown Captain America movies felt off without any reference to the second world war.) But doing so works quite nicely. The script is pretty bland, for all that—this adaptation plays things much straighter than Batman did, which makes its attempts at humor less fun—but mostly it works because of the convincing heroism and earnestness that Carter brings to the role. You believe that she’s really Wonder Woman in the same way you would believe that Christopher Reeve was really Superman a few years later.
If only his fictional cousin could manage it. Both iterations of Wonder Woman showed tremendous class and strength. Each was hit on repeatedly, and each was generally treated more like an object of desire than a person in her own right. Rather than embrace the sexism, both scripts had the target either deflect or reject such treatment, or simply work around it.
Supergirl, unfortunately, wears its sexism on its red-and-blue sleeve. Selena can only start to control the omegahedron properly with Nigel’s help. Zaltar insists on taking the fall for Kara when the omegahedron is lost, and then later has to be the one to rescue her from the Phantom Zone (though he only does it because she kicks him in the ass), and she only is able to break free from the animated statue when she hears his voice. Ethan is the one who enables her to snatch back the omegahedron. Worst of all, both Selena and Bianca are cast into the Phantom Zone, while Nigel gets away scot-free.
The basic plot of Supergirl is okay, but the details are a mess. Where is Argo City, exactly? How did it survive the destruction of Krypton? How do they know that Kal-El is on Earth, calling himself both Clark Kent and Superman? Why does Kara feel the need to enroll in a school? Even leaving the school aside, what’s the point of the Linda Lee identity? Why does she insist on being nice to Ethan when he’s a creep (even though he’s mostly a creep to her because he’s been magically roofied by Selena)? Why can’t Selena figure out that Linda Lee is Supergirl when she’s using her magic mirror to spy on her constantly, including at least two occasions when she changed from one to the other? How drunk was Peter O’Toole when he was acting in this, anyhow? (And yes, a lot of this is because the comics did it, but the movie does nothing to justify any of the Silver Age goofiness, nor does it truly embrace it, it just sort of drops it onto the screen and hopes for the best.)
It’s a pity, as Supergirl has a stellar cast, most of whom is utterly wasted. Faye Dunaway and Brenda Vaccaro are actually a fun double-act as Selena and Bianca (it reminds me favorably of the vibe between Carolyn Jones and Estelle Winwood as Marsha Queen of Diamonds and Hilda on the ’66 Batman). The Peters Cook and O’Toole are phoning it in, mostly, Cook in particular counting on his teeth to do his acting for him. Mia Farrow creates no impression whatsoever in what amounts to a cameo as Kara’s mother. And it’s fun to see Hart Bochner—probably still best known as the bearded sleazeball from Die Hard whom you actually root for Alan Rickman to shoot in the face—go from creepy landscaper to lovesick loon, though Kara returning his affection is just squick-inducing. Slater comports herself as best she can, showing Kara’s naïveté and sense of wonder (the bit where she wakes up and meets a bunny is delightful), though she seems to adjust to everything a bit too quickly and unconvincingly, with only occasional reminders that she’s not from around here, as it were. (“What’s a train?”)
Supergirl was not a big hit and after the failures of both this and the stunt-casting in Superman III prior to it, the Salkinds dumped the license on Cannon Films, which subjected all of us to Superman IV, which was just cruel. Slater has returned to the franchise by playing Kara’s adoptive mother in the current Supergirl TV series (which also cast Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher, the titular actors in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, as, respectively, her adoptive father and the Daxamite queen), and also appeared as Superman’s Kryptonian mother Lara on Smallville.
As for Wonder Woman, what’s really hilarious is that the 1974 movie failed to generate enough viewers to be picked up for series. So they went back to the drawing board, gave us the paralogically unsound title The New Original Wonder Woman, and that got developed into a series—one that would ultimately fail on the network, and get picked up by another network that changed the format into one very similar to that of the 1974 film that failed. The only difference in the CBS years of Wonder Woman was that Trevor didn’t know Diana and Wonder Woman were the same person, and Diana was openly an agent instead of a fake secretary (though they did the fake-secretary thing for about eight episodes or so). Carter also has appeared on Supergirl, as President Olivia Marsdin.
