Anyway, similar to the "filling in the gaps" thing I've been doing with Marvel Monday in recent weeks, I thought I'd do a quick gap-fill for the DC blog in the form of the second (or third, depending on how you're counting it) Wonder Woman TV movie from the late '70s. We last dealt with Diana Prince in the 1975 re-launch of the TV series "The New Wonder Woman" (so called to avoid confusion with 1974's "Wonder Woman" starring Cathie Lee Crosby...see the original reviews if you want to know more because it was complicated enough to explain the first time!) with the premise being that she'd been sent to accompany an American GI called Steve Trevor who'd crashed his plane on the Amazons' home, Paradise Island situated in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. The pair ended up becoming allies and fighting the Nazis during World War II with Prince masquerading as Trevor's secretary.
However, while the first series of Wonder Woman, aired in 1975-76, did respectably, it was dropped by CBS at the end of its first run. However, rival network NBC swooped in to pick it up a year later and a second series belatedly aired in 1978. However, it was decided that a clean break was needed with the past and the whole thing was rebooted with the new series being set in the 1970s. Although Carter and her original co-star Lyle Waggoner (now playing Steve Trevor Jr, the original Steve Trevor's son) returned, the rest of the cast were axed and a new team was brought in with the new series premiering in late '77. Let's see how it held up against its predecessor..
The film begins with Steve Trevor Jr and his team of government agents flying over the Bermuda Triangle. They're on their way to an international meeting in a South American country called Samarra (South American? You sure, sounds more Mediterranean to me!) However, unbeknownst to Steve, one of his crew is a mole sent by a terrorist called Solano to spy on them. Upon being rumbled, he attempts to gas the occupants of the plane and it promptly plummets earthwards only to suddenly level out as it's about to hit the ground.
We find out that this is because the plane has entered the airspace around Paradise Island, home of Wonder Woman, and apparently there's a magnetic field there now which controls any aircraft that enter it to prevent them from crashing. Trevor and his crew are discovered by Diana (who we find out returned to Paradise Island after the end of World War 2) and her fellow Amazons and taken back to the village.
Upon realising that Steve Jr is her old Nazi-clobbering buddy's son, Diana asks her mother, the queen, for permission to accompany the team on their way to Samarra to ensure that they're safe. Although initially reluctant, the queen eventually agrees. However, as par for the course, Diana must accept a bracelets and bullets challenge from another Amazon, this time her cousin which she ultimately wins.
The Amazons hypnotise Steve and plant the information about Diana being his new assistant into his brain before releasing the plane and allowing it to continue on its journey with the crew regaining consciousness once it's out of Paradise Island's airspace. Diana meanwhile follows in her invisible plane which doesn't look quite as silly as the first film but...well, the distance shot is obviously just a perspex toy plane with a doll in it!
Diana and Steve recon properly at the hotel where they're invited along for a meeting with the deputation from Guanaray (hang on, isn't that Spanish for bird s**t?) led by Solano and his assistant Grace (Jessica Walter who we last saw as Morgan Le Fay in the '70s version of Dr Strange). Trevor reveals that the US government's new gift of a nuclear power plant for Samarra will be airlifted into the country piece by piece but, despite being questioned by Solano and Grace, doesn't give any details. As we see back at their hotel room, the Guanarayan pair are up to no good with Solano detailing his completely nonsensical plot to rule the world by owning as many nuclear power plants as he can. Fritz Weaver, who plays Solano, is just hamming things up ridiculously here and his over-the-top dialogue just makes it impossible to take his character seriously.
Solano and Grace have quickly identified that Steve and Diana are a threat to their scheme and quickly move to off them with Grace breaking into Diana's new apartment in Washington and bugging her phone. Although the pair have a (hilariously badly choreographed) fight, Grace escapes and the next day Steve and Diana's car is followed by a group of Solano's goons. When they go to overpower Steve, Wonder Woman appears and runs them off. Steve obviously recognises her from the stories his Dad told him as a youngster.
However, Wonder Woman is spotted by Grace who had tailed the operation to make sure it went according to plan and she reports her findings to Solano (with the footage from her video camera showing as the exact same multiple-angle stuff we saw earlier - oops!) who quickly does his research on her and deduces that she's either superhuman or a robot. Which is handy because Solano has built his own robot which is capable of fencing and plans to challenge Wonder Woman to a duel with it! Again, plot hole anyone?...
