Fight Clip Club: Wonder Woman

…in your satin tights, fighting for your rights / and the old Red White and Blue🎶

We’re doing something different today at Fight Clip Club. Instead of analyzing one fight from one piece of media, I want to instead compare the fights of one character, in two different iterations produced in two very distant-from-each-other time periods with different movie making tech, aesthetic norms, etc. The character? Wonder Woman. The portrayals? Lynda Carter’s iconic spinning badass from the 1970s TV show, and Gal Gadot from 2017’s blockbuster of the same name.

These two iterations of the eminent comic book character are quite different, but as they share the same core seed, there are a few similarities too. Their costumes both consist of bustier and swim-suit-shaped, with ‘the old Red White and Blue’ represented on it, though Carter’s is much brighter in color, and Gadot’s more in line with her Ancient Greek goddess roots. They both boast super strength and advanced unarmed fighting skills, and both have the bulletproof bracelets, sword skills, and glowing Lasso of Truth. They both have a sidekick named Steve, the arc of which in the 2017 movie I talked about in my Problematic Badass Female Tropes series #2: The Wonder Woman. Both are Princess Diana from the fabled all-woman island of Themyscira, abandoning their Amazonian warrior upbringing to battle Nazis in the US. I’d actually forgotten that Wonder Woman was such a Nazi-puncher in her comic origins, and she totally is in the 2017 movie. The ‘70s TV show? Well, just look up the lyrics to the theme song: Wonder Womaaaannnn…

Stop a bullet cold,

Make the Axis fall,

Change their minds, and change the world

I wanted to look at both these Wonder Women because I’ve been discussing the use of CGI in film fights lately irl and online, and it seems to be an evergreen topic, in the realms of the Realism vs. Authenticity discourse I’ve gone over in detail in several of my essays, most deeply and recently in the pair called Realism and Method. Read those for my views on stunts, Reality TV, and how to make authentic-looking fights.

So let’s look at a sample of some fights from two versions of this superhero, portrayed by two badass women nearly 50 years apart.