Another DC character that got theatrical treatment in the early 1980s was Swamp Thing, and we’ll look at his two movies next week.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at RocCon 2017 this weekend at the Kodak Event Center in Rochester, New York. He will have a table and be selling and autographing things. Other guests include actors Burt Ward, Nana Visitor, David Yost, Felix Silla, Jeremy Bulloch, Glenn Morshower, Chalet Brannan, Karan Ashley, and Carey S. Means; fellow author Lois H. Gresh; comic book creators Kurt Lehner, Pat Shand, Karl Slominski, Mark Sparacio, Nigel Carrington, Dan Curto, and Elizabeth Pritchard; and tons more.
“So he doubles down and says he’d like to make love to her, which doesn’t strike me as the right move.”
Should be kept in mind that “make love” used to mean to flirt, romance, pitch woo, hug and kiss, that sort of thing, rather than to have sex as it’s used today. I think the usage was starting to change in the ’70s, but this movie was written by Star Trek‘s first story editor John D.F. Black, so he might’ve been using the older meaning of the phrase.
Still, I liked the feminism of her response — that it wasn’t just what he wanted that mattered, but what she wanted.
And the evil Amazon’s name was spelled Ahnjayla, according to IMDb. Nobody pronounced it that way, though.
I haven’t seen this movie in decades, but I found it on YouTube today, and there were a couple of moments I almost recognized. The bit about the snake and the saucer of milk was familiar, as was the moment where she was trapped behind the glass in the tunnel. It was never explained why she was trapped; she would’ve gone after Smith anyway, so there was no need for that. Nor was there an explanation for that bizarre deathtrap in the ghost town with the multicolored cement. What the hell was that about?
Anyway, the story’s not bad, considering it was taking off on the “mod Diana Prince” era of the comics, which I actually kind of liked. Crosby does a nice job playing Diana as calm, poised, and fearless, and she’s very convincing and graceful in the athletic scenes, but she’s a little bland. Montalban is his usual suave self, but Prine isn’t very good, and Kaz Garas is terrible as Steve Trevor. The actress playing Hippolyta is amazingly awful. Anitra Ford is kinda hot, but comically broad and campy in her performance.
The opening flashback to “the island” (which is never named, nor is the word “Amazon” ever spoken) is brief but interesting, with the custom of the Amazons clasping forearms and clinking their bracelets. Nice way to call attention to them, although they never serve their traditional role as bullet deflectors (perhaps since a non-superpowered Wonder Woman wouldn’t have the speed or reaction time for that to work). The belt with the concealed rope in it was kinda neat.
As for the Lynda Carter pilot, 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 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. 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?
As for Supergirl, I reviewed it on my blog a couple of years back, and I liked it better than I remembered. I think it does a pretty good job of capturing an unapologetic Silver Age tone and mindset. It mostly has a terrific cast, though Hart Bochner is awful and his character is even more superficial than most female love interests in male-dominated films (though I wonder if that was the point). Helen Slater was pretty impressive in the lead, and I love how proactive she is — she’s not just reacting to the villain’s actions, she drives the story by seeking to correct her own mistake.
As dumb as the movie may be, I’ve rewatched Supergirl, maybe 6 times.
Why? I don’t know, in the end, as a baseline, I give movies where women get to beat stuff up a 5 out of 10, a little comedy, a decent performance ups that to a 7 out of 10. Now, movies can go down (ahem, Ultraviolet) and yes, that’s my own scale that vastly favours female characters over male ones, but this movie doesn’t stay at a 5 because Selena and Bianca are fun, Slater is a little muted, but fun and friendly enough for it to be okay, and even if the plot is stupid…umm, it was a comic book movie before comic movies were smart; and let’s face it, comic books, especially ones they just put out due to a sense of obligation, like Supergirl, were really poorly written, thus stupid. While it might be nice to have the movie elevate the material on which it was based, that’s a lot to ask for.
