DC History Club February Wonder Woman TV: She Changed the World Crossover now includes Polls and a Quiz

Yep, to all.

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Quick Bio: Season 1 episode The Bushwackers stars a dude who stuffed his horse.

Wonder Woman Season 1 thoughts.
As soon as it was apparent the Wonder Woman TV was going to win the poll for February, I started watching episodes for the first time in years. I’ve now watch exactly half the episodes, spread across the 3 seasons and just finished season 1 last night. So, a few thoughts about the World War II era season and its comparison to Golden Age Wonder Woman.
-While the show never mentions Mars, Dr. Physcho, Dr Poison, Cheetah or any other colorful enemy, a good number of the episodes appear to at least have been inspired by the Golden Age. The Pilot is relatively faithful to Wonder Woman’s introduction, Wonder Woman Meets Baroness Von Gunther, Beauty on Parade, Wonder Woman vs Gargantua, Bushwackers, and Wonder Woman in Hollywood at least have elements from Golden Age stories.
-The lack of Japanese opponents is very visible. I cold be wrong, but I don’t think the show even mentions the Japanese Empire more than a couple of times. Andros says he wants to meet the Emperor in Judgement from Outer Space. This of course is very different from the Golden Age stories when Nazis and Japanese Imperial agents featured in many stories. I can only guess that the show’s producers were concerned about racial stereotypes so just steered clear of the issue altogether.
-Romance. Will Diana occasionally expresses some attraction to Steve and Steve does to Wonder Woman, the show larger stays away from straight out romance, longing etc. I think this is an improvement.
-Finally, Nazis infiltrated everything!

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Great poll. Extremely tough decision. WW has to be the 1 for me tho. No bad choices.

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Working on polls for second half of month, so willing to take any ideas.

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A lot of justified hype for green lantern. Idk how to spin it for a pole tho? This one was great, I didn’t look at anything till I voted & lots of love for WW. Has to be my choice too, cuz WW Super Friends was my gateway to the DCU.

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You can’t talk Wonder Woman TV without talking fashion. These are the uniforms I’ve found for Season 1.
Here’s a full shot of her standard costume. A number of changes will come in season two. In particular, Lynda Carter found the chest area on this version uncomfortable and asked for changes.

In a shot from Judgement from Outer Space, Lynda goes with her formal look which includes her skirt and a predominately red cape.
Wonder_Woman_season 1 cape

I kinda love this costume. Out to save Roy Rodgers’ cattle from rustlers, Wonder Woman goes with this nice ensamble
WW bushwackers

Diana, as Yeoman Diana Prince, still looks pretty great in her Navy WAVE uniform
diana prince

Finally, a young Debra Winger as Wonder Girl Drusilla (who came up with that name?)
Drusilla_Feminum_Mystique

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I put the Lyle Waggoner and Adam West screent test in the first wiki

From the book Caped Crusade

Some of the lines in Semple’s script were just plain funny, as when Batman, in full cape, cowl, leotard, and blue satin trunks, walks into a nightclub and tells the maître d’, “No, thanks, I’ll sit at the bar. I shouldn’t wish to attract attention.”

Others, however, were dully expositional, as when Batman solves one of the Riddler’s puzzles by working through it aloud, with Robin.

Whoever got tapped for the role would have to sell the jokes with absolute and unwavering seriousness.

“If they see us winking, it’s dead,” Dozier famously said.

But that wasn’t enough. He’d have to keep the audience’s interest even during the lengthiest information dumps; those talky puzzle-solving scenes needed an actor who could make them pop.

In other words, Batman could be square, but he shouldn’t be boring.

At the end of the casting process, Dozier brought the studio and the network two screen tests.

The first starred handsome, square-jawed actor Lyle Waggoner as Bruce Wayne and squeaky-voiced teen Peter Deyell as Dick Grayson.

The second starred Adam West—a bit player who just was coming off a successful turn on a Nestlé commercial as an ersatz James BondVI—as Bruce, and young, athletic actor Burton Gervis (aka Burt Ward) as Dick.

