With “Wonder Woman” still currently reigning supreme at the theaters — $708 million worldwide and counting — now seems like the perfect time to take a look back at the evolution of Diana Prince and her alter-ego through the years with a new video essay from Burger Fiction. Surprisingly comprehensive, the video shows not just the higher profile outings like the Lynda Carter TV series, but also spoofs and lesser-seen iterations, like several TV pilots that weren’t picked up and a variety of the animated depictions of Wonder Woman and the Justice League (including my personal favorite, the Hanna-Barbera show “Super Friends,” where Wonder Woman and Batman got to rub shoulders with crime-solving talking animals).
READ MORE: Forged By The Gods, ‘Wonder Woman’ Is Still Made By Mere Mortals [Review]
To see decades of interpretations shows that Wonder Woman herself hasn’t always changed that much, but the context around her definitely has. Just as with superheroes in general, the tone has shifted from the fun, campy spirit of Saturday morning serials where the crime-fighting was small-scale and light-hearted to the much more somber and serious modern outings where heroes like Wonder Woman have to stare down one apocalypse after the next. Yet despite those changes, much about Wonder Woman has stayed the same, from her lasso and amulets to her general spirit of untarnished idealism.
Wonder Woman as an ideal has always been popular, even if her on-screen depictions haven’t always succeeded, so it’s encouraging that Patty Jenkins’ new “Wonder Woman” seems to have taken the right ingredients from past depictions while adding some new ones to make Gal Gadot’s portrayal a hit. With the financial success of “Wonder Woman” and this fall bringing the rebooted “Justice League,” this certainly isn’t the last we’ve seen of Paradise Island’s most famous daughter. The Amazon princess will continue fighting for peace into the future and as always, it will be fascinating to see if future generations respond to Wonder Woman and what about her they choose to change or maintain.