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 ...comes
'Wonder Woman' Lynda (Wham!) Carter, who is scoring hit (Zap!)
with children and their fathers (Crash!). |
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 There's
a 9-year-old young man of my acquaintance who is an aficionado of comic
strips and comic books of all kinds. When polled recently on the
identity of his favorite TV network, he unhesitatingly cast his vote
for ABC. Pressed for his reasons, he replied, "Every night it's
like reading the funnies on Sunday Morning." |
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For this young man - who likes The Six Million Dollar Man, The
Bionic Woman, Happy Days, and Welcome Back, Kotter, as much as he
enjoys "Steve Canyon," "Superman," "Buz
Sawyer," and "Archie" - ABC has provided an embarrassment of riches this year in the 8 to 9 P.M.(ET) timeslot. And
now, there is also Wonder Woman. But it is not only 9-year-olds
who are watching. The Nielsen evidence is that their fathers are also
impelled to steal peeks at this particular comic-strip show. |
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The reason is obvious when you view the spectacular 6-foot dimensions
of its star, Lynda Carter, an ex-"Miss World-USA" in the
Miss World beauty pageant. In the other ABC comic-strip |
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Lee Majors, Henry Winkler, Gabriel Kaplan, and Lindsay Wagner do not
have a noteworthy bosom among them. Lynda's is an impressive size 38. |
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One of Wonder Woman's other assets is that the
show is based on a real comic strip instead of an ersatz one, and
grown-up audiences can look upon Lynda's physical endowments with lack
of guilt, knowing that surreptitious reading of comic strips by adults
has long been accepted as a forgivable part of the American cultural
tradition.
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For the uninitiated, the Wonder Woman cartoon
character was conceived in 1942(WRONG: 1941) by Charles Moulton, who
decided that, while little boys has Superman and Batman and Captain
Marvel fighting the world's evildoers in the comic strips, the little
girls had no funny-paper heroine to root for. Moulton restored the
balance - and vastly enriched himself (His family saw the money, he died
too early to see much of it) - by coming up with Diana, an immortal
Amazon from uncharted Paradise Island, to which she and her sister
Amazons had fled circa 200 B.C. to escape male domination by the ancient
Greeks and Romans.
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Diana wears a golden belt that gives her superhuman strength, has
silvery bracelets that deflect bullets and missiles, and - get this -
she carries a golden lasso that, when it ensnares a victim, forces him
to tell nothing but the truth. Thus, equipped, and enamored of a U.S.
Army pilot named Maj. Steve Trevor, whose plane crashed on Paradise
Island, she comes to the United States in the guise of Yeoman 1st
Class Diana Prince, secretary to the unknowing Major Trevor, now an
intelligence officer. When feats of derring-do are required to save
America, she changes into her brief and sexy Wonder Woman costume and
flays insidious Nazi villains. |
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Although the Wonder Woman strip has not appeared
in the newspapers for some time, Wonder Woman comic books have been
printed in dozens of editions and earned a fortune for creator Moulton
and his heirs. They still are being read avidly throughout the world.
Thus, when Warner Communications acquired the company that printed the
Wonder Woman comic books, executives there asked themselves "If
Universal can get away with a pseudo comic-strip TV series like The Six
Million Dollar Man, why can't we do even better with the real thing?"
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So, the studio hastily foisted a prototype Wonder Woman plot on
the world in 1974, It seemed strangely out of kilter. The story was
set in modern times instead of in the campy 1942 period, and the
Amazon princess was played by Cathy Lee Crosby, an ethereal blonde who
looked more suited to modeling chemises at Bergdorf Goodman than
hurling 200-pound men through the air like Frisbees.
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But Warner Bros. persisted, and producers
Douglas S. Cramer and Bud Baumes eventually came up with some workable
proposals. Cramer said, "Let's stop fooling around with modernizing this
thing. The network liked the comic strip, so let's just do a life-actor
version of the original. We'll put it back in 1942, an age of innocence
when you could tell the good guys from the bad guys; and we'll get a
dark-haired girl who looks like the girl in the strip. She should be
built like a javelin-thrower but with the sweet face of a Mary
Tyler-Moore."
