Whoa! Whoa! Don't diss WoWo! / Michael French
Whoa! Whoa! Don’t diss WoWo!
Where - Is - Wonder Woman?
Michael French
Warner Bros. and DC Comics have become far too skittish for my tastes. They’ve become slaves to perceived marketing trends rather than good storytellers. The saddest part is, they fail to see that the best stories are trendsetting, not trend following.
In order to set the standard, you have to buck the trend. That’s where the greatest stories and the biggest profits traditionally converge. Everything else is, by default, derivative. Trends are standards set by someone else.
Warner Bros. and DC Comics are losing this battle not only with the larger film industry, but with themselves as well. First, they’re willfully in the same stylistic mud pile that many other studios are playing in—dark movies, dark characters, dark stories. Dark dark dark! Hell, we’ve got Thor: The Dark World coming right on the heels of Star Trek: Into Darkness. The film industry can’t even write a title without the word now.
In a previous article, I discussed how Man of Steel was an opportunity for DC—with their bright flagship character of hope and positivity—to buck this darkness trend and usher in a new era of comic-book storytelling. But, of course, Warner Bros. swung for the fence, at the wrong ball no less, and struck out big in that regard.
As we have recently heard from the commercial din of San Diego’s Comic Con, the future of Warner Bros. and DC Comics rests on a Superman/Batman team-up in Man of Steel 2. Really? Already? No second solo film for Superman? To quote a famous news anchor, “Boy…That escalated quickly. That really got out of hand fast!”
After that film, we will also get a movie about The Flash. Then a Justice League movie. Anyone else see a missing link here? I’d go so far as to call it a glaring omission.
Granted, given the movies we’ve seen in the brave new DC movie universe, female characters are pretty much props. Between Batman’s girlfriend changing from Katie Holmes to Maggie Gyllenhal and then blowing up, alongside Amy Allen’s waxen Lois Lane in Man of Steel, it's fairly evident the executives at Warner Bros. and the “creative” team at DC Comics are completely gun-shy where women are concerned.
Maybe they’re all former basement-dwelling morlock-type geeks who still don’t know how to talk to women? Just a theory....
The larger point here is that Wonder Woman is part of “the Big Three” at DC Comics. Superman. Batman. Wonder Woman. That’s how it goes. And yet… we got Green Lantern, albeit badly. We’re getting The Flash. We’re getting Batman, again, as a bonus pack-in with Superman. But somehow there’s still no ability to deliver a Wonder Woman film.
Warner Bros. and DC Comics—you’re all pathetic.
Oh, and don’t throw up the excuse that you tried it with that half-baked Wonder Woman TV pilot and it didn’t sell. That train wreck didn’t sell because it was badly written, badly conceptualized, and exhibited a fundamental lack of understanding about Wonder Woman’s character; not to mention a major neurological disorder that ran rampant through your costuming department.
As it stands right now, just a few days after her 62nd birthday no less, actress Lynda Carter is still the defining standard for Wonder Woman on film. At this rate, much like Ricardo Montalban as Khan, Mrs. Carter may be the last word on the Amazonian Princess.
The 1976 Wonder Woman television series combined with the long-running Super Friends cartoon on Saturday mornings were my introductions to Wonder Woman, and I was a fan from the get-go. Even at the height of toymakers not developing female characters into action figures, they still made a space for Wonder Woman in Kenner’s Super Powers line.
After the Batman and Superman animated series of the 1990s, I was waiting for a Wonder Woman show to follow. No dice, though. She would not appear until the Justice League animated series. The shame of it was, she was awesome and well-written, and you could tell the writers were telling her full story, what would have been her stand-alone series, within the confines of the larger Justice League show.
At the height of the show’s popularity, I was collecting the Big Three’s comics as a devoted fan. I was in grad school, and Adam Hughes was painting the amazing covers on Wonder Woman at the time. The actual story content of the book was still pretty underwhelming, though, sad to say.
Around that time, I coined the nickname “WoWo” for Wonder Woman, since all of my friends used the names “Supes” and “Bats” for… well, it’s obvious, right? I felt she needed a modern nickname too. It’s only fair.
After that, came the excellent straight-to-DVD Wonder Woman animated feature. And then… well, that’s all she wrote beyond a few cameos in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. In fact, Warner Bros. and DC have canceled any and all new straight-to-video animated features unless they feature Superman and/or Batman (and their preference is Batman).
This is the war they’re fighting with themselves as a company. Not only are their products derivative when compared to the wider competition, their products are now derivative when compared to each other!
Wonder Woman’s exclusion is indicative of a larger issue at DC Comics. The fact that they’re failing to use this massive wealth of characters because they have no faith in their marketability is, quite frankly, a reflection of their poor skills at writing, adapting and selling anything.
Let’s face it, too. If this creative boycott of film and animation development for DC characters runs all the way up to one of the Big Three, then their unwillingness to play with the full deck goes beyond a simple aversion to female characters. It speaks to a fatal dysfunction within their marketing and screenwriting brain trust. Were I a shareholder of Warner Bros. and/or DC Comics, I would be voicing my displeasure and liquidating my stocks, because the way they’re “doing business” defies logic.
“We’ve got hundreds of products, but we’d prefer to sell only two. What? Oh, no—we haven’t actually tried to sell the others on screen, but did you get the memo that we’re clairvoyant? We know for sure they won’t work.”
Sounds to me like it’s Warner Bros. and DC Comics that don’t work, in more ways than one.
Until that changes, we won’t see WoWo in her own movie. The worst part is, Batman and Superman are beyond market saturation at this point. As a brand, Batman is worn ragged. Wouldn’t it be better to take a break and take Batman back to just the comics for a while? Whet the appetite of the fans, get some distance from (and pressure off) the material? Try something else and then bring Batman back when everyone’s excited again in a BIG way?
There was a four-year hiatus between Kenner’s Super Powers and the 1989 Batman film, barring the comics and two more years of Super Friends, which was an ensemble. When Batman came back, he came back in a BIG WAY. They even called it “Batmania.” Now Batman’s too overexposed for that to ever happen again without a break. Just saying, DC Comics… Just saying.
Assuming they didn’t darken her story down and stayed true to her character (I know, I’m asking a helluva lot), WoWo on the big screen would be a breath of fresh air while simultaneously capturing our nostalgic bend as well, thanks to the still-strong memories of the Lynda Carter series.
Let’s remember our manners, Warner Bros. It’s time.
Ladies first.
