Wonder Woman

OK, we all have our secrets, and I'm going to share one of mine. When I was growing up, I had a crush on Lynda Carter.

Miss World USA 1972. And looked hot hot hot in her Wonder Woman attire. Everyone else could fawn over Farrah Fawcett and Bo Derek and whoever else were the pinups of the time, but Lynda Carter, and later Stevie Nicks, always did it for me. I wasn't fickle; my likes never changed.

So several years ago when Wonder Woman was made available on VHS, I bought it. The entire series. Two episodes at at time, on tape. Hundreds of dollars. Today I could have the entire series on a few DVDs for well under $100--probably with commentary and special features to boot. But at the time VHS was all that was available, and a couple dozen dollars a month for a tape of my childhood memories didn't seem too bad a deal.

I'm in the process of burning all those VHS tapes to DVD so that I can put the tapes up in the rafters, clearing room on the movie shelves. Tonight I'm burning the tape that has on it the episodes "The Murderous Missile" and "Time Bomb". A line from each got my attention--one made me laugh out loud, the other made me remember the fears of the late 70s.

In The Murderous Missile, Diana Prince gets stranded in a town out in the middle of the desert--a town inhabited by people we later find out are imposters, there to steal a missile from a nearby test range. The "sheriff" keeps Diana to file a report about an attempted carjacking, then the garage owner "luckily" finds the fuel pump on her car is leaking, and Flo, the town operator, isn't home for Diana to make an outbound call. When Diana finally does meet Flo, Flo (who's in on the missile theft) tells her there's a lot of static on the line and a call wouldn't be possible. Diana remarks that it seems like somebody is trying to cut communications with the town. Flo replies, with feigned seriousness, "You mean the Commies?"

Maybe you had to see it, but it killed me.

In the second episode, Time Bomb, a scientist from the 22nd century comes back to 1978 to stop a colleague from getting rich and altering the timeline. He mentions rules similar to Star Trek's Prime Directive, and when Diana asks when the rules were made, he said, "After the nuclear holocaust. 2007, I think."

Both quotes, in their own ways, are great windows to the world of 1978.

And did I mention that Lynda Carter looked good in both episodes?