Every Wonder Woman screen adaptation reveals something about what Wonder Woman means to
the world and just how messy that meaning can be.
Join us as we explore the highs and lows of the Amazon princess, from 1960s homebody to
2000s career girl, as we rank every screen adaptation of Wonder Woman from worst to best.
What do people love about Wonder Woman?
Is it her bravery, her ceaseless commitment to good, her fighting prowess?
The minds behind the canceled 2011 Wonder Woman TV series starring Adrianne Palicki
decided it was none of the above Rather, as the unaired pilot argues, people like Wonder
Woman because beneath the lasso and bracelets, she's just a silly bachelorette who wants
to flop onto her couch with her cat and a glass of wine to catch a screening of The
Notebook.
It's not all bad, exactly.
Though the series takes some serious left turns in imagining Diana as the CEO of "Themyscira
Industries," a company we see as chiefly concerned with selling buxom dolls of their vigilante
boss, it's also not afraid to show her eager to do what's right and stand up against her
own objectification.
"I never signed off on this prototype.
I hadn't seen it, I never would have done that, I never said to merchandise my t---."
But the overwhelming impression is that of a series embarrassed by its own source material.
Add in a limp lead performance from the usually reliable Palicki and some truly clumsy camera
work, and you get the most disappointing Wonder Woman adaptation of all time.
Audiences worldwide might remember Lynda Carter's twirling, tiara-sporting Wonder Woman as an
emblem of 1970s entertainment, but they're significantly less likely to recall her 1974
predecessor.
That Wonder Woman was played by tennis pro Cathy Lee Crosby, only one year before Carter's
Amazon princess would take the small screen by storm.
Why did one iteration so eclipse the other?
Well, right off the bat there's Crosby herself.
Clad in a reinterpretation of Wonder Woman's classic costume that looked more like a fleece
ski vest than anything else, this Diana wasn't much more than a generic 70s style kung-fu
fighter - pitted against villains no one remembers today.
Of the many liberties taken, not one of them improved upon the classic canon.
Years later, Crosby's Wonder Woman is mostly a footnote in the character's history a justified
fate for an enterprise so alienated from its origins.
Before Lynda Carter or Cathy Lee Crosby, there was another Diana Prince.
She was played by Ellie Wood Walker, and boy, was she in dire straits.
Little is known about this failed Wonder Woman adaptation: all that's been left behind is
five minutes of footage.
And really, Walker does an admirable job with the material she's given.
A 27-year-old still living with her mother, she's bullied for being unmarried until she
realizes the thunderstorm raging outside will prevent Steve Trevor still a pilot in this
incarnation, apparently from taking off.
"Steve's plane must be grounded."
She heads behind a revolving door, only to emerge as Linda Harrison in a Wonder Woman
costume.
As a 1966 Batman-style take on Wonder Woman, it sort of works, and Walker manages to bury
the seeds of what could have been a genuinely funny performance in those scant five minutes.
But the angle makes no sense.
What does making Wonder Woman so silly accomplish?
Why not play her absurdities straight, as Batman did to campy greatness?
We'll never know what might have been, and perhaps that's for the best.
Amazons are warriors.
This has been part of their history since the Greek mythology that helped inspire Wonder
Woman's creation, and has always been one of the character's essential attributes.
But before she is a wager of war, she is a scholar, a dreamer, and a seeker of truth.
As she once noted in the pages of her comics, Amazons "don't raise [their] hand at all until
[they've] first extended it."
The Wonder Woman of Justice League: War and the other direct-to-DVD DC animated movies
that share its continuity might beg to differ.
She is absolutely fearsome with her fists, the kind of hero who stands before any angry
crowd and asks for the man responsible for their anger:
"Tell me who you speak of, and by Zeus, they will taste my steel."
It can be thrilling to watch such an action-minded Wonder Woman, and many of her fight scenes
are impeccably choreographed and animated.
But it's tiring, after a while, to see her constantly with sword in hand.
Add in a weak romance with Superman, and this Wonder Woman feels more like a petulant adolescent's
idea of "cool" than a hero with history and a mission.
Based on Darwyn Cooke's classic limited comics series, The New Frontier blends the militaristic
machinations of Cold War policy with the bright-eyed idealism of World War II-era superheroism,
and the animated adaptation largely lives up to its source material.
