WONDERLAND • The Ultimate Wonder Woman Site

The Plot. Near Berlin, in Nazi Germany, General Von Blasco informs pilot Drangel of his mission, an attempted bombing raid on the Brooklyn Navy Yard that will in fact cover his real objective: to destroy the building where the Allies are developing an early predecessor of the `smart bomb'. Simultaneously, a Nazi spy ring based in Washington will steal the plans, setting the Allied war effort back a year. Von Blasco's `loyal' valet Nickolas is in fact a spy, and alerts Washington using homing pigeons.

In Washington, General Blankenship sends Major Steve Trevor from a top-secret base to intercept Drangel's plane before it can reach the US. However, Steve's secretary Marcia is a spy for the Nazis and warns Von Blasco. A dogfight over the ocean results in the destruction of both 'planes, with Drangel drifting helplessly into the jaws of waiting sharks while Trevor is washed up on the shores of an uncharted island. Unfortunately, just before becoming sharkbait, Drangel managed to put a bullet into Trevor as they both parachuted from their aircraft. Trevor is found, unconscious and seriously wounded, by the island's sole inhabitants, a race of beautiful and athletic young girls clad in diaphanous light dresses, none of whom have ever seen a man before.

Princess Diana is fascinated and intrigued by this man, and realizes that something has been missing from their Amazon society, but her mother, Queen Hippolyte, sees men only as trouble-making savages, distractions from the pursuit of athletic and academic achievement that Amazon society values above all else. As an advanced and humane society, she decrees that they will nurse the man back to health, after which he will be returned to the outside world. To determine who receives this task, there will be an athletic tournament, but sensing Diana's deeper interests, Hippolyte forbids her daughter to participate.

Angrily, Diana announces she will retreat into solitude, but secretly she returns and competes in the games disguised in a blonde wig, and conveniently masked by the traditions of the games until revealed to her mother as the rightful winner. Hippolyte reluctantly awards her the ceremonial golden belt, golden lasso and indestructible costume made in the style of the flag of the United States, an emblem of freedom and democracy. "Remember," she warns Diana, "that in the world of ordinary mortals, you are a wonder woman!"

Diana flies Steve Trevor back to Washington in the magical invisible plane that utilizes the technology that has helped keep the Amazons' Paradise Island a secret from the outside world. Piloted through the clouds by a beautiful woman dressed in the flag, Steve inevitably believes he's a dead man on his way to Heaven. Instead, he is delivered to a wide-eyed nurse in the Army Services Hospital. On hearing Steve's been recovered alive, Marcia alerts her mysterious colleague.

Walking around the city streets in full costume, an awed Wonder Woman is blissfully oblivious to the stir she is creating, and soon attracts an entourage of male admirers. Seeing an opportunity of a different kind, a saleswoman entices her into her store and kits her out in more appropriate winter warmers... until she realizes Diana has no money and swiftly shows her the door.

Her next encounter is with three armed bank robbers, despatched effortlessly, her magic bracelets easily repelling their bullets. Watching in the astonished crowd is theatrical agent Ashley Norman, who offers her some much-needed money as a nightclub act. Diana reluctantly agrees and is an instant sensation but in the audience is Marcia, who,recognizing Steve Trevor's saviour, sends her colleague onto the stage to take up Norman's bullets-and-bracelets challenge. Everyone is astonished when the little old lady pulls out a machine gun, and even more so when Diana easily repels the bullets. Norman is devastated when, after the show, Wonder Woman takes her money and quits – so devastated that he ends up sprawled all over his desk when he tries to forcibly change her mind. After she leaves, we discover that Norman is Marcia's secret contact.

Back in Berlin, Von Blasco has determined to finish Drangel's mission. Nickolas again alerts Washington, but once again Marcia is in on the arrangements and sends Norman and his henchmen to intercept Steve on his way to the airfield. Steve puts up a brave fight, but hits his head on the first of many rubber rocks in the series. Discovering Steve has signed himself out of the hospital, Diana, disguised as a nurse, executes the first of her famous twirls into her Wonder Woman costume. Marcia coaxes the combination of Steve's office safe from him with drugs, but Wonder Woman is waiting for her. A furious fight follows and Marcia is compelled, by the truth-telling magic of the golden lasso, to reveal Steve's location and the details of the Nazi plot. Taking the invisible 'plane, Wonder Woman sends Von Blasco's plane into a waiting Nazi U-boat and takes him captive. After demolishing Norman and his goons, she rescues Steve. When Steve returns to his Washington office, he is introduced to Marcia's replacement, his new colleague Yeoman Diana Prince. Everyone seems oblivious to the powerful resemblance she has to Wonder Woman...

Background. The bizarre title of this 1975 tv movie, Wonder Woman – The New Original Wonder Woman, is reminiscent of Marvel's famous blurb `Together again - for the first time!' – when they retold the Fantastic Four's origin – betrays the bumpy road DC Comics 1940s creation took to the small screen. First considered during the Batman craze of the '60s – what a loss that Republic or Monogram never had a go – it finally became a completed pilot in 1974, when in the grand tradition of 1970s super-hero adaptions Won-der Woman was given a makeover to the point of being unrecognizable. The star was diminutive blonde Cathy Lee Crosby, and the culprits ABC and Star Trek veterans John DF Black and Vincent McEveety. The following year, comic fans were pleasantly surprised to see this 1975 successful revamped version, which became one of the definitive tv memories of the 1970s.

Starring this time was newcomer Lynda Carter, a former Miss America who everyone agreed looked more like Wonder Woman than anyone dared have the right to hope for. In charge of developing the series was Stanley Ralph Ross, one of the leading lights of 1960s camp, author of most of the King Tut and Catwoman Batman episodes plus many others, and a writer for The Monkees and The Man from UNCLE in its camp phase. Here, Ross avoided the excesses of the '60s while keeping his tongue planted firmly in cheek, and turned in a pilot script that hit just the right tone for the period, although the machine-gun granny was a classic Ross touch.

