AGE OF
T V HEROES: Wonder Woman Wonder Woman 1974-style, with Cathy Lee Crosby in the first telefilm’s title role.
envisioned as a comedy, and indications were that it would have been done in the same over-the-top manner as the Batman series, even including Batman’s narrator, William Dozier. However, even at its short five-minute length, the presentation fell flat. It featured no action and not much about it was very inspiring. As a positive, the Wonder Woman costume worn by Linda Harrison was well done. Aside from a white belt, it was mostly faithful to the comic version with all the accents and elements in place. With a bit of additional tooling, the premise for this pilot may have been salvageable, but as it failed to generate any interest among television networks or buyers, it never got the chance to develop further. Since it was also never screened for the public, Wonder Woman—Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? was destined to quickly fade into the realm of mostlyunseen and unknown productions. Although the first take on Wonder Woman didn’t succeed, the character would prove difficult to keep off television. In late 1973, well after Greenway’s options had expired, another attempt was made to introduce a flesh-and-blood Wonder Woman to television audiences, this time with Warner Bros. at the helm. The tone of this new pilot was more serious and completely avoided anything having to do with the previous production from Greenway. Titled simply Wonder Woman, the pilot premiered March 12, 1974 and starred Cathy Lee Crosby as Diana, with Ricardo Montalban as the villain, Abner Smith, and Andrew Prine as his chief henchman, George. It was produced by John G. Stephens, and written, developed and executive produced by John D.F. Black. Direction of the pilot was by Vincent McEveety. All of these gentlemen had strong backgrounds in television, all three having worked on the original Star Trek as well as many other top series. Wonder Woman began by showing Diana being sent into the outside world by her mother. Her mission was simply to be present with her love of justice and right, to show the world the true value of women. Diana, whose identity of Wonder Woman was known to seemingly everyone in the film, took a job as a receptionist and part-time spy for an unnamed government agency headed by Steve Trevor in Washington, DC. The plot centered on a set of stolen books which held the names and information for thirty-nine US spies. They had been stolen by agents of Abner Smith, who then held them for ransom for the sum of fifteen million dollars. It was Wonder Woman’s job to retrieve the books within Smith’s imposed deadline of fortyeight hours. Diana was able to thwart every attempt to stop her, even including battling one of her sisters from the island, whom Smith had recruited. In the end, Diana was of course successful in stopping Smith and his henchmen, retrieving the books and the ransom money. WONDER WOMAN ©Warner Bros. Television. All Rights Reserved.