Supergirl was the movie I went to on my first date with the woman who would eventually be my wife. You cannot say anything bad about it.
fcoulter: I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that you and your future wife would have found yourself enmeshed in collubial bliss even if your first date was, y’know, a good movie… *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The classic 90s X-Men cartoon “second-rate”? Shame on you! To be honest, I have no real memories of any DC cartoon apart from a vague awareness of a Batman cartoon running on ITV at one point, whereas things like X-Men, the 80s Spider-Man cartoons and what I swear was a 90s Fantastic Four cartoon although a contemporary insists it was re-runs of a 60s cartoon featured heavily in my formative experiences of the characters.
Never seen the Wonder Woman stuff either, despite very vague memories of the CBS show airing on Saturday afternoons in the 80s. But yes, seems very faithful, with the “bullet and bracelets” thing there from the cartoon. As CLB says, probably a good thing they dropped the “Hey, you look just like me with glasses on, let me pretend to be you/“Okay” plot point. Even if they did replace it with nothing at all.
But ahh, Supergirl. I have fond memories of watching it round my aunt and uncle’s. Fun and Helen Slater’s very engaging but I do wonder where they were going with it: It’s possibly the debut superhero movie least conductive to a sequel. Supergirl comes to Earth to do a specific job, does it, then leaves. Was Supergirl II going to have her come back again because she misses bunny rabbits? She even sets up a secret identity only to abandon it after about two days! I seem to recall she only gets called Supergirl once, by Nigel during the climax. Guess he thought that’s she a girl dressed like Superman and it beats “Hey, you.”
And maybe it was the adolescent male in me but I felt really sorry for Ethan, even if he was rather wet. He gets mentally raped, quite probably physically raped (Selena seems to be keeping him as a sex slave), plays a mundane but crucial role in the world saving and gets rewarded by having his hot super-powered girlfriend fly off and leave him alone. I guess he should be thankful she didn’t give him super-amnesia…
While the first Wonder Woman film is nothing like WW (even keeping with Diana’s kung-fu era), it at least sounds like a passable spy action/adventure movie. But Supergirl’s script sounds like a real mess… I know I saw it in the 80s, but I didn’t remember a thing about it.
Is Matt Frewer’s trucker a Robert Knepper moment?
Regarding the sexism, could it be with the fact that the WW movies were for TV and Supergirl was a theatrical film? Different audiences? Like the WW movies would be seen by families as a rule, while Supergirl would be more for comic fans? (Not that families couldn’t go see it, of course, and this is just a theory.)
@5 – cap-mjb: It’s almost like the Supergirl writers were begging not have to make a sequel.
@5/cap-mjb: There was a Fantastic Four cartoon in the ’90s, alongside an Iron Man cartoon from the same creators. It was quite awful in its first season, mediocre in its second. But I think the first season pretty closely adapted some of the original comics plots, which the ’60s show also did, so maybe that’s the source of the confusion.
As for Supergirl, Hollywood has never had a problem creating sequels to stories that should’ve been over with the first time. Oh, what a coincidence, John McClane has run into yet another bunch of gun-toting hostage-takers at holiday time! Oh no, the bad guys have murdered our hero’s wife and family so he can’t live happily ever after anymore and must take revenge! And so on.
In this case, we know the people of Argo City had observed Earth for a long time; that’s how they knew about Superman. So it would’ve been easy enough to concoct a sequel where Kara saw something so bad happen on Earth that she had to go back to help — either something that incapacitated Superman or happened in his absence, or something so monumental they had to team up, depending on Reeve’s availability. Although it is true that they seemed to deliberately set up the ending of the movie to have no impact on the Superman films so that it could be ignored, almost like a non-canonical tie-in. (Although it wouldn’t really work just to have Jimmy and Lucy keep her secret, since Supergirl had been seen in public and the spectators would surely tell of it.)