Steve and Diana are visited by Grace who invites them to a party at the Guanarayan embassy but while they're visiting, Steve is lured into a room, ambushed by and replaced by a doppelganger who's had plastic surgery! Again, no preamble to that, they just kind of drop it straight in there. Fake Steve then promptly leaves Diana and heads off to the air base where he's due to meet the pilots flying the bits of nuclear plant into Samarra. He instead instructs them to take the stuff to Solano's base up in the mountains. Okay, just read that last paragraph back to yourself - does the phrase "this is just getting ridiculous now" spring to mind or is it just me?
Fake Steve makes the fatal mistake of trying to get fresh with Diana when he drops her off at her flat and you can guess how that ends. Realising something's up, she heads back to the embassy to rescue Steve as Wonder Woman and the pair make a dash for Samarra using the invisible plane (cue more inadvertently hilarious special FX with dolls in glass tubes).
The pair manage to land at Solano's plant but a stand-off develops where Wonder Woman has Solano held at gunpoint, likewise Grace with Steve. Solano challenges Wonder Woman to a fencing duel but, of course, sends out the robot in a rubber mask. Diana defeats it but unbeknownst to her, the thing has a mini-nuclear bomb inside it capable of destroying everything within a 100-mile radius which is programmed to go off if the robot ever loses a fencing fight (anyone else remember the piano sequence from the terrible 1990's version of "Captain America"?). Luckily, Wonder Woman throws it down the mineshaft that Solano and Grace attempt to escape down, causing a cave-in that presumably kills them. And presumably it would also cause everything else in the area to die from radiation poisoning - somebody on the plotwriting team really didn't think about this, did they? Anyway, Steve uses the radio in Solano's shed (!) to contact the planes and get them to deliver their cargo to where it was supposed to go in the first place and everybody lives happily ever after. Fin.
Hmmm...I have to be honest, the main thing this film brought to mind was the '70s Spiderman films (which, in all fairness, were released around the same time). And, if you remember the reviews I did of those months ago, you'll know that's very much not a good thing. Okay so maybe "Wonder Woman Returns" isn't quite as bad as those but it suffers from plot holes the size of planets meaning half the film really does require a huge leap of the imagination for you to not go "Nah, I know it's a superhero film but that's just silly..." Weirdly, the other main problem with this film is that it suffers from the exact opposite problem a lot of the films Marvel were putting out around this time in that it just tries to cram too much into a 75 minute time frame meaning a lot of it feels rushed, especially towards the end. For once (and I never thought I'd say this about a Marvel/DC '70s TV film), this could actually have done with being stretched out to 90 minutes to make it feel a bit less garbled.
Wonder Woman would hang around for another two series after this film before the series was eventually cancelled in 1979. The next we'll be seeing of Diana Prince won't be until we get pretty much right to the end of the DC Saturdays series with the 2016 Wonder Woman film. Which, unlike a lot of the modern DC films, was actually a step up from its predecessors. But more on that in a few months' time...
FINAL RATING: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 (4/10)
CURRENT DC FILM TABLE
1. Batman (1989) (8/10)
2. Superman (1978) (8/10)
3. Superman 2 (1980) (8/10)
4. Batman (1966) (8/10)
5. Superman 3 (1983) (5/10)
6. Swamp Thing (1982) (5/10)
7. The New Wonder Woman (1975) (5/10)
8. Superman and the Mole Men (1951) (5/10)
9. The Flash 2 - Revenge Of The Trickster (1991) (4/10)
10. Wonder Woman Returns (1977) (4/10)
11. The Flash (1990) (4/10)
12. Wonder Woman (1974) (3/10)
13. The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) (2/10)
14. Superman 4 - The Quest For Peace (1987) (2/10)
15. Supergirl (1984) (2/10)
NEXT WEEK: Well, tomorrow actually in the interests of catching up - I'll be finishing off the Flash trilogy with The Flash 3 - Deadly Nightshade. Then after that we can go back to some big budget stuff...
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