"I don't need a gun to take you, Wonder Woman. I was Nuremburg Judo champ. Ha!" - Stella Stevens as a Nazi spy
Wonder Woman: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Do you ever look back on some of the things you enjoyed in your childhood and, through adult eyes, view them with a mild degree of horror? Chemical-tasting processed foods, candy that tastes as subtle as cheap cologne smells, children's books that are crummy even on their own terms? These realizations serve to point out either how relatively sophisticated we've become.or to point out how moronic we once were. For those of us who grew up watching Wonder Woman either in primetime or in off-network syndication, the release of Wonder Woman: The Complete First Season is likely to have the same effect.
Based on the 1940s comic book, Wonder Woman was first brought to TV screens in a 1974 TV movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby. The movie was creatively unsuccessful, and as viewers who remember Crosby from her later hosting duties on That's Incredible!, the blonde-haired actress is not known for her resemblance to the comic book character. In 1975, ABC tried again, this time with the more Wonder Woman-esque former Miss USA Lynda Carter in the role. The New Original Wonder Woman, so-named because of the new actors and the fact that like the comic book (and unlike the original TV movie), the film is set during WWII, premiered on November 11, 1975. From April of 1976 to February of 1977, a total of thirteen episodes of the show occasionally aired as a series of specials on ABC. In the fall of 1977, Wonder Woman moved to CBS as a regular series. In the process, the setting of the show was moved from the 1940s to the 1970s. Wonder Woman: The Complete First Season collects the Lynda Carter pilot movie and all thirteen of the WWII episodes in a three disc set.
The deliriously stupid pilot movie lays the groundwork for the series' mythology. Diana (Carter) is an Amazonian princess who lives on Paradise Island, "an uncharted island within the Devil's Triangle." All of the inhabitants of Paradise Island are preternaturally strong women who colonized the island centuries ago upon fleeing from male dominated Greek and Roman societies. There they are free to make their own rules, control their own destinies, and wear pastel-colored peignoir sets while romping on the beach. In 1942, a badly injured Major Steve Trevor (Lyle Waggoner), who is somehow a war hero even though by that point the U.S. had barely entered the war, crash lands on the island. Diana takes great interest in the downed airman, much to the consternation of her mother, Queen Hippolyta (played by The Mary Tyler Moore Show's Cloris Leachman - since, let's face it, when the phrase "Amazonian Queen" is uttered, the name "Cloris Leachman" immediately comes to mind). Once Major Trevor tells the women of the Nazi threat to take over the world, it is decided that he must be returned to his own world to continue his fight against evil.
How will they decide which lucky Amazonian will venture to the outside world for the first time in over 2,000 years? By staging their own version of the Olympics, of course, complete with sporting events that include picking up papier-mache boulders while wearing Fredericks of Hollywood-inspired nighties. Diana wins, and she loves America so much that she decides to stay in order to help defeat the Nazis - and to keep an eye on the unsuspecting Major Trevor. As her cover, she takes the guise of Yeoman Diana Prince, Major Trevor's mild-mannered secretary. Whenever danger rears its head, Diana performs a slow motion pirouette and morphs into Wonder Woman, a satin tights-wearing superhero able to deflect bullets using her Feminum alloy bracelets and extract the truth from evildoers using her magic lasso.
From the moment the opening credits begin to roll, it is obvious that the pilot movie is a little bit.off. The casting of petite, brittle Cloris Leachman as an Amazonian warrior queen not weird enough for you? Try The Producers' Kenneth Mars, The Young and the Restless' Eric Braeden, and Laugh-In's Henry Gibson appearing as the least threatening Nazis ever to grace the screen. Gibson's strange, troll-like pigeon keeper (and the world's most obvious double agent) is especially odd. Why would the U.S. hire this semi-retarded guy to serve as a spy? As a German spy who has infiltrated the U.S. War Department, Stella Stevens delivers a performance that is distractingly unsubtle even by Stevens' own scenery chewing standards. And no wonder the Germans lost: they send elderly Red Buttons to fight with strapping Playgirl beefcake Waggoner. All of the actors smirk and over emote as if the camera is set up across town and they are struggling to be seen. Leachman sometimes sticks her head behind set pieces and bites her hand to seemingly hide her laughter at the ridiculous goings-on. You know things are bad when comedian Fannie Flagg is given the relatively straight role of Paradise Island's doctor. With its special effects that wouldn't even cut muster in that Raiders of the Lost Ark tribute filmed by teens in their Mississippi backyard, boorish performances, leering Nazis, and proto-soft core Paradise Island sequences, the pilot film often has the look and feel of a Russ Meyer movie with smaller boobs, a Doris Wishman nudie cutie with more clothing, or an even less coherent Barbarella.
