"The Bushwhackers"

"Those rustlers are dangerous."

Indeed.  You wouldn't think a buncha good ol boys would give Wonder Woman trouble-- she fights NAZIS for a living-- but in "The Bushwhackers," our heroine certainly learns a thing or two about messing with Texas.  While it's hardly a peril-fest for Diana, it is one of three episodes when her belt of power is taken, which alone would make it more than worthwhile.  What's especially great in this case is how both heroine and villain react during said de-belting sequence... We'll get to that in a second.

They say everything's bigger in Texas...

The plot is wacky.  Wonder Woman follows Steve to Texas to take care of some cattle rustlers.  She meets some kids and cuteness ensues.  This all might be kind of intolerable, but there are a few key scenes prior to the de-belting that bear noticing.  The first of these occurs at the ranch, when Wonder Woman-- dressed formally, in her Roy-Rogers-approved white pants and red top combo (still pretty sexy, if you ask me)-- is talking to the kids about her superpowers.  She's clearly having a great time, even when a girl asks her a pretty loaded question: "What about your magic belt?  What is it's secret?"

"Well if I told you that," Wonder Woman says,  "It wouldn't be a secret, would it?"

Diana trusts some kids with her biggest secret.  Hmm...

She DOES, however, proceed to tell them what I consider to be, well, important information: that the belt is her source of strength when she's away from Paradise Island.

This ends up being a mistake.  Because one of the kids has a line to the cattle rustlers.  And that kid, in the second important pre-de-belting scene, spills the beans to the villains.  "Steve Trevor's got Wonder Woman helping," he says.

"Don't worry about that," the bad guy responds, "We'll take care of her... First thing we have to find out is... Where does Wonder Woman get her strength from?"

Well, somewhere along the line, they do find out.  We don't actually see this conversation.  But the first time the rustlers meet up with our heroine, they know EXACTLY what to do.  And this leads to one of the all-time great peril scenes of the series.

The encounter.  Note how in this shot, the belt already appears to be coming off.

Wonder Woman is out riding her horse. Everything seems peaceful.  Suddenly, a patrol car drives behind her, siren blaring.  As the soundtrack kicks into a funky groove (almost as if it's gonna launch into a cry of "Wonder Womannnn," though, as we'll see, that would be highly inappropriate here), the car pulls off of the road and in front of our heroine's horse.  The horse rears up as the rustlers get out of the car.  "Down Wonder Woman, whoa, easy," they say, talking to her like an animal.  In a panic, the horse collapses, taking one rustler and Wonder Woman down with it.  "Go get her boy!" The man starts hooting and hollering.  By the time Diana is back on her feet, so it the downed rustler.  Meanwhile, the other rustler has crept up behind her.  As soon as Wonder Woman gets in a fighting pose, gritting her teeth, ready to kick ass, this second rustler already has his hands around her.

"Too close for comfort, Wonder Woman?"

The camera zooms in.  Before Wonder Woman can make a move, the second rustler has ripped her belt from her waist!

NOOOOOOOOO

Her face forms almost a look of pain as he draws back from her-- there's a barely audible gasp on the soundtrack here, that might be a cry of distress-- waving his new present around.  "Lose something?  Come and get it!" he gloats.  "Put her in the car!"

Diana beginning to understand what normal woman life is like

Now the camera zooms out again.  We see that the first rustler has Diana in his grip.  She struggles mightily against him, twisting her body, baring her teeth, stepping around, but to no avail.  And then the second rustler says it all, "It's like what you said, Walt!  Without her magic belt, she's just another woman!"  Though Wonder Woman makes a real effort to fight back, she is fairly easily turned around and jammed into the backseat of the car.  Quickly, the rustlers toss away the belt and lasso, jump in the car and drive away.  As they speed off, we can see our heroine's tiara in the back seat bouncing around, suggesting she is still struggling to break free.

Manhandling the likes of which our heroine rarely sees

This is a special sequence, one that demands to be watched again and again for all its little nuances.  The most important thing to me, of course, is the way Lynda Carter reacts.  She is absolutely perfect here.  Just look at the way her face and body language show her shifting mood.  When she's first attacked, she is as you'd expect: confident.  She's clearly been taken off guard by these unknown foes, but there's no suggestion in the way she gets ready to fight that she's at all worried about being defeated.  Why should she be... She has superpowers.  What she doesn't have, of course, is the knowledge that these seemingly easy-to-beat rustlers know what the source of her superpowers is.  Hence, the next shift in mood.  When Wonder Woman's belt is ripped off (and really, dramatically RIPPED... this sort of thing doesn't even happen in "Fausta"), there is an immediate look of shock.  She knows what has happened, and what it means for her super abilities.  The "o" face she makes during the act itself might even be unique to the series: I don't know if ever Wonder Woman has been caught so helpless, at least in a state of complete consciousness.

That helpless face is not very heroic, though, so it changes, once again.  The look Wonder Woman gives her attackers now is one of defiance, of hatred.  This changes again, subtly, as she looks down and tries her hardest to break free of the rustlers' grip.  This look of intense focus is so nice when contrasted with her utter inability to do ANYTHING about her fate.

That's one happy rustler

The speed and intensity of this brief encounter is also interesting to me.  It seems like as soon as the rustlers figure out about Wonder Woman's belt, they're off to go get her.  They show no hesitation it all in their approach, and once they've got Wonder Woman off her horse, their precision in snatching the belt and then putting her in the car is ruthless.  The poor lady hardly has a chance here: she's outnumbered and out-of-her-element, made to look even, gasp, slow against the dead-on focus of her foes.

