Today's video link is to a demo film, a little under five minutes in length, that was made in 1967 to try and sell a Wonder Woman TV show to ABC. Its producer, William Dozier, already had a hit on that network with the Adam West Batman series and he locked up a number of other comic book (or comic book-ish) properties to see if he could make lightning strike again. He couldn't. Not with this effort, not with a half-hour Dick Tracy pilot he produced, not with several others that never got anywhere near a camera lens. The only other show he was able to sell was The Green Hornet and it didn't last long.
The short Wonder Woman demo was written by Stanley Ralph Ross and the team of Larry Siegel and Stan Hart. That's right: It took three men to write this.
Stanley was concurrently writing many episodes of Batman. He later claimed — and I'm not sure I believe him — that he hated the idea that Dozier had of making Wonder Woman into a broad sitcom about a drab lady who imagines herself as the more beautiful, exciting Wonder Woman. On the other hand, eight years later, after ABC had commissioned and passed on another Wonder Woman pilot (the one starring Cathy Lee Crosby), they bought a very faithful adaptation of the comic book, the pilot of which was written by…Stanley Ralph Ross. Stanley developed the Lynda Carter version and claimed it was the way he'd wanted to handle the property all along. So maybe he did.
Stan Hart and Larry Siegel were a fairly new comedy writing team at the time. Shortly after this project, they were hired for The Carol Burnett Show, where they worked for many years and won many awards. They also wrote a lot for (and may still occasionally appear in) MAD Magazine.
In what you'll see if you're brave enough to click on the link below, Diana Prince is played by a woman named Ellie Wood Walker, who had few credits and who, I guess, was television's idea of an unattractive woman. On TV, it's okay for a lady to play someone who can't get a man as long as she's pretty enough. Portraying her alter-ego — the beautiful version of W.W. — was Linda Harrison, who was then the actress cast in every role at Twentieth-Century Fox that called for someone stunning but didn't have much dialogue. The same year, she played "Miss Stardust" in A Guide for the Married Man. The year after, she was Nova in Planet of the Apes. And the year after that, they stuck her in my favorite trashy TV melodrama of the sixties, Bracken's World where, amazingly, she was allowed to talk. She did fine.
Her nagging mother was Maudie Prickett, who managed to turn up at one time or another in just about every sitcom in the sixties. Narration was supplied by William Dozier himself, filling the same job he'd hired himself for on the Batman show.
Why didn't his version of Wonder Woman sell? Well, watch it and see. What's usually the case when a network commissions a brief demo film instead of a full pilot is either (a) they have so much faith in the premise and creative team that they don't feel the need to waste the time or money…or (b) they have so little faith in the project that, though they've been pressured into giving it a try before the cameras, they don't want to waste the time or money. Guess which was the case this time.
