PicoBlog

by Tom Blunt

I come here not to praise Wonder Woman 1984 nor to bury it, but to address you as an semi-professional Wonder Womanologist, pushing my fashionably gigantic Lynda Carter frames up to an even snobbier position on my nose as I inquire: “Do you happen to remember how the beloved WW TV series ended?”

Well, do you?

Reader, I do not ask idly! Along with their rollout of this new film escapade, HBO has also acquired and released every single episode of the 1975-79 Wonder Woman television program, which can now be streamed in alarmingly high definition. Trust that the show’s production designers were definitely counting on certain details being obscured by poor reception and RGB color formatting on a small screen, not to mention poor ophthalmological care, audience inattention, and a haze of cigarette smoke. This is a media product that was never intended to be splashed across an entire living room wall with a projector, and yet here we are. There I am. There I was.

Where were we? Ah yes. This means that you, faithful JUDGEMENT reader, are not shackled to my interpretation of the show’s tragic finale. You can go watch it yourself, quicker than one can say “Hey, what’s your HBO password?”

But don’t be fooled: the last episode you’ll find listed in the HBO catacombs is not the show’s true ending! They’d have you believe the whole shebang finished with “The Phantom of the Roller Coaster” parts 1 and 2, but this is as phony as Gal Gadot’s Themysciran accent.

What you’re really looking for is “The Man Who Could Not Die,” otherwise known as The TV Show That Was Shot In Both Knees And Left To Crawl.

Before I say more, here are a few important things to note about Wonder Woman in general:

🌟 I actually enjoyed WW84 quite a lot, even though I poked fun at it the whole time.

🌟 One of the earliest childhood nightmares I can recall was about Cheetah, WW’s arch-nemesis. In the dream she was trying to break into my grandparents’ farmhouse, where I was taking refuge from a tornado. (Wonder Woman did not materialize to rescue me from either.)

🌟 My mom went to the same high school as Lynda Carter, but due to their age difference they did not attend at the same time.

So as you can tell, this is a very personal, emotional subject for me. I grew up enjoying the TV series whenever it happened to air; in fact, I basically learned to read so I could snoop in the TV Guide and find out when my shows would be on. In a very real sense, Wonder Woman contributed to my ability to share these thoughts with you today.

The show’s structure is pretty simple. A problem is introduced, and Deep State agent Diana Prince is enlisted to solve it. A rousing opening credits melody is played. Diana tells someone where she’s going to begin her investigation, and then she goes there. A clue is found. She goes somewhere else, and someone tries to kill her. Several times during the episode she will twirl behind some crates and turn into Wonder Woman, whom, despite being a crime fighter in one of the sweatiest decades, never breaks a sweat. Our otherworldly heroine’s attitude runs the gamut from friendly consternation in the face of male obstruction to being sort of sheepishly amused at her own obvious superiority to every living human.

She is very patient with the men, and also exhibits zero sexual interest in them. Even in her scenes with leading dude and potential romantic interest Steve Trevor, you still get the sense that she’d happily trade him in for a leather recliner to kick back in at the end of a hard day’s work. (To be fair, by the 1980s Lyle Waggoner was well on his way to actually becoming a leather recliner.)

(And later, when he retired from acting, he became a sculptor of clownishly erotic artworks. Were you unaware?)

But enough about the men.

What you need to know about the TV series is that it was filmed in Los Angeles, because of course it was, even though the show was originally set in Washington DC circa 1942. But period pieces are expensive to film, so naturally they coasted to a lazy finish by ending that season with “Wonder Woman in Hollywood.”

It should surprise no one that they basically rebooted the series for the beginning of Season 2, saving piles of money by jumping forward to present day Washington D.C., which also allowed Lynda Carter to model contemporary fashions and thus become a ‘70s style icon. Still, if you try, I’m sure you can mentally recreate the entire grueling, sweaty studio meeting where this deal was struck, complete with the sounds of phones ringing and ulcers gurgling.

Mind you, this rebooting required a whole new obligatory origin story that shows Diana leaving her homeland yet again (Not Themyscira but “Paradise Island”) under the exact same conditions, but thirty years later. This time, it’s not Steve Trevor whom she plucks out of the sea, but Trevor’s son — also named Steve Trevor, and also played by Lyle Waggoner, so basically nothing to change here. And now her mother, Queen Hippolyta, is played by Beatrice Straight instead of Cloris Leachman or Carolyn Jones. Remember, there were no VHS recorders, let alone internet. No IMDB to help prove to the bullies at school that you’re not crazy, that Cloris Leachman really had been Diana’s original mom. Ow, stop punching me!

What I’m trying to say is: as fondly as we might remember this show, it really struggled. In its time, it was subject to the same cruel vagaries as any other superhero property, its continuity and integrity torn to rags in a brutal tug-of-war between producers and advertising executives. Fans watching contemporaneously could track the show’s identity crisis in real time — and if I’d been alive then, you can bet your ass I’d have been cranking out mimeographed JUDGEMENT newsletters about it.

But instead, to those of us who grew up watching the syndicated reruns through the 1980s, tuning in to random episodes, this was far less obvious. We just accepted the logic we were presented with, staring at the TV for hours in a semi-conscious state, scraping Fruit Roll-Up debris from the roof of our mouths and waiting for life to properly begin (or, if you were older, to end).

So that brings us to Season 3, the show’s last hurrah. At this point, everything in Diana’s timeline is holding stable, but viewership is in a slump. The writers have begun desperately tossing out youth-grabbing plots involving skateboarding and disco, but there’s no getting around the fact that our protagonist is a loveless government bureaucrat in her 30s. Cancellation seems imminent, so if the party is to continue, further appeals to Youth Culture must be made.

