Posted by Dan Greenfield on Mar 14, 2024
The Weird Wonder of WONDER WOMAN’s First Movie
50 YEARS LATER: You’re Sort of a Wonder, Wonder Woman! — UPDATED 3/14/24: The Wonder Woman TV movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby premiered 50 years ago this week, on March 12, 1974. Perfect time to re-present this REEL RETRO CINEMA column from May 2017. Dig it! — Dan — By ROB KELLY 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. 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. 1974’s Wonder Woman TV movie might represent the Platonic ideal of this philosophy. Wonder Woman, which aired on ABC on March 12, 1974, was written and developed for television by John D.F. Black, who had a long career in the medium (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and, later, Charlie’s Angels). 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. Amazingly, 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. (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?). A 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! 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. 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...
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