The setup for both tests was the same. Scene one: Dick enters Bruce’s study. The two commiserate about Batman’s having to testify in court and expose his secret identity. Dick suggests taking another look at the subpoena the Riddler gave them. Could there be a hidden riddle?

Scene two: in the Batcave, Batman and Robin find a hidden clue on the document, solve its puzzle, and set out to investigate.

At this writing, both tests are available for screening on YouTube, and they represent a stark study in contrasts.

Until the tests, the producers had favored Waggoner and Deyell.

Waggoner was certainly good-looking, with a jawline that could have been rendered with a T-square, and features so even and uncomplicated that he seemed a Bob Kane drawing made flesh. There was also the way he so convincingly filled out the Batman tights. Waggoner was not simply your average, run-of-the-mill, Hollywood-in-the-sixties fit, but actually muscular. Deyell, on the other hand, is more of an acquired taste, with his high-pitched voice and youthful-bordering-on-pubescent mien. And in performance, Waggoner is . . . fine. Perfectly fine: he’s got the soothing baritone required of a studio day player and delivers a straight-ahead, unfussy performance that’d feel perfectly at home on any adventure series of the era. It gets the job done. But only the one job. Waggoner can read a line like “When our poor housekeeper Mrs. Cooper learns what you’ve been up to on these supposed fishing trips of ours, I’m afraid the shock could kill her,” and have it just . . . lie there. He asserts it flatly, as if the sole purpose of that line is merely to convey the information it contains. Deyell sells Robin’s youth but never quite manages to register the Boy Wonder’s requisite zest for crime fighting. Still: a solid, B-minus showing from him.

The West/Ward screen test, however, is something of a slow-burning revelation. Physically, West’s features are softer, prettier than Waggoner’s, and in the Batman getup he looks simply trim. But his voice. In his 1994 autobiography, West would expound upon the method of his performance.

He saw Bruce Wayne as a man who kept his emotions at arm’s length, until, as Batman, he found himself engaged in solving a crime. Batman got excited, enthused, even incensed, while Bruce Wayne remained forever placid, uninvolved. West makes this much plain enough in the screen test, but that’s simply the surface performance. The thing that sets West apart is how thoroughly he invests his voice, his body, his entire being into registering the weighty solemnity of his mission. As he delivers each line, his voice slithers through different registers and volumes. He inserts pauses that are not merely pregnant but two weeks overdue. Those pauses were of course a deliberate choice—he wanted the viewer to see Batman’s intellectual processes, the way he thought through a puzzle and excitedly seized upon the answer. The Batman cowl occluded his facial expressions, so the work he would have done with his eyebrows got shunted to his waggling index finger and to that snaky, sinuous voice.

Where Waggoner gives us a Bruce exasperated at the notion of his secret identity being revealed—“In the ashcan! Up the chute! It’s too terrible to face!”—West, on the other hand, goes full-bore Olivier on the lines, whispering and shouting in turn, and breaking them up with languorous caesurae: “In the ashcan. [beat] UP! THE! CHUTE! It’s [beat] tooterribletoface.”

What strikes you today, watching West’s very first pass at what would become the performance he’d never escape, is that it’s not safe. We can see how thoroughly he’s submerged into the role; he’s not breaking off a piece of himself to stand apart and roll his eyes at each “Holy barracuda!” There’s a risky and willfully unalloyed passion to both his Bruce and his Batman. His Bruce is the part of the duck visible above the water, serene and circumspect, his Batman the furiously paddling feet.

As for Ward, he commands our attention the moment he enters the scene, because he makes his character’s youthful drive impossible to miss. His Dick Grayson never walks. Instead, he bounds across a space on the balls of his feet. He delivers his lines with simple, athletic gusto. If they lack the twelve-tone complexity of West’s every utterance, that’s fine: athletic gusto is all the part really demands.

Based on their exceptional screen test, Dozier hired West and Ward.