But when it comes to Wonder Woman, those successes are a bit more muddied.
This Wonder Woman has been beaten down by postwar disillusionment.
Once, perhaps, she was a hopeful dreamer full of can-do spirit and Themysciran wisdom.
Now she allows women caught in the midst of the Vietnam War to kill their abusers.
It's an interesting moral argument, and Lucy Lawless' steely performance is superb.
But with scenes like the one that concludes with her directing a judgmental Superman to
the door, one in which her fellow Amazons deride her leadership, and one when she crash-lands
her blood-splattered jet into a military base, it's all a little dire for a character so
closely aligned with optimism.
It's an interesting departure from the character's history, but not one to be indulged for very
long.
As far as superheroes go, Batman has the biggest part to play in The Lego Movie.
But he's not the only DC hero pounding Bricksburg's pavement Wonder Woman is there too, lasso
in hand, as capable in plastic as she is in the flesh.
For, well, all of 30 seconds.
True, she's not a major part of The Lego Movie, with all of two lines that add up to a combined
eight words.
"To the invisible jet… dang it."
But the sheer fact of her existence within the candy-colored confines of The Lego Movie's
world is enough to merit her a place on this list.
Here, Wonder Woman is a Master Builder, a being of unparalleled creativity and vision.
Though the movie's moral is, ultimately, that anyone can be a Master Builder, audiences
are informed that the ones who earned the title pre-movie worked for years "to clear
their minds enough to have even a fleeting glimpse of the Man Upstairs."
Now ask yourself: who can't be charmed by the idea of a Wonder Woman who guards creativity
itself from a literal patriarch, bent on keeping his toys from being played with?
Wonder Woman is easily the best part of her 2009 animated movie.
She maintains a tireless faith in the world, her ideals, and her abilities.
Watching her throw down with Ares is thrilling.
The sequence in which she steps into her costume for the first time is stirring.
She's everything you want her to be, really.
The problem has everything to do with the movie around her.
Wonder Woman seems to believe it needs to apologize for its stalwart heroine by constantly
sexualizing her and the culture she comes from.
This iteration of Steve Trevor is an absolute sleazeball who can barely go five minutes
without making it clear that Diana and her sisters matter most to him as babes.
The fact that their romance succeeds at all when so much of their interaction consists
of Steve making her uncomfortable lessens her character.
Would Wonder Woman fall for a man who sneers at her mother's long-since-past liaison with
Ares as a stupid woman falling for a "bad boy," let alone one who refers to her as "the
hot chick" to her Amazon sisters?
This movie argues she would, and that's why this iteration misses the mark.
Alternate universes have well been explored within the pages of DC Comics and the tradition
continues to flourish today, in stories like Justice League: Gods and Monsters.
Within the cynical confines of its DC universe, Superman is the son of General Zod, Batman
is a literal vampire, and Wonder Woman is Bekka, a New God from DC's Fourth World comics.
Their approach to enforcing global order is considerably more brutal than their mainstream
counterparts consider its Wonder Woman.
She might believe in justice, but she's a lot less into lassos and a lot more into using
her sword to impale her enemies to achieve it.
"Low tech.
Works for me."
Does it work?
For the most part, yes.
This is only a Wonder Woman depiction in the most technical sense, but it works on its
own and as an interesting riff off the established character.
Bekka's far-off land is considerably different from Themyscira, and what sent her to Earth
the death of her husband, Orion is a lot sadder than Diana's hopeful mission of peace.
But those changes highlight the commitment to righting wrongs both heroines share, making
this wildly different Wonder Woman a worthy enough rendition.
Before Batman: The Animated Series, Teen Titans, and DC Super Hero Girls, there was the ever-cheery
Super Friends.
Wonder Woman is a particularly bright spot in this primary-colored collection.
A fairly straightforward depiction, from her Amazonian heritage to her invisible jet, she
nevertheless maintains a certain wry edge that stands out against her teammates.
She's nowhere near sarcastic this is, after all, the cartoon that gave us the Wonder Twins
but Shannon Farnon's performance has a knowing lilt to it.