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At that point, Warner Bros. vice-president Ed Bleier is reported to
have muttered, "Sure, we'll cross-pollinate Olga Korbut with
Godzilla."
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The search seemed hopeless, but unbeknownst to
anyone at the Warner Bros. meeting, the almost-totally-obscure Lynda
Carter was even then taking drama lessons just a few miles away. Having
surrendered her 1972 "Miss World- USA" crown to the 1973 winner, she had
descended on Hollywood to try to make her mark in the acting profession.
She had followed a circuitous route in getting there.
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Born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, the
daughter of a well-to-do antiques dealer whom she persists in calling "a
junkman, like Sanford and Son,' she had a not-too-pleasant four years at
Arcadia High School. "I was taller than all the boys except the tackles
on the football team," she told me, "and all my girl friends seemed to
be 5-foot-3-inch blondes. I even was rejected as a pompon girl because I
towered over everyone else." She neutralized this disappointment by
taken singing lessons and writing music, and when she was only 15 she
was hired by a folk group called Just Us.
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This led to her joining other singing groups and
touring the U.S. for three years after she graduated from high school.
She was not a sensation as a singer.
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Back in Phoenix, for want of anything else to
do, she entered a 1972 Phoenix beauty contest. She had not blossomed
into a statuesque Sub-Belt Venus, with long dark hair and striking
gray-green-blue eyes, and she won the local competition hands down.
Today's beauty pageant contestants being what they are, Lynda, at 6
feet, no longer was much taller than her competition. She went on to win
the Miss Arizona-World title and then "Miss World-U.S.A." She lost out
to Miss Australia in the Miss World pageant in London.
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Lynda desultorily filled her "Miss World-U.S.A."
duties for a year, and then moved to Hollywood to take acting lessons.
That's when her path crossed that of Douglas Cramer at Warner Bros.
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A Stanley Ralph Ross script already in hand,
Cramer just had to add a few small touches to satisfy ABC's comic-strip
cravings. For example, remembering how Clark Kent metamorphosed into
Superman in phone booths, Cramer devised a pirouette to the beat of a
tom-tom, during which the plain-looking Yeoman 1st Class Diana Prince
does a twirling striptease and emerges as Wonder Woman, in star-spangled
hot pants and golden breastplate. It worked. The second Wonder Woman
pilot, starring Lynda Carter, aired on ABC on November 7, 1975, and did
handsomely in the ratings.
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That precipitated a curious and unprecedented
fame of "chicken" involving all three networks. ABC, already committed
to one female comic strip in The Bionic Woman stalled on inserting
Wonder Woman into its 1976 schedule. CBS, by now intrigued with the
possibility of having a prime-time comic strip of its own, then tried to
buy the series from Warner Bros. This impelled ABC to extend its option
on the show and it ordered two more one-hour tryout segments, both of
which aired last April and did extremely well in the ratings. Now it was
NBC's turn. In July, NBC announced that it would option Wonder Woman
from Warner Bros. and probably put it on the air this season - if ABC
didn't renew its option on the show.
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This was too much pressure for ABC to bear. ABC
senior vice president Michael Eisner announced, "We are delighted to add
Wonder Woman and Lynda Carter to out prime-time entertainment schedule.
We will offer the Wonder Woman specials in different lengths on a
pre-emptive basis." This was done and plans are now being discussed for
making the show into a regular series.
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Lynda Carter this became a star - at the age of
25.
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Her acting is rudimentary, but it doesn't
matter. Just as in the comic strip, all she has to do is stand up real
straight and say likes like the following to Major Trevor, played by
Lyle Waggoner: "Follow me, Major, I'll teach those dirty nazi agents a
thing or two about democracy." WHAM! ZAP! CRASH!
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For ABC and the other networks, can The Return
of Batman be far behind?
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