Basically, this scene shows Wonder Woman losing a fight, and badly.  By the end of it, she's not even a superheroine: just another woman.  There are many sequences where Diana is put in a trap-- she's gassed by the Baroness, and Fausta'ed by Fausta-- and a few where superior strength or numbers are able to temporarily subdue her-- Gargantua bearhugs her real good, and the Skrill even gets a chance to SLAP HER across the face-- but this might be the only time in the show where Wonder Woman is approached by baddies and just straight-up defeated.

The "rustler plan" for defeating Wonder Woman simple but effective.  Make it seem like you don't know anything about her powers.  Then, ambush her and surround her.  Once you're close enough, go straight for the belt... Which apparently is fastened with velcro and quite easy to pull off.

In her jail cell / Fighting not so well

This epic capture sequence is followed by even more humiliation for our now powerless heroine.  The rustlers drive her to a ghost town, pull her out of the car-- she's still struggling-- and together they drag her into an abandoned jail.  "You are a regular spitfire!" They laugh, tossing her in a cell.  The camera rests on Diana's distressed face.  "The jail cells [in ghost towns] always keep working," the rustler grins, and the two dash away.  At this point, Wonder Woman goes to the bars and attempts to bend them.  Nothing happens.  The hopelessness of her situation is brought home extra hard when she looks down at her waist, sees no belt, and holds her hand at her stomach, probably queasy with fear.

Welp.  This sucks.

I can see some complaining about this part.  And you do wonder why these rustlers, so skilled when it comes to capturing America's greatest heroine, decide it's best to just LEAVE HER in the jail cell of a ghost town.  But we can't have it all.  I think the shot of Diana feeling her unbelted waist is worth whatever opportunities the screenwriters might have blown.

That's pretty much it.  The kids come save the day.  Wonder Woman gets her belt back and then beats up the rustlers real good.  You have to think that this encounter will stick with our heroine, though.  On one seemingly normal summers' day in Texas, a few middle-aged nothings were able to make her completely helpless.  No mean feat.

This episode gets a 9/10.

INTRO: Why Wonder Woman?

If you're a fan of superheroine peril, then Wonder Woman is your SHOW.

Simply put, it's the one time in the history of mainstream entertainment (as far as I know), when everything came together.  A beautiful woman playing a sexy superheroine was knocked out, tied up, or put in peril in practically every other episode... And it happened on broadcast television.

There is an almost shameless eroticism in Wonder Woman that is completely lacking in most superheroine films today, even (perhaps especially) those that have been made specifically for the superheroine peril crowd.  Which is kind of odd, because the show was made in the 70's, and seemingly for a broad audience.  By the standards of 2015, the show is spectacularly innocent, with nary a scene of violence or explicit sexuality.  Yet you will rarely find a superheroine peril fan who will not attest to the life changing pleasures of watching Lynda Carter being chloroformed in "Fausta, the Nazi Wonder Woman," or gassed and rendered unconscious in "Baroness Von Gunther."

There's thus a tension in the show.  On one hand, it is an innocuous, often cute saga of a feminist icon beating up Nazis (usually by, err, throwing them).  On the other hand, it is a strange fantasia of deviant sexuality, with wonderfully juicy scenes of bondage, humiliation, de-powerment, and struggle-- of a superheroine being put in peril.

I think it's this very opposition which gives the show its thrills-- a sort of excitement that could never be captured by a producer making stuff exclusively for the peril set.  You get a little tingle of surprise watching "Wonder Woman"... A weird sense that something dangerous is really happening.  The show was designed to show a superheroine being super: so how come she is so often made, well, not super?  Was there something about Lynda that just FORCED writers to put her in perilous situations?  Wonder Woman can lift cars.  Wonder Woman can beat up men.  Wonder Woman can deflect bullets.  So how come Wonder Woman can be rendered powerless so easily?

Fight fans may scoff.  And it's true that she was never "beaten up."  But that was mainly because, at a certain point, beating up the poor lady would be pointless.  When Wonder Woman is beltless, or under the spell of chloroform, she is, as pointed out in "The Bushwackers," only as strong as a normal woman.  On TV in the 70s, this means she's pretty damn weak.  Therefore, when Wonder Woman is defeated on her own show, she's hardly even a superheroine: just a damsel in distress.

It's the transition from mighty hero to damsel... That's the point.  That's why we care.  No other superheroine made that transition quite like Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman.  There were other heroines before her, sure.  Yvonne Craig as Batgirl had her share of obsession-worthy perilous encounters (I'm especially a fan of the classic "Cat's Whiskers").  But Batgirl was always just that-- a girl, and a knockoff of another hero-- so when she was defeated, it never quite registered the same way as "Fausta."  (At least for one person...)

Since Wonder Woman, there hasn't been anything quite like it.  The closest superheroine peril fans ever came to a mainstream show of its caliber was "Black Scorpion," which was definitely heavy on sexy knockouts, and placed a emphasis on the heroine losing in combat that "Wonder Woman" could never had.  But that show really only pretended at the kind of campy, perilous delights that "Wonder Woman" reveled in.  I mean, it didn't even have chloroform, for crying out loud!

This blog will be dedicated to reviewing the most perilous Wonder Woman episodes.  If I can captured in words at all the experience of watching Lynda being tied up, I will count it as a success.  If not, well, you know what to do.