MAGS AND BOOKS
Date and Issue: Issue 1244, Volume 25, Number 5. January 29, 1977 thru February 4, 1977.
Pages: 3 pages.
Pictures: 1 small color picture.
Article: 3-page article on Lynda Carter and the series.
Author: Bill Davidson.
Country: USA.
...comes 'Wonder Woman' Lynda (Wham!) Carter, who is scoring  hit (Zap!) with children and their fathers  (Crash!).
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."
     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.
     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
shows, Lee Majors, Henry Winkler, Gabriel Kaplan, and Lindsay Wagner do not have a noteworthy bosom among them. Lynda's is an impressive size 38.
 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.
 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.
     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.
 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?"
     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.
 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."
     At that point, Warner Bros. vice-president Ed Bleier is reported to have muttered, "Sure, we'll cross-pollinate Olga Korbut with Godzilla."
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 Lynda Carter this became a star - at the age of 25.
 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!
 For ABC and the other networks, can The Return of Batman be far behind?
© 1977 by TV Guide / Triangle Publications, Inc.
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