50 Years Ago, Lynda Carter Became TV’s Wonder Woman — But She Wasn’t the Only One Who Tried

Though she’s one of the most beloved superheroes of all time, it turns out that getting Wonder Woman to live-action television was a super undertaking, and Lynda Carter was the only actor who got to brandish the golden lasso on a regular basis.

Carter’s run as the Amazonian princess began 50 years ago, on November 7, 1975, as ABC aired the TV movie The New Original Wonder Woman — which was also a pilot for the TV show that became Wonder Woman,airing three seasons between ABC and CBS from 1976 to 1979.

Here are more details on the Wonder Women you saw on TV — and those you didn’t.

Who Played Wonder Woman Before Lynda Carter?

A year after launching 1966’s Batman TV series on ABC, Hollywood producer William Dozier filmed a “super-campy” screen test for a Wonder Woman show titled Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince?, as Jill Lepore reported in The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

And in 2017, nearly 50 years after Dozier’s efforts, The Hollywood Reporter unearthed more details about the project, including YouTube footage of that low-budget, cringe-worthy screen test. Ellie Wood Walker (The New Interns) played the lead, while Maudie Prickett (Hazel) played Diana’s mother. “How do you expect to get a husband flying around all the time?” the mother says at one point.

Unsurprisingly, the project never made it to the small screen.

Cathy Lee Crosby played Wonder Woman in a 1974 TV movie

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A year and a half before Carter’s Wonder Woman debuted, ABC and Warner Bros. teamed up on another take on the character. Wonder Woman, a 75-minute pilot for a prospective series, aired as a TV movie on ABC on March 12, 1974. In that version, Cathy Lee Crosby (That’s Incredible!) played the title character, while Kaz Garas (Strange Report) played sidekick Steve Trevor, and Ricardo Montalbán(Fantasy Island) played the villainous Abner Smith.

As Tim Hanley wrote in Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine, Crosby’s version of the character didn’t much resemble the Wonder Woman fans knew from the comic books. As she tracked down a stolen list of undercover agents, she wore a jumpsuit instead of a bodysuit and toted a grappling line instead of a lasso.

When ABC tried to mount another Wonder Woman TV show the following year, a spokesperson for the network didn’t mince his words about the 1974 version. “They made the dumbest mistake in the world; they tried to update it,” that network rep told The Washington Post.

Another source at ABC — who asked to be anonymous while offering a less damning critique — said the 1974 effort was played too straight and that the re-do would be much more comedic.

Why Lynda Carter Became the Definitive Wonder Woman

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The New Original Wonder Woman came along as the push for women’s liberation was sweeping the United States, and the show ended up toeing a fine line between female empowerment and the male gaze. A 1975 column about the TV movie by UPI’s Vernon Scott begins, lecherously, with speculation that Carter didn’t wear a bra to his interview with her. (“Her bosom, like the rest of Lynda, challenges physical perfection,” Scott wrote.)

And for some viewers, Carter’s Wonder Woman was a step in the wrong direction. “To radical feminists, it looked like a sellout of everything the feminist movement stood for,” Lepore wrote.

But Carter saw it differently. “I think of Wonder Woman as a real champion of the feminists,” she explained to Scott. “She’s stronger than any man physically. She is fast, flies in an invisible plane, and can force anyone to tell the truth. Wonder Woman is good for the feminine ego because she is beautiful, strong, and intelligent. She’s not competitive with other women. She isn’t a threat to them. I think she gives women a better self-image.”

Adrianne Palicki fulfilled a “huge dream” when she played Wonder Woman in a 2011 pilot

In 2011, Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights) starred in another Wonder Woman pilot, one from David E. Kelley. In that story, Palicki played three identities in one: Wonder Woman, the vigilante superhero, Diana Themyscira, the entrepreneur behind the corporate Wonder Woman brand, and Diana Prince, the romance-reading cat lady keeping a low profile out of the spotlight. Joining Palicki in the pilot were costars Cary Elwes, Elizabeth Hurley, Tracie Thoms, Justin Bruening, and Pedro Pascal.

“It was honestly the scariest thing ever and the best thing ever at the time,” the would-be Wonder Woman told Entertainment Weekly in 2020. “Getting to wear that outfit was just a huge dream.”

Unfortunately, NBC passed on the project, leaving Carter as television’s definitive version of the superhero. “It was devastating when [the 2011 pilot] didn’t go. It was so big,” Palicki said. “I feel like maybe if it had been [made] one or two more years [later], it would’ve been a shoo-in.”