Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Wonder Woman 2.21: The Girl From Ilandia


Airdate: 4/7/78

While sailing. a newspaper publisher, Simon Penrose, finds a nearly-drowned girl floating in the water; he takes her to hospital but can find no information on her. Summoning the information-gathering services of the IADC, he gets help from Diana – as Wonder Woman she finds that the girl has superhuman powers she gets from wearing special jewelry, and is from an extra-dimensional world known as Ilandia, to where she desperately wants to return. Unfortunately, only an evil physicist named Bleaker has the power to enable this, and he’s after her for her psychic powers so he can, you guessed it, control the world. WW steps in to foil all intended villainous plottings, but Bleaker makes a fast submarine escape and dashes the hopes of Tina’s (the girl’s) homecoming; instead she stays to live in the human world with Simon.

Intriguing episode cobbled together from then-popular pop cultural elements:Tina looks like a dead ringer for Nellie Oleson, her dog looks like Benji and the two remind one of Annie and Sandy from the huge Broadway show, and M*A*S*H supporting player Alan Arbus is an eerily evil baddie (they must be on a M*A*S*H kick, coming after last week’s Gary Burghoff episode). The idea of a super-powerful preteen with powers to match WW’s is always a crowd pleaser – WW did it multiple times, as did The Bionic Woman in the Helen Hunt episode. The WW/Tina face-off scene is fun, too – the girl even gets to use the same sound effects!


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