The biggest problem is that manufactured camp is rarely as funny as unintentional camp. Charlie's Angels, for example, is campy fun, but mostly because the actors seem to take even the most ridiculous plotlines seriously, as if they are performing in a Shakespearean play rather than a lame T&A-filled TV episode featuring a pervert who strangles pretty women using oversized clown dolls. One could argue that filmmaker John Waters (Hairspray, Desperate Women, Serial Mom) deliberately sets out to make camp films, but his movies succeed because he fills the cast with talented non-pros (Mink Stole), equally talented big stars (Kathleen Turner), and other assorted weirdoes (Edith Massey) who actually take the work seriously. Divine wasn't trying to be a fat, grotesque drag queen - he was simply acting. When actors purposely set out to create camp, the result is often self-consciously off-putting. Red Buttons, Stella Stevens, and the other stars who appear in the pilot film seem to think that their roles demand that their performances be BIG. Why sigh when you can SIGH? This quickly becomes tedious, leading one to wonder how they were all convinced to sign on for this dreck.
At times, the series seems to be a failed knockoff of the Adam West Batman. Adding to this belief is a bit of trivia included on the boxed set that reveals that Stanley Ralph Ross, the person who developed the Wonder Woman TV series, also wrote thirty-two episodes of the Batman series. What worked for Batman, however, is an uneasy fit for Wonder Woman. Comic books may be aimed at kids, but that does not mean that TV shows and movies derived from comic books should be childish. The goofiness of Batman gently mocked comic book conventions for the benefit of adults while maintaining the interest of kids with it bright colors and highly stylized action sequences. Wonder Woman, by contrast, just seems amateurish and aimed directly at kids. An episode where Wonder Woman battles Gargantua, a sub-Planet of the Apes gorilla featuring a costume so unconvincing it is seemingly made of leftover hair from Lynda Carter's hairbrush? Why not? The kids will buy it.
Even though the subsequent episodes aren't as campy as the pilot movie, the remaining episodes do not get much smarter. Diana goes undercover at a beauty pageant, battles a Nazi Wonder Woman double named Fausta, protects Paradise Island from Nazi invaders, meets an alien from outer space, and even visits Hollywood. Along the way, Carolyn Jones (The Addams Family's Morticia) takes over the role of Diana's mother, and we are introduced to a baby-faced Debra Winger (Terms of Endearment) as Diana's younger sister, Drusilla.
Another of the show's biggest flaws is that WWII isn't exactly a laugh riot. Comic books really came of age around the time of the war, and many comic characters were used as effective anti-Nazi propaganda at time of their creation. To put comic book characters in the same situations all these years later just seems in poor taste. What once was a way to rally Americans to fight against Nazi atrocities now seems like mere exploitation.
The series does have one big assest - star Lynda Carter. She is perfectly cast, helping to give the show its moral center. Her acting technique is tentative in early episodes, but by the end of the season, she has relaxed into the role. Lyle Waggoner proves to be too one-note as Major Trevor, delivering each line as if reading an Ovaltine commercial on a 1930s radio show. Stalwart, yes, but also boring and one dimensional. As General Blankenship, Richard Eastham isn't given much to work with, and the writers have made Beatrice Colen's Corporal Etta Candy embarrassingly moronic.
Wonder Woman's numerous guest stars run the entire spectrum of grade A to grade Z, including Bradford Dillman, Lynda Day George (Mission: Impossible), Christopher George (Rat Patrol), Anne Francis, Dick Van Patten (Eight is Enough), Bobby Van, John Saxon (Falcon Crest), Robert Loggia (The Sopranos), John Hillerman (Magnum, P.I.), Robert Reed (The Brady Bunch), Hayden Rorke (I Dream of Jeannie), Roy Rogers, Lance Kerwin (James at 15), Harris Yulin (WIOU), Robert Hays (Airplane!), and Christopher Norris (Trapper John, M.D.).
The first two discs in The Complete First Season are double sided. The third disc is single sided. The discs are housed in a foldout case decorated with publicity stills and comic book drawings of Wonder Woman. The panels of the foldout case list the title, number, the writer, the director, the original airdate, and a brief synopsis of each episode. The case slides into a cardboard sleeve. The design of both the outer sleeve and the foldout case are eye-catching, perfectly capturing the series' comic book origins. The simple yet fun menus mimic the series' star-themed animated opening credit sequence. Viewers can play all of the disc's episodes or choose an individual one. The episodes are divided into chapters.
