Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Alex Toth/Super Friends Week - Wonder Wednesday Edition

Here we have Wonder Woman as rendered by Alex Toth for the Super Friends. Wonder Woman was one of the most pivotal members, as she was the lead female hero on the team. Most people don't consider the Wonder Twins full-fledged members and remarkably there were only two other female SFs and they made only sporadic appearances. Rima the Jungle Girl, as previously discussed, was only tenuously a DC super hero and appeared in only three shorts. And Hawkgirl who only ever appeared alongside her husband Hawkman in five shorts, including one where she was ridiculously miscolored.
(Although Hawkman made many appearances without Hawkgirl, including the entire Challenge of the Superfriends season.)
I read in Back Issue magazine, that one writer wrote a script that would have featured Wonder Woman and Black Canary teaming up to save Lois Lane on a Ghost Ship, but the producers had just decided to stop buying scripts from free-lancers. Here were have Toth's rendering of Black Canary... oh what coulda been!Here's an interesting artifact, an early rendering of Wonder Woman by Alex Toth, where she more closely resembles the way she was drawn in the Golden Age. Apparently, they decided to go for a more "current" look so she wound up with the Marlo Thomas That Girl flip that she rocked for over a decade.
Here we have a couple of drawings Toth did for the live action/animated commercials for Underoos. He actually employs a slightly different style and Wonder Woman is given longer, wavier hair than she had on Super Friends. This more closely resembles the way Wonder Woman was drawn in the comics of the time. It's too bad the Super Friends producers didn't allow her to be modernized on the show.

Here's a nice sketch Toth did of Wonder Woman. I think this is a commission piece.
For the final season of the show Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians, Hanna Barbera finally decided to freshen up the look of the show and abandoned the 70s Toth designs for the then-current Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez designs from the DC Style Guide. The previous season, Wonder Woman's eagle logo had been switched to the new WW logo, but overall she still looked the same. The Garcia-Lopez look is more detailed and slightly less "cartoony" and she is given long flowing hair.
Wonder Woman is one of only five heroes whose origin was revealed on the show, in her case, in Secret Origins of the Super Friends during the Challenge season. Two of her enemies, The Cheetah and Giganta were included in the Legion of Doom. Her fellow Amazons appeared on several episodes, most notably in 1980's "Return of Atlantis" where her mother Hippolyta organizes the Amazons to battle a group of villainous Amazons from the lost city of Atlantis... apparently a different Atlantis than the one Aquaman was from. And in the final season, her comic book boyfriend Steve Trevor appeared. That same episode showed Wonder Woman in her secret identity of Diana Prince for the first time on the show. An action figure called Rocket Man, who bore a strong resemblance to Steve (who was an astronaut) was designed for the fourth series of Super Powers action figures, but the line was never produced, therefore the background on that character is unknown. Could Steve have made the jump from super hero's boyfriend to actual super hero himself?
There you have it! A SF-centric look at the Amazing Amazon!

No comments:

Post a Comment