From Screen to Page: Wonder Woman ’77 Meets The Bionic Woman

From Screen to Page: Wonder Woman ’77 Meets The Bionic Woman by Jerry Whitworth

Announced a week before the San Diego Comic-Con, DC Comics and Dynamite Entertainment are teaming up to produce Wonder Woman ’77 Meets The Bionic Woman in 2017. Spinning out of DC’s Wonder Woman ’77 and Dynamite’s The Bionic Woman: Season Four, Wonder Woman superfan and writer Andy Mangels (founder of Women Of Wonder) will pair arguably the two biggest female TV action stars of the 1970s together for the first time. Both women super-powered secret agents with Diana Prince an operative of the Inter-Agency Defense Command (IADC) and Jaime Sommers of the Office of Scientific Information (OSI), Prince transforms into the powerful superheroine Wonder Woman (princess of the Amazons) while Sommers is a mighty cyborg following a skydiving accident. Both series shared a number of similarities as both women often went undercover and had to face threats such as enemy agents/saboteurs, aliens, impostors, robots, psionics, and more. At times it could have even felt as though they faced the very same foes such as the case with actor René Auberjonois who portrayed thieves James Kimball on Wonder Woman and Pierre Lambert on Bionic Woman.

At this time, the plot of the series is virtually unknown. Although, where Andy Mangels is viewed as one of the foremost experts on the Wonder Woman television series, its likely more ground of the TV show maybe covered in the series than has been thus far in Wonder Woman ’77 (which has mostly adapted elements from the comics such as incorporating Wonder Woman and Batman foes or introduced new characters such as Celsia). As such, chances are supporting characters like Steve Trevor, Joe Atkinson, and Eve from Wonder Woman and Oscar Goldman, Dr. Rudy Wells, and Maximillian from Bionic Woman could emerge (ideally, even Drusilla and Steve Austin could put in an appearance). Further, in a series so built around technology, something like Ira the IRAC computer could make for an interesting plot point (perhaps with a throwdown against fellow supercomputer ALEX7000). While Jaime Sommers faced many threats within her series, perhaps her greatest came in the Fembots (which were paid homage later in the Austin Powers films), female robots that could replace humans and were more powerful than cyborgs. Wonder Woman faced a similar threat in Orlich Hoffman and his robot duplicates. Regardless, the success of this series could mean future crossovers such as the series of ones Batman ’66 currently enjoys. Perhaps even a Batman ’66/Wonder Woman ’77 series could finally occur as scribe Marc Andreyko has pushed toward since he began writing Wonder Woman ’77.