On the one hand, you have to appreciate the effort the makers of this ad for Mexican department store El Palacio de Hierro have gone to to re-create the 1960s TV Batgirl (complete with Batbike) and Catwoman and the 1970s TV Wonder Woman. On the other, the ad’s almost as leery as some of DC’s rebooted comics. Sigh – where’s the R.E.S.P.E.C.T. these days, I ask you?
Wonder Woman
Weekly Wonder Woman
Review: Wonder Woman #1
Poor old Wonder Woman. What a year – her 70th no less. She’s been having nothing but trouble. Let’s put to one side for a moment the problems of her intended TV adventures and look to her true home: comics.
Still trouble.
A year or so ago, lauded writer Gail Simone was just leaving the title. She’d left it in quite a nice state. Wonder Woman was getting to grips with “man’s world”, relationships, friendships, daughterhood, her new power (Zeus’s lightning bolts), et al. Achilles had settled down from his time as The Olympian. The Amazons were tickety-boo for a change. Everything seemed happy and all set for the next writer, J Michael Straczynski. They even reverted the numbering scheme for the comic back to #600 in celebration for the next issue.
(Forgive the gorillas – it’s a long story).
Then along comes JMS and everything gets shaken up. Everything Gail Simone did is thrown to one side. We get an alternative Wonder Woman with a new costume, who lives in a world where the Amazons are all dead, Wonder Woman is an orphan. Paradise Island is in ruins. The gods have gone. And she has a new costume, too. This wasn’t Wonder Woman as we knew it or her.
So lots of people stopped reading it, including me. By about issue #608, though, it soon became clear that Wonder Woman’s ‘Odyssey’ wasn’t exactly what everyone thought it was and in fact the major reboot was a bit more minor and Wonder Woman would in all likelihood get back to something like her normal self by the end of JMS’s run on the title. Which she did, although she got to keep her new costume.
I actually ended up going back over the run once it was done to read the earlier issues, because it was quite a clever subversion of the whole Wonder Woman mythos that led to something stronger. Trouble was, it took a year to do and at the end of it, turned out to be a little pointless.
Because DC had its own major reboot planned for no fewer than 52 of its titles, including Wonder Woman. Nothing was ever going to be the same again, just as at the end of the pan-DC ‘Infinite Crisis’ arc back in the 80s. The question was, how was everything going to be different? To be honest, no one yet knows and DC hasn’t exactly been forthcoming, beyond telling us everything was going to be different and every single comic was going to start from issue #1 again.
It’s an easily satirisable position.
Now, four weeks into the relaunch, we have issue #1 of the all-new Wonder Woman. Has it all been worth it? Have there been many changes?
Well, Diana does have a new costume – again…
TMINE
Weekly Wonder Woman
Review: Wonder Woman (2011) (US: NBC)
In the US: Made in 2011 for NBC (US) (never aired)
So I’m going to out myself as a bit of a Wonder Woman fan. I love her in the comics (with the right authors such as George Perez, Gail Simone and Greg Rucka), we have the whole 1970s TV series on DVD, we have the animated movie on iTunes and lovely wife has a Wonder Woman mug to drink from. I even have a couple of Wonder Woman encyclopaedias on the shelves.
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I know. Sad.
But I’ll tell you for why. As well as Wonder Woman being one of the very few iconic and powerful female superheroes out there, the DC universe is such that while Superman is off fighting sci-fi enemies, Batman is fighting human grotesques and Captain Marvel is off beating up magical villains, Wonder Woman is the fourth iconic pillar: she’s the mythological hero, fighting gods and monsters. Her stories are unique and she has a necessary, irreplaceable area of the comics world to call her own.
But there’s still more to her: she is literally an emissary from the Greek gods, who are second to none in the DC universe (no Christian or any other monotheistic gods at the top of this pantheon), and they have imbued her with their powers to give their mortals a message: there’s a better way to live than patriarchy.
In other words, despite what you may or may not think about her costume, she’s just about the only feminist and indeed religious superhero out there and when she prays, her prayers are answered.
Wonder Woman’s TV and movie career is a little checkered. There was a dreadful 1967 pilot that tried to do for Wonder Woman what the Batman TV series did for the caped crusader – camp it up. Then Cathy Lee Crosby did a quite awful TV movie version that preserved most of the trappings of Wonder Woman, but robbed her of all her powers.
Lynda Carter had a much better time of things from 1976, with three seasons of The New Adventures of Wonder Woman. The first season, set as the original comic was during World War 2, wasn’t bad and did a reasonably good job of presenting the Wonder Woman of the early comics.
However, the later seasons, set in quasi-modern/futuristic times, became very camp sci-fi affairs.
Nevertheless, none of these versions have really depicted the comics version of Wonder Woman, who can fly, is as strong and as fast as Superman, can talk to animals, has the wisdom of Athena and is a trained Amazon warrior. That means it’s largely been left to animated shows and movies to depict the real Wonder Woman halfway decently.
Recently, however, in this, Wonder Woman’s 70th anniversary year, NBC tried to make another TV version of Wonder Woman. For some reason, however, they got David E Kelley of Ally McBeal, Boston Legal and Harry’s Law fame to do this. It’s not been picked up for series, so will probably never get onto TV (just like that very first Wonder Woman pilot), but just for the sake of completeness and curiosity, I’ve watched it and, well, it’s exactly what you think it would be like: never has a superhero worried so much about the law, jurisdiction, search warrants and the difficulties of her love life, as well as the pressures of running a company and being a woman in today’s world.
Here’s the intro and a fan-made compilation-trailer – the full pilot is at the end!
Friday’s inadmissible news
Doctor Who
- Karen Gillan to make theatre debut in Inadmissible Evidence
- Caroline Skinner joins Doctor Who as producer
Film
- Annette Bening to play Kristen Wiig’s mother in Imogene
- Oscar Isaac joins The Bourne Legacy
- Trailer for Drive
- Trailer for Paranormal Activity 3
- Escape from New York remake dumped
British TV
- S4C announces details of its co-production fund
- Barbara Machin adapting Susan Hill’s ghost story The Small Hand for BBC2 and Simon Serrailler’s crime books for ITV
- Robert Bathurst joins Wild at Heart
- Rick Edwards in Channel 4 Comedy Labs satire
- The BBC’s new drama trailer
- No firm plans for a second series of The Trip
- Public service broadcasters’ spending on original programmes falls 6%
Canadian TV
- Ratings for week of July 15
US TV
- Heroes‘ Santiago Cabrera to guest star on Covert Affairs
- Hot in Cleveland gets season high with 2.4m viewers
- Robert Wagner exits Charlie’s Angels
- Burn Notice gets digital comic spin-off
- Trailer for Dexter – season 6 [spoilers]
- New promo for The Ringer
- Kenny Johnson joins Prime Suspect
- More appalling leaked Wonder Woman clips
- Clip from season 6 of Psych
- Sundance Channel picks up ITV’s Appropriate Adult with Dominic West