dmessmer

Have you seen Briget Regan act? She would be a terrible choice. Great at cosplaying Wonder Woman at cons, but not at playing her in a film.

Haven't we had this discussion a million times already? Do Batman and Superman get this much discussion over what they wear?

@scorpio_cassadine: We have a winner! That was definitely the best one.

How about this:

I just hope that this doesn't mean they're going to go the "Black Widow" route and keep putting her in films without giving her her own solo film. But, given that they didn't cast a bankable star, it seems possible that that's what they plan to do.

If I'm understanding all the legal stuff you guys brought up, would it then be possible that the reason there hasn't been a Wonder Woman movie is that it makes it a bigger financial risk for WB since they have to pay the family part of the profits. I imagine WB would provide all of the money to make the film, then the ticket sales would first go towards paying that back, then they would split the profits with the Marston family? That might not be a wise investment on their part. Just a thought.

@scorpio_cassadine: It's ironic that you lament the anti-feminist message that casting such a thin actress sends, then make such a misogynistic statement about her having to exchange sexual favors for the role.

The truth is, at this point we know very little about Gal Gadot as an actress - the FF movies aren't really the right forum for anyone to show off their acting chops. So until we know more (i.e. see the movie), there's no way to know one way or the other. Maybe she'll suck. Or maybe she'll knock it out of the park. Or maybe she'll pull a Henry Cavill and do a perfectly fine but unexceptional job.

@jphulk26: I agree with most of what you say. My emphasis on Greek Mythology was in response to @dshipp17 suggesting mythology wasn't important at all. But by no means to I want to suggest that that is ALL that matters. It is, though, one of the central elements, and Marston worked with it in interesting ways (as you've described) and blended it (I would argue inextricably) with other elements that make the character so interesting.

The one thing I wouldn't completely agree with is the importance of Steve Trevor. As you rightly pointed out, feminism was important to Marston, but by today's standards it's pretty hard to fit his version of Steve (and Steve's role in Wonder Woman's origin) into an effective model of feminism. That's not to say it can't be done (the animated film did a decent enough job), but the idea that Wonder Woman leaves the island because she immediately falls in love with the first man she sees, in today's society, works against the feminist goals of the character.

@clarkbruce: Agreed. The mythology is a big part of what makes Wonder Woman interesting, and should be a prominent feature. But one of the things that makes her more interesting to me than someone like Thor is that she doesn't always have to be tied to mythology - there is a lot of potential for other kinds of stories as well. 75/25 feels about right to me.

It would also be cool to see a bit more of the consequences of her mythological roots in a non-exclusively mythological setting. One of the real strengths of the Perez run was that, while mythology was always present, a lot of the stories focused on Wonder Woman's attempts to fit into the world and impact the world with the mythology looming but not always central to the story. That's what's bothering me a bit in Azzarello's run - it's just her