Her Wonder Woman is a whole-hearted hero, but one can imagine her rolling her eyes good-naturedly,
of course.
Above all, she's a do-gooder dedicated to righting wrongs in a version of the DC universe
where that means battling killer bees and teaching important lessons about the dangers
of drag racing.
And darn it if she doesn't manage to put a smile on your face as she does it.
Pop quiz: What was Wonder Woman's first broadcast appearance?
If you guessed Super Friends, 1974's TV film, or the series starring Lynda Carter, you're
wrong: it was in "It's All Greek to Me," a 1972 episode of the animated The Brady Bunch
spinoff The Brady Kids.
"It's All Greek To Me" sends the Brady kids to Ancient Greece alongside Diana Prince,
mild-mannered administrative assistant in the local university's mathematics department.
She's a bit of a schoolmarm here, her superheroic persona played for laughs against her buttoned-up
alter ego.
"As Diana Prince, I should say that brains are more important.
But being Wonder Woman, I know the value of physical conditioning too."
It works, for the most part: Wonder Woman as time-traveling babysitter responsible for
keeping the groovy sextet from making a mess of history is, if nothing else, certainly
unique.
All in all, it's a fun detour but it's probably for the best that Wonder Woman only spent
22 minutes in Brady-land.
Every generation gets its DC cartoons, and one of the biggest ones going today is Justice
League Action.
A zippy, slickly animated series that manages to fit DC's brightest stars in alongside lesser-known
heroes, it takes its share of liberties, but rarely without cause.
This version of Wonder Woman is, for example, a bit more hard-edged than others.
Physically, she's a brawler wielding a sword who gets more action scenes than the character
has historically been granted in ensemble cartoons.
Personality-wise, there's a wry, wisecracking side to her that stands out among her many
incarnations.
A lesser cartoon might have translated that as generically sassy, but Justice League Action
locates her sense of humor firmly in a warrior who loves a good sparring session as much
as she loves keeping the peace.
That said, the feistiness could use a little lightening now and then, if only to keep the
character in touch with the joy and love that make her unique.
Wonder Woman isn't just a warrior, after all she's a pacifist as well.
1988's Superman cartoon was a boisterous ode to the Man of Steel.
Unsurprisingly, Wonder Women fits right in, exemplified by the fabulously-named episode
"Superman and Wonder Woman vs. the Sorceress of Time."
Superman, Wonder Woman, and a villain who combines magic and time travel, thrown together
in the sort of cartoon that opens with a voiceover explanation of how Superman came to be?
"Strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far
beyond those of mortal men.
Superman!"
That can only succeed.
Not only does it make good on that promise, it provides genuine humor, adventure, and
world-building.
Though Paradise Island is only briefly glimpsed, its pastel-swathed Amazons, pastoral hills,
and mysterious artifacts establish the world, its heroine, and her mission in vivid style.
Diana herself is at the peak of her heroic game here, as brave and bright-eyed as any
fan could ask for.
She's notably quicker with a quip than most adaptations depict her, and it's so charming,
it's a wonder it doesn't happen more often.
This team-up might have been brief, but it's a delight from beginning to end.
Batman: The Brave and the Bold is an unabashed love letter to the Silver Age of DC comics,
which makes it an absolute joy of a cartoon.
Villains ensnare hapless civilians with maliciously magical music, while no DC character, gritty
or otherwise, escapes a generous dose of humor within these bubbly, brightly-colored confines.
Unsurprisingly, Wonder Woman responded very well to this treatment.
Accompanied by an especially groovy reinterpretation of her 1970s theme, she is every inch the
laughing crusader of her earliest Golden Age years.
She's the can-do spirit of the Silver Age personified, minus the ditzy personality that
era forced on the Wonder Woman of the comics.
This Diana isn't just a warrior she's genuinely, thoroughly, wonderful.
Justice League and Justice League Unlimited are monuments to the power of animation.
Their interpretations of DC's lineup forever scrubbed away whatever memories of the Super
Friends lingered in the public's mind.
It wasn't just a success, but a benchmark for superhero stories period.
Wonder Woman didn't feature quite as largely as Batman or Superman did, unfortunately.
Yet Susan Eisenberg's performance was strong enough to make her into a heroine to be admired.