And that, faithful Reader, is how we arrive at “The Man Who Could Not Die,” intended as a season-ending reboot that promised to inject new life into a dying series, gesticulating wildly at everything Wonder Woman could be, would be, if you’ll just give us one more season. So here’s what this final episode brings to the table:

🌟 An opening montage establishing that Diana Prince has officially relocated to Los Angeles, where she will be working with the local intelligence community. Not only will an L.A. lifestyle help her seem more hip (aside from the fact that her new home appears to be somewhere in Burbank) it’s also more affordable from a production standpoint: they can lean into shooting recognizable locations, instead of disguising them to pretend she’s in D.C.

🌟 Diana is immediately given an animal sidekick, in the form of a chimpanzee that’s been rendered indestructible by a rogue scientist’s super-soldier serum. You will scream out loud when this is demonstrated via a hit-and-run accident that sends the ape fully aloft — cut to an F.A.O. Schwartz stuffed ape being tossed into some privet — and then again when Diana shows off the animal’s invulnerability by breaking off a No. 2 pencil in the cute baby chimp’s hide.

(Honestly, probably best to freeze a monstrosity like this in a block of ice, before it realizes how much stronger it is than humans and, one by one, begins to strip us of our tender, delicious faces.)

🌟 Diana is immediately given a child sidekick as well, in the form of a smooth-talking, trenchcoat-wearing, street-hustler stereotype named T. Burton Phipps III. Please remember that by now, the show “Diff’rent Strokes” is fully in its heyday, so this was as desperate and cynical a ratings-grab as one could possibly imagine. There’s nothing about it that isn’t super cringey, even down to Lynda Carter doing her best to sell the absurdity with an “I can’t believe this is really happening to me” grin that is meant to pass as Diana’s reaction to this audacious little tyke, but also suffices as an artistic statement from performer herself.

🌟 Diana is immediately given a love interest, in the form of an ordinary fellow who’s been rendered immortal and super-strong by the aforementioned serum. Previously it was always understood that nothing much would ever happen between Diana and Steve Trevor, because she’s an eternally youthful divine figure, and he’s a mere mortal on the cusp of his leather recliner years. This new guy (he has a name, but you don’t need to know it) is young, athletic, and an equal match in terms of longevity as well as a sense of belonging within the Superhero Community. However, as both a SoCal resident and a newly empowered being, he poses no real threat to Diana in terms of intelligence or physical prowess, and this (one may imply) will be very important in terms of their chemistry going forward. If an Amazon must have a mate, he should be a himbo extraordinaire.

So it was upon these four prongs — location, animal sidekick, child sidekick, himbo love interest — that a case was made for a fourth season. Perhaps the episode would spark the public’s imagination, generating interest in further Wonder Woman adventures featuring this motley, ad-hoc nuclear family?

I mean… I rather doubt it would have. And you will too, once you’ve staggered off to watch it for yourself on HBO. This is truly no one’s finest work, even down to the final image, a freeze-frame on Lynda Carter’s face that appears (to my eyes) almost apologetic, or like a hostage silently begging to be rescued.

But the truly psychotic thing is, we can never know for sure, because of how they bungled the episode’s debut. Here’s the part where you might want to look around for something soft and safe to throw across the room, perhaps a stuffed monkey: THEY AIRED THE FINAL EPISODES OUT OF ORDER.

How it went down was, as far as anyone could tell, in May of 1979, the season appeared to officially end with a two-part episode called “The Boy Who Knew Her Secret.”

Much later, at the end of August, they aired “The Man Who Could Not Die,” uprooting Diana and giving her a fresh start in Los Angeles and hopefully more than one No. 2 pencil.

And then, over the two weeks that immediately followed, they aired the “Phantom of the Roller Coaster” episodes which had already been filmed before that, which appeared to dump her right back into her D.C. life, as if none of that happy horse shit had ever happened!!

If the show’s fanbase had been larger (or if the internet had existed) this might have prompted a wave of Annie Wilkes-caliber outrage in defense of the show’s continuity.

Instead, a handful of close attention-payers probably thought they were losing their minds, the show was summarily canceled, and the world moved on.

Except for those few of us who spent the next decade continuing to watch reruns of the show! Which is why so many people experienced genuine shockwaves of emotion during the 2017 movie, the kind of earnest expression that many men long ago forgot was part of watching their favorite hero stomp out evil and injustice onscreen. Literally no one cried at the 2004 Punisher movie, friends.

And while WW84 ended up being even more polarizing than the last film — partly owing to the complete absence of goodwill extended to Gal Gadot in the role, thanks to her hawkish Zionism — it still contains plenty of elements that place it firmly within this decades-spanning lineage, with all its entertaining highs and infuriating lows. And that includes Lynda Carter herself, who turned up in an end-credits cameo, because why not?

This is why “Wonder Woman 1984 sucks” or even “comic book movies suck” is a perfectly empty criticism. Wonder Woman has always never sucked, and also her many vehicles have never stopped sucking. Or, if Wonder Woman 1984 sucks, it’s because life sucks, and Wonder Woman is simply a part of everyday life a this point, as much as we’d like to preserve her in an ideal form.

Like any divine figure, she will manifest in many forms, and in their way they are all perfect, but some of them will still probably suck. And like any female figure, her existence will always appear to invite comparison among her male counterparts and contemporaries — which is an aspect of our world that Diana herself ends up having to confront, in fictional scenarios, over and over again.

There’s at least one solid bit of continuity between all the various comics, shows, and movies: at any time she could have just left us all to hang and stayed on the damned island, but instead, here she is. Here we are.

Where were we?

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