WONDER WOMAN

   US tv series (1974-9), based on Wonder Woman, the COMIC book inaugurated by DC COMICS in 1942. Warner Bros TV for ABC, then for CBS. The complex production history falls into 3 parts.1. The 2hr pilot for ABC, Wonder Woman (1974) dir Vincent McEveety, written John D.F. Black, starring CathyLee Crosby. This flopped.2. Series for ABC with a new Wonder woman, Lynda Carter: The New Original Wonder Woman, with a 1975 2hr pilot, and 12 50min episodes 1975-6. This endeavoured to recapture the feeling of the original comics. Wonder Woman (Carter) leaves her Amazon home of Paradise Island to help out the USA during WWII, taking with her a golden belt (for strength) and a golden lariat whose movements she controls. Prod Wilfred Baumes, this was perhaps the best of Wonder Woman's 3 tv phases; its writers included Jimmy Sangster, and its dirs Herb Wallerstein and Stuart Margolin. It was scheduled erratically by ABC, so never really had achance.3. The commercially most successful phase. CBS took over the series, now retitled The New Adventures of Wonder Woman and set in the present day, but still starring Lynda Carter and made by Warner Bros; this was the version that was most widely circulated outside the USA. Now prod Charles B. Fitzsimons and Mark Rodgers, it opened with the story TheReturn of Wonder Woman in 1977. 2 seasons, 1 80min pilot and 45 50 min episodes, 1977-9. Dirs included Jack ARNOLD, Alan Crosland, Michael Caffey, Curtis Harrington, Gordon Hessler. Writers included StephenKandel, Alan BRENNERT, Anne Collins.In 2 and 3 Wonder Woman (herself more a figure of fantasy than of sf, and looking rather like a busty, glitzy cheerleader) is regularly confronted by sf-style problems, ranging from a Nazi superwoman and an alien visitor in 2 to artificial volcaniceruptions, malign ANDROIDS, a disembodied brain and mind-capturing pyramids with alien occupants in 3, though for the pure-fantasy fans there was also a leprechaun. Like so much sf on TELEVISION, there was an air of camp parody about the whole thing (rather as in the Batman series whose great success 1966-8 set the pattern for this sort of SUPERHERO-on-tv enterprise).

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