![]() ![]() Otherwise, it’s pretty much all talk talk talk, even when WW escapes and finally meets Abner. This scene - where Abner lures Wonder Woman out to the desert and then into some sort of weird-ass mudroom, whose walls start to close in like the Death Star garbage compactor - is the only prototypical comic-book moment in the whole movie. When she finally does put on a superhero suit, it’s a sort of Adidas-style running outfit, though it’s not without its charms. (Ironically enough, Anitra Ford, with her flowing brunette locks and statuesque height, looks way more like the comic book Wonder Woman than Crosby ever does.)įor the first two-thirds of the movie, Wonder Woman never wears any sort of costume, preferring to beat guys up in red slacks. ![]() The closest we get to an emotional scene is when she learns that her Amazon sister Ahnjayla has come to the United States and is in on the plot with a man named Abner Smith.ĭiana looks genuinely pained when she has to fight Ahnjayla, but the scene is so clearly edited to hide the fact that she is dueling with a stunt woman(?) that there’s little to no thrills. But the action scenes are so brief, and shot so perfunctorily, that Wonder Woman is a bit of a void in her own movie. Like Trevor, Calvin seems to know that Diana Prince is Wonder Woman, immediately spotting her in the lobby.Ĭrosby is given very little dialogue to say presumably the producers figured that her background in athletics made her suited to this action-heavy role. Diana takes all this sexual harassment in stride, never wavering from her mission. George Calvin meets her there, and he asks her out, going so far as to say how much he’d like to make love to her(!). Trevor seems to know that Diana is Wonder Woman, or something, because she heads out to find the person who stole the books, with Trevor’s winking approval.ĭiana tracks down Smith, starting with a trip to a posh hotel. Diana, after fending off the creepy advances of one of the agents, overhears her boss’ meeting. Trevor calls a meeting of the top brass to tell them that the codebooks (seen at the beginning of the movie) have been stolen. ![]() We learn that the whole Paradise Island sequence is a flashback because, after a jump cut that Stanley Kubrick would find ambitious, we find Wonder Woman in the civilian guise of Diana Prince, comfortably ensconced with some sort of government agency, a secretary to Steve Trevor (Kaz Garas), who heads the unnamed espionage-related department. She bids a melancholy goodbye to her mother Hippolyta (Charlene Holt) and some of her Amazonian sisters, one of whom, Ahnjayla (Anitra Ford) who all but begs to go with Diana, only to be denied (more on this in a moment). Our first shot of Princess Diana (the very blond Crosby) is on Paradise Island, as she prepares to leave her home and enter Man’s World. ![]() (There was an unaired ’60s TV reel and she was on the Super Friends, of course, but her first-ever televised appearance was in 1972, in the cartoon series The Brady Kids, where the six Brady moppets time-traveled back to ancient Greece, which of course makes total sen… - wait, what?).Ī pre-title sequence shows us various MPs seemingly stealing volumes of top-secret information from different locales (Paris, Istanbul, Berlin, etc.) and delivering them to the very 1970s-ish George Calvin (Andrew Pine), who summarily has his field agents executed by a brother-and-sister assassin team! It stars Cathy Lee Crosby, a former tennis pro transitioning into acting, who nabbed the title role in a TV movie that was intended as a pilot for a series.Īmazingly, even though the character had been around for over 30 years, this was her live-action debut, and only her third appearance ever outside of comic books. Black, who had a long career in the medium ( Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and, later, Charlie’s Angels). Wonder Woman, which aired on ABC on March 12, 1974, was written and developed for television by John D.F. 1974’s Wonder Woman TV movie might represent the Platonic ideal of this philosophy. In the dark days between the 1960s Batman TV series and 1978’s Superman, Hollywood was so sure that audiences would not be able to tolerate wall-to-wall (or, more specifically, commercial-to-commercial) superhero action that they tended to jam whatever character they were adapting into more traditional TV templates. If you were a comic-book fan in the 1970s, you had to get to used to the idea that any live-action adaptation of a beloved superhero property would be… a loose adaptation, at best. REEL RETRO CINEMA: You’re Sort of a Wonder, Wonder Woman! ![]()
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