@6/MaGnUs: No, even back then when comics were more widely read, the comics audience would’ve been a tiny fraction of the overall audience a movie would need in order to make a profit. If anything, movies need to appeal to mainstream audiences even more than TV shows do, not only because of the audience size they need to break even, but because plenty of people go to movies for reasons that have nothing to do with fandom — because they want to get out of the house on a Saturday night, because they’re on a date or a family outing and just picked whatever movie struck their fancy, because they’re interested in a particular actor who’s in the movie, etc. Movies have always been as much about the social experience of going to the movies as about the actual content of what was showing. So movies have pretty much always been made for a general audience rather than a niche fanbase.
Yes, you’re right. Then perhaps, could it have something to do that movie audiences wouldn’t give the sexism a second thought, while TV audiences, if they were hoping to make these into series, would, over time, find it distasteful even in the 70s? Or I’m just looking for rhyme and reason where there is none.
That said, I still can’t understand people who go to a multiplex and then choose what they’re going to see.
@8/MaGnuS: It wasn’t TV vs. movies. There were a ton of sexist shows on TV, and there were some more feminist movies. It depended on the individual creators.
Honestly, when I rewatched Supergirl, I found it was less sexist than I remembered. I thought it had reduced Supergirl and Selena to fighting for the affections of a man (which would’ve been very much in keeping with Silver Age comics with female leads), but in fact, Selena’s pursuing nothing less than world conquest and mainly just sees Ethan as an incidental plaything and a means to hurt Supergirl.
Still, it’s pretty sexist in light of what Keith relates of the film, even if it’s not horribly so.
“(It’s also amusing hearing that voice try and fail to fake a French accent, which is swimming upstream against his natural Mexican accent, not to mention the character’s incredibly white name of Abner Smith….) “
Shouldn’t that read ” not to mention the character’s incredibly Anglo name of Abner Smith?”
@10/MaGnUs: It’s a product of its time, and it has some cringeworthy moments, but it’s not as bad as it could’ve been. As I said, it’s less dominated by the love-triangle element than I thought. Kara/Supergirl is not particularly sexualized (despite the attempted rape by the truckers, and the later brief shower scene), certainly nowhere near as much as she was in ’90s comics. She’s mostly quite assertive, strong, and intelligent, although there are a couple of moments where she’s overwhelmed and moans “I can’t!” and needs a man to encourage her. It’s not perfect, but for its time it’s not bad.
I mean, heck, they actually made a theatrical feature film with a female superhero as the title character. That was a first, and was a step up compared to most of the succeeding 33 years. What have we had between Supergirl and Wonder Woman? Pretty much just Elektra and Catwoman. (Keith is including Tank Girl and Barb Wire in this column, but I’m not sure why, because those characters are more bounty hunters and mercenaries than superheroes.)
People needing encouragement to realize their potential is not in itself sexist if a man has to encourage a woman. I guess Lucy could have maybe been the one or something, but in the Phantom Zone, it had to be a man, not just a man, but her childhood mentor, whom it is natural to defer to even as an adult.
Maybe because I am a guy, and I rarely play games or watch movies or read books without a female lead, I didn’t see that as particularly egregious in this movie. She was a teenager in the movie, and teenagers (the nice ones anyway), sometimes fall back on encouragement from coaches or teachers, or friends, and that’s all that happened here.
The alley scene, well, that happens to Women all the time, so…you know, do you not put it in the movie? It might be the most realistic scene (minus the Supergirl just blowing them away) in the movie lol
I really liked Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, and preferred the episodes set in WWII.
@7/ChristopherLBennett: Oh yes, they could have come up with a sequel if they really wanted to. But it does seem like an unusually final ending, with Supergirl pretty much treating this as a fun holiday and then presumably settling back to…whatever it is she does to fill her time in Argo City. Most superhero movies, even the ones that bomb, end with the implication that this is an ongoing adventure and the hero’s going to be doing more crime-fighting next week. Here she gives up her new lifestyle straightaway.
