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Wonderful and Wonderless — Wonder Woman (1974), The New Original Wonder Woman, and Supergirl

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Wonderful and Wonderless — Wonder Woman (1974), The New Original Wonder Woman, and Supergirl

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Published on September 12, 2017

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.

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Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing about popular culture for this site since 2011, primarily but not exclusively writing about Star Trek and screen adaptations of superhero comics. He is also the author of more than 60 novels, more than 100 short stories, and around 50 comic books, both in a variety of licensed universes from Alien to Zorro, as well as in worlds of his own creation. Read his blog, follow him on Facebook, The Site Formerly Known As Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Blue Sky, and follow him on YouTube and Patreon.
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