Even in the smallest scenes, Eisenberg summoned a strength to Diana's voice that immediately
established authority, kindness, and confidence.
"Heed my words, Faust.
If you break your vow, no magic in the universe will save you from me."
Her Diana is funny without ever being mean, brave without showboating, and hopeful without
limit.
She is a pillar of everything the League strives to be a walking, talking encapsulation of
why superheroes exist at all.
This is a Diana who will never run from a fight, but would die before she picked one.
Wonder Woman: Bloodlines crams an absolute plethora of the Amazon's villains, friends,
and allies into its runtime.
It's a bit of a mess, to be frank but when it does takes the time to focus on its heroine,
everything else becomes forgivable.
Bloodlines' Wonder Woman is exactly what the character should always be: A lover and a
fighter.
She does not shy away from a battle, nor does she provoke them, instead seeking peace with
every villain she faces whether they're rampaging minotaurs or mutated cheetah-women.
This Diana refuses to accept the world she has been presented with, finding, even in
the most extreme circumstances, that peace is always possible.
Now that's a wondrous power indeed.
Set at a high school in the DC universe, DC Super Hero Girls reinterprets Wonder Woman,
Batgirl, Green Lantern, Bumblebee, Supergirl, and Zatanna as besties, crime fighters, and
occasional detention sufferers.
Though the stakes here aren't exactly world-shattering, this narrowing of scope actually allows the
characters room to grow and establish themselves as scholars, nerds, divas, and warriors.
There isn't a weak member of the cast, but Diana stands out from the very beginning as
a joyous tribute to all that has made the character endure.
A transfer student, she is as passionate about being called a woman, rather than a girl,
as she is about ice cream.
Freed from having to carry the burden of being a rare female character in a sea full of dudes,
she can be a fully rounded character, complete with flaws and failures, and never lose her
heroism.
This Diana isn't just a Wonder Woman, she's a woman looking to put her ideals into practice.
Whether she's playing dodgeball with her friends or misunderstanding one of the many idioms
of Man's World, it's a joy to watch her do it.
The 1970s Wonder Woman series is regarded today as a success, but rarely without an
invocation of its campy allure.
Commentators aren't wrong to bring this up.
This was, after all, a show featuring Nazi cattle rustlers.
A sense of humor and irreverent fun was very much the point of the show, and it holds up
remarkably well.
Wonder Woman's universe might be live action, but in its fundamentals, it is very much a
cartoon.
It's tempting to chalk Lynda Carter's appeal up to her beauty, and perhaps an unconsidered
charm she simply exudes.
But playing her performance off as something unconscious is to do her a tremendous disservice.
"Excuse me, but that's very rude…
“Get outta here, broad!”
“it's also dangerous."
Carter's Diana is a heroine whose belief in goodness is so ironclad you can see it in
her eyes, whether she's punching out a bad guy or perched behind a typewriter.
Her Wonder Woman is a dreamer with her feet planted firmly in the real world, a warrior
who hopes that one day there will be no war.
Decades after her premiere, Carter's Diana doesn't just evoke fondness she commands respect
for an enduringly fine performance.
There was a lot riding on Gal Gadot.
The DC films that preceded her had a rocky go of it.
Superheroine movies were primarily remembered as a graveyard for the likes of Catwoman and
Elektra.
Gadot didn't just have a hard road ahead of her — she had a towering mountain to climb.
"As Amazons, this is our duty."
Years after her debut in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, her starring role in Wonder
Woman, and her part in Justice League, it's easy to forget all that pressure.
But that's only because Gadot did such an enormously good job.
And, if her winning turn in the otherwise ho-hum Justice League is any indication, promises
to continue doing so.
Her Wonder Woman is as fierce as she is cheery, an eager competitor who comes alive when presented
with a challenge.
An immortal war god?
She'll hop on a boat to slay him before you've even finished explaining his raison d'etre.
A battlefield's no man's land, strewn with the bodies of the dead?
She'll jump up to cross it, laser-focused on civilians in need of saving.
A dessert she's never tried before, like ice cream?
She'll thank the vendor like he invented it just for her.
As she says in Justice League:
"What are you?"
"A believer."
And in so doing, she makes us believe in her too.
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