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Per Wonder Woman 77

There is a Comic Book.Titles for this

https://www.dcuniverse.com/comics/series/-/670cbd65-aa13-4854-ba9b-a559bd2da635

She was also in Batman 66 in.our library

https://www.dcuniverse.com/comics/series/-/6a5e81e8-77dd-419a-b75b-bc6ae5b7adf0

The story is relatively short

Set in three time periods

World War Ii Young Bruce Wayne and Parents

1966 Adult Bruce Wayne

Modern Older Bruce Wayne

WW 2 Nazis Steve and Etta Catwoman

Next Catwoman Robin at Themyscira Plus Wonder Girl

Finally Catwoman Nightwing Batgirl

And always Bruce immortal Diana Talia and her father

As well As with the Bionic Woman not in our libray.

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I got 6 points on the quiz, hope you do the quiz every month @msgtv, it’s fun to see how much I remember. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks, how did it function for you? Any ideas?

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I like that after the quiz, you don’t look at the answer til you’re done, and the points rating are the best part, it worked really well for me. :slightly_smiling_face:

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After I thought about quizzes, I kinda went after the model of the magazine quizzes. They always graded you somehow.

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Lyle as Batman. That’s a really interesting short video everyone should watch. If you were doing a serious Batman in 1966, Lyle would have been great. But, Adam just has that extra touch that made him perfect for that version.

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Since this hasn’t been mentioned yet…it should be pointed out that the “Character Creation Credit” from the pilot to the final episode gives credit to “Charles Moulton” not William Moulton Marston.

A major reason for this was information that had come out about Marston and his long term poly relationship with his wife and two other women. Not to mention some of the “sexual kinks” the relationship had. It had been released that part of his ideology and shared by his partners included the concept that “male submission to the female” would lead to a utopian society of peace. Before that reality was in place, they expressed the idea of “love-binding”. This not only explains the large amount of bound persons in the early WW comics, but also explains, at least in part why censors and the general culture wanted and succeeded in suppressing his (and his partners) vision of female empowerment. It was much harder to get one’s hands on Golden Age WW stories in the 70’s. They were not mostly reprinted and if you could find them, they were serious collectors items with serious price tags. The fact that so much of the “pre-boomer and beyond population” would have no idea of these elements, having not had the chance to read the Golden Age stories because of scarcity and actual issues being cost prohibitive for most in the 1970’s. So suppression of these elements was easy to simply ignore, because so few viewers had actually read some of those Golden Age comics.

We still see very little of this philosophy truly expressed in WW in all her portrayals today. Be it live-action or animation. It seems that society is still not ready to at least see this concept from the general audience standpoint.

Will it ever be?

Sure, the Gal version and later animated versions show Diana willing and able to not just fight, fists, sword and all, and, in some iterations actually kill. (See WW animated 2009) However, there is not that much growth towards Marston’s expressed vision of the utopian society. Women and especially WW, could, in theory at least, attempt to make that vision happen.

So here are two questions I’ll put out there.
If WW lead a group to change and possibly fight when attacked, to try and implement Marston’s utopia, is she still heroic, or does she become yet another “villain” who wants to impose their view of the world order they believe is best for humanity?

Here is a link to an interesting piece from the UK newspaper “The Telegraph” which shows some of these points.

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I got a seven

Guessed a lot especially non Wondy characters

Good quiz

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@DeSade-acolyte

Some of that material is covered in these two posts

Full topic is

plus my section on Wonder Woman
in The Road to the Trinity

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I got 9 out of 11. Not to bad, but I have re-watched the entire series in the last year.

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Thank @TurokSonOfStone1950
Much appreciated.

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In that scenario Wonder Woman would be no better than French Revolutionist, Bolsheviks, and every other utopian revolutionary. Utopia imposed by force and violence inevitably and quickly leads to dictatorship.
On Marston’s philosophy. I haven’t finished Lapone’s books yet, but Marston strikes me like many utopian thinkers and more than a few men who proudly label themselves feminists. They believe the label allows them to ignore some of the precepts the espouse. Like a certain prolific and talented genre director who claims the feminists label but turns out to have treated his wife and a number of other women like crap. In Marston’s case, he not only forced his wife to change her last name, even though she didn’t want to, he had her change her first name because he didn’t like it.

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