***My 2027 Badass Goddesses calendar is hot off the press and on sale now!***
I originally posted about this in 2017, but it feels like a good time to revisit it. Bear in mind, this was before I saw the much-maligned sequel or the terrible weirdness that was Batman v. Superman.
So, I saw Wonder Woman last week... in a theater, even! If you haven’t seen it yet, what are you waiting for? Go now! You don’t want to reinforce the Hollywood investors’ assumptions that only garbage movies catering to the international 12-year old boy market are financially viable, do you?
(Which is not to suggest that those international 12-year old boys wouldn’t like Wonder Woman because, with the exception of a few moments here or there, I’m sure they would.)
I haven’t read many reviews, but I remember when it first came out how all my podcasts were raving about it (your Pop Culture Happy Hours, your Slate Culture Gabfests, &cetera).
Not that their ravings have always been a reliable predictor of what I’ll enjoy, mind you, since they’ve also been known to spend entire episodes raving about “Girls” and Taylor Swift’s latest album or awards show appearance, meanwhile, not once in three seasons mentioning “Hannibal.”
And then there was one female critic who spent 15 minutes explaining how she just didn’t get all the hype over “Mad Max Fury Road” <sigh> but they were right about Wonder Woman, which is every bit as awesome as they said it was.
So, what’s it about? Basically, it’s Wonder Woman vs. World War I… W(cubed). The second World War has been done to death—and ever since Tarantino re-killed Hitler, there hasn’t been the same level of excitement for stories about, well... historical Nazis anyway. [Note from 2026: Oof… still relevant! LOL]
Everybody knows you can’t put superheroes in tights inside the death camps or under the atom bomb. Michael Bay ruined Pearl Harbor for at least a generation and D-Day is all Spielberg’s, for the opposite reason.
Even the iconic VJ-Day kiss in Times Square, 70 years later, is considered tantamount to sexual assault. But the first world war—the Great War—is cinematically untrammeled territory, ripe for a new generation to rebrand in their own image. The poison gas! The end of empires! No man’s land! Trench warfare... and those magnificent trench coats!
While we’re jumping on bandwagons, can we talk about Robin Wright for a minute? She was always too perfect a specimen to be considered a role model but then, somewhere around the middle of the 3rd season of House of Cards, she began to ever-so-subtly and tastefully eclipse Kevin Spacey as the star.
Like they used to do on Fame Tracker (RIP), if this was Robin Wright’s “fame audit,” it might look like this:
Previous level of fame: Sharon Stone
Current level of fame: Uma Thurman
Deserved level of fame: Angelina Jolie (assuming of course, that anyone deserves such a thing).
We always knew Robin Wright could do the “imperious ice queen” thing until the cows come home, but now—I mean, who wouldn’t want to watch her do more of this?
One reviewer memorably compared the improbably perfect casting of Gal Gadot to that of Christopher Reeve in the 1970s as the big screen’s first—and, to this day, best—Superman, and that sounds about right to me.
A friend of mine commented after seeing Wonder Woman that female role models have come a long way since we were kids. It’s hard to disagree that we’ve come a long way, but I would argue we didn’t have it so bad. The seventies get a bad rap these days. You would think Generation X was literally raised by wolves and groomed by pedophiles…
But if I may, for a moment, speak for the 70s, not only did they give us our forever-Superman, they gave us our prime time television Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter (who, based on this photo alongside Gal Gadot, may in fact be some sort of immortal goddess).
We also had Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman, all five Charlie’s Angels and, on the big screen we had Carrie Fisher, Sigourney Weaver, Pam Grier, Raquel Welch, Grace Jones, Sandahl Bergman and that’s all before the fitness-obsessed 1980s brought us Jamie Lee Curtis and Brigitte Nielson (you want to talk about immortality? Google either of them right now!). Red Sonja? Supergirl? Firestarter, anyone?
Of course, this is all from my Hollywood-centric perspective. The 60s, 70s and 80s were also the golden age of “wuxia,” a chivalric martial arts genre from Hong Kong, and the era of samurai epics from Japan.
Those genres launched the careers of dozens of amazingly talented female action stars. I couldn’t tell you a single name off the top of my head, but their elegance and badassery in classics like Lady Snowblood and Sister Street Fighter made sitting through my parents’ kung fu, swords & samurai phase in the 80s much more bearable.
Even the Saturday morning cartoon line-up in the 70s featured plenty of female role models for little girls whose Barbie fantasies involved less decorating Dream Homes and more fighting super-villains.
I remember watching Wonder Woman on the SuperFriends but my favorite super heroine was Spider Woman, who had her own short-lived animated series in 1979 (now available on Disney+! I rewatched a few episodes and have to say, it’s not half bad).
Equally short-lived but just as influential on my forming consciousness and sense of badass girlhood were Goldie Gold (1981) and Jana of the Jungle (1978)… If you know you know… just kidding, I’m sure I’ve lost 100% of my audience by now!
My first bathing suit was an homage to Jana, a blonde female Tarzan who befriended the animals and swung on vines in a snazzy strapless scrap of red fabric. Goldie Gold’s lavish lifestyle and Wonder Woman’s invisible jet were just a tad out of reach, but of course I had the Wonder Woman Underoos.
Speaking of women coming a long way, baby, it’s not just the good girl role models who are having a bit of a Renaissance. It’s also the badass female super-villains. Of course I’m talking about the immortal Elektra, the only good thing about Netflix’s new original series, The Defenders, an otherwise aimless and largely pointless mashup of the network’s Marvel properties.
But who cares about the Defenders? Give Elodie Yung her own Elektra series! The others are welcome to drop in for a fight (except for Iron Fist, obviously), and Daredevil is invited to stick around, provided they drop the “no sex” rule (whose shitty idea was that, anyway?).
[Note from 2026: I tried so hard to get into the new reboot of Daredevil, but it’s just painfully boring, even with Vincent D’Onofrio reprising his role as the Kingpin.]
Honestly, the best thing they could do is adapt Frank Miller’s cult classic Elektra: Assassin.
(What’s the different between a classic and a cult classic anyway—is it strictly the size of the audience or can something that’s popular but prohibitively weird call itself a cult classic, like Blue Velvet or Reservoir Dogs?)
Anyway, written by Frank Miller and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz right around the time when both were just entering the pantheon of comic gods, the 1986 Elektra: Assassin mini-series is delirious, disorienting, violent, manic and psychedelic.
Set against a backdrop of political satire, it’s an unhinged tale of government conspiracies, paranoia, weird psychological torture with a dash of BDSM and mythic incest thrown in (well, her name is Elektra...).
It evokes a very specific flavor of 1980s nostalgia; every page drips with sweaty, coke-fuelled, hyper-masculine, end-of-empire criminal excess and technological nihilism. It’s an epic battle of bad against really bad against pure evil, played out on the blood-soaked soil of South America, brought to you by the School of the Americas.
The main character is even a dead-ringer for Pablo Escobar. (I can totally see Sam Rockwell in the part!) Netflix, if you can hear me, “Save Hannibal” is still priority number one but after that, make this happen!
[Note from 2026: I still can’t believe none of the streaming services stepped in to save “Hannibal” RIP but maybe one day AI will be good enough to provide a satisfying ending to all our “cancelled too soon” favorites.]
I saw an excellent meme on Instagram today suggesting an anthology series called “Closure” where every episode would give a fitting end to a beloved cancelled series. Yes, we need this! Maybe I’ll do a whole post about my favorite cancelled shows…
What are your favorite cancelled shows or super heroines? Tell me in the comments…
2027 Badass Goddesses calendar is on sale now!