Watch the Casually Sexist Wonder Woman TV Pilot from the 1960s
The newest incarnation of Wonder Womanas portrayed by Gal Gadot in this week's Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice and next year's standalone Wonder Woman movielooks to be a perfect fit with both the action-heavy feel of modern superhero movies and the gender consciousness of a post-Frozen world. Gadot has even said that one of the reasons she was interested in the role was to provide her daughter with a role model who does more than get rescued by a prince. That's a vision that meshes well with the original version of the character, as first introduced to comics fans in 1941 Wonder Woman's origin story tells of the immortal Amazon princess Diana, who accompanies the lost U.S. Army pilot Steve Trevor back to the U.S. and ends up staying there, in disguise, to fight for American ideals that include "equal rights for woman.", But not every incarnation of Wonder Woman has been quite so feminist-friendly. In 1967, amid the success of the campy Adam West Batman TV series, that show's producer William Dozier took a crack at a comedy version of the Wonder Woman story. The bizarre and casually sexist test footage has been circulating online for a few years now, but watching it as Wonder Woman makes her way to the big screen is a reminder of how much the character has been through over the course of her 75 years, , The five-minute sample, starring Ellie Wood Walker as Diana Prince and Linda Harrison as her alter-ego Wonder Woman, never became a proper TV showbut about a decade later, in 1975, Wonder Woman would finally find TV success with the Lynda Carter-starring series with which she is still strongly identified today.