In this, he was ably assisted by some inspired and nudging casting selections that left viewers with no doubt as to where the programme's mind-set lay. Playing the Nazis were Kenneth Mars, hilarious in Mel Brooks' then-controversial Nazi parody The Producers, Eric Braeden, best known for his role as recurring villain in 1960s wartime show The Rat Patrol, notorious in the UK for enraging WWII veterans in the '60s with its historical inaccuracies, and Henry Gibonn, who, with Arte Johnson, spoofed Hollywood Nazis in '60s satire show Laugh-ln. In short, every cartoon Nazi this side of Colonel Klink. One of the funniest scenes occurs as Gibson's valet, secretly working for the Allies, keeps blocking Mars' slide projector while he's outlining his master plan.

Cast as Queen Hippolyte was Cloris Leachman, a versatile actress equally adept at subtle drama and broad comedy, but at the time known to tv audiences as overbearing fad follower Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and solo spin-off Phyllis. Mars and Leachman gave knowing performances that were spot on, but other players were somewhat more heavy-handed, most notably John Randolph and the usually excellent Stella Stevens, who is uncharacteristically awful here and gives her, as Comic Book Guy would say, 'worst performance ever"!

Anti-bullet bracelets. Only Carter and co-star Lyle Waggoner returned for the series that followed. Lyle Waggoner was known to Ross by his footnote-in-history status as second choice after Adam West for the role of Batman. After doing little while under contract to 20th Century Fox — he had a brief part on a Lost in Space episode, Deadliest of the Species — he found success as a supporting player in comedy sketch series, appearing as Lyle Perfect on The Carol Burnett Show. His lack of ego combined with comedic talent and understanding of the role, alongside a healthy self-deprecating sense of humour about himself and his career, made him the perfect choice to play male Lois Lane and cardboard pin-up boy Steve Trevor. The animated twinkle put in Carter's eye and on Waggoner's teeth in the opening credits is a brilliant touch.

The BBC, then as ever, managed to make their own special mess of the show. They gave the series a prime Saturday evening slot, but started with the weakest of the 1970s-set run. A listings magazine of the period claimed that the BBC had bought the first season, but considered them unsuitable due to the flippant attitude they took to WWII. This has never been verified, but if true is a bit rich coming from the broadcaster that made Dad's Army and had no ethical problems about maligning and trivializing the efforts of the French Resistance in 'Allo 'Allo! Wrote the nitwit reviewer, 'Perhaps the title of the pilot, Fausta and the Nazi Wonder Woman, quite properly dissuaded them from showing it'. Yes, don't let the proles make up their own minds, we wouldn't want to offend any Nazis... — it's not the title anyway!

To further complicate matters, the two pilot films were aired on ITV off-peak, purchased in tv movie packages. The first season was eventually purchased by defunct satellite service BSB and inherited by Sky after their takeover, whose programmers were quite taken back when I told them the WWII episodes would be getting their first UK airing. Now, the series is due back on Sci-Fi. lt is the best compliment available to say that Wonder Woman was perhaps the least panned super-hero adaptation of the 1970s. Whereas Marvel's tv characters looked decidedly less credible on screen than their comic book counterparts, Lynda Carter made a perfect Wonder Woman, and although the show didn't take itself seriously, as a peripheral figure never given the star treatment by a 'name' artist, comic buffs didn't take the character seriously either, and so were not as sensitive as they had been over Batman. Viewers across the board were ready to accept a frothy, light-hearted super-hero show and the nostalgic WWII setting fitted well with the general trend toward nostalgia (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Waltons, Little House etc.) that took hold in pop culture during the back end of the '70s. Comics also had regressed, with several 1940s revival titles on the stands (All Star Squadron, Invaders, Shazam, The Shadow, etc).

As a successful businessman (supplying trailers to Hollywood productions), Lyle Waggoner no longer feels the urge to act, although he occasionally takes minor roles. Lynda Carter has kept busy with night club acts, tv movies, and two one-season series, Fifty Fifty aka Partners in Crime in 1984 and Hawkeye in 1994.

Jon Abbott. Wonder Woman will be premièring on Sci-Fi every Saturday and Sunday at 11am from 10th March.

Credits

Princess Diana/Wonder Woman Lynda Carter

Major Steve Trevor Lyle Waggoner

Colonel Von Blasco Kenneth Mars

Kapitan Drangel Eric Braeden

Queen Hippolyte Cloris Leachman

General Blankenship John Randolph

Ashley Norman Red Buttons

Nickolas Henry Gibson

Marcia Stella Stevens

Horst Severn Darden

Amazon Doctor Fannie Flagg

Army Nurse Helen Verbit

Bank manager Ian Wolfe

Saleswoman Fritzi Burr

Machine-gun lady Maida Severn

Police officer Tom Rosqui

Cabbie Anne Ramsey

Amazons Tenga Neilson, Jean Karlson

Creator William Moulton Marston (as 'Charles Moulton')

Developed for television by Stanley Ralph Ross

Executive Producer Douglas Cramer

Ass. Producers Peter J Elkington, Wilford Lloyd Baumes

Director Leonard Horn

Writer Stanley Ralph Ross

Dir. Photography Dennis Dalzell

Art Director James G Hulsey

Set Decorator Bill McLaughlin

Stunt Co-Ordinator Bill Catching

Lead Stuntwoman Jeannie Epper

Music Charles Fox

Oh, Those Lyrics Norman Gimbel

Casting Alan Shayne

US airdate: November 7th, 1975

UK broadcast history: BBC1 (partial), Sky One, Sci-Fi Channel