ATTN: Moderators: the “New In Series” entry for this Rewatch still lists the prior Captain America article as the most recent column.
@15/cap-mjb: Well, as I said, this was the first female-led superhero movie, so I guess they were approaching it as a test case, or a sidebar. Maybe there was pressure from studio execs to make sure it was a story that had no lasting impact on the status quo, so that the Superman series could ignore it if it bombed or if the sexist backlash were too great. (Although that turned out to be a moot point once the Salkinds sold the rights and we ended up with only one more Superman film that was even worse.)
Really, the way Supergirl was introduced in the comics wasn’t that different to start with. After Kara’s arrival on Earth and her first adventure, Superman stuck her in an orphanage under the alias Linda Lee and kept her hidden as his “secret weapon,” someone he didn’t tell anyone about and generally avoided unless he needed her help. Which was a hell of a jerk move for one of the last surviving refugees of Krypton to do to the other one, especially given that she was his only surviving family and vice-versa (in the comics, Argo City had been destroyed rather than just endangered), but it served the purpose of allowing most Superman stories to ignore Supergirl’s existence unless they had a story reason to acknowledge her. It was years before Supergirl was finally “outed” to the public.
@16: Updated, thanks!
Chris: Certainly, it’s something very big.
@12/ChristopherLBennett: Tank Girl and Barb Wire are included (I’m certain) just because they premiered in comics first and that’s close enough. Personally, I think that’s fine and I’d go one step further: I’d expand the definition of “superhero”. Nobody will convince me that Alice from the Resident Evil movies isn’t a superhero. If Black Widow is a superhero, Alice is a superhero. Alice has all of Widow’s moves, plus she had actual super powers during a bunch of the movies.
But Alice isn’t a “superhero” because a.) she wasn’t published by Marvel or DC, and b.) she never wore a costume. And she’s not the only one I classify that way. There are a lot of characters, men and women alike, who qualify in my mind. Especially if you use the “If Black Widow counts, so does…” test.
@20/DMC: But there are many comics-based non-superhero movies that Keith isn’t covering, e.g. 30 Days of Night, 300, Josie and the Pussycats, Men in Black, From Hell, Heavy Metal, etc. Comics have never been exclusively about superheroes, but the declared focus of this series is specifically on superhero movies based on comics — excluding superhero movies not based on comics (e.g. The Incredibles or Condorman) and, for the most part, excluding comics-based movies not about superheroes. But there are some odd exceptions to the latter. Plus there’s the odd inclusion of The Shadow, a movie based on a character originating in pulp magazines instead of comics.
“But Alice isn’t a “superhero” because a.) she wasn’t published by Marvel or DC”
There are plenty of non-Marvel/DC characters that are explicitly called superheroes. The protagonists of my own novel Only Superhuman are among them. Those two companies’ trademark on the term “super hero” doesn’t mean that nobody else is allowed to call their characters superheroes — that’s not what trademarks mean. Trademarks apply to terms or images used in titles, promotions, or merchandising. I couldn’t have legally called my novel Superheroes of the Asteroid Belt, say, but I was perfectly free to have my characters call themselves superheroes within the text of the novel. For that matter, my novel uses the terms “superhero” and “superheroine” several times on the cover blurbs, so it was somewhat used in promotions, and we didn’t get in any legal trouble for that. I’m not sure that trademark is ever really enforced anyway.
“In what alternate universe is Wonder Woman a blonde?”
– Sheldon Cooper
@22 – dlf1203: One of the many times where it shows that while TBBT writers have an advisor for the science dialogues, they don’t for the nerdy stuff, or not one that knows a damn. I enjoy the show, but I have to watch it like computer experts watch hacker shows.
I adored Supergirl and nearly destroyed a VHS cassette rewatching it endlessly. Seriously. Get to the end of the movie, hit stop, hit rewind, hit play.
Hey, I was 6 when it came out, shut up.
I suspect it may not stand up to my memories of it if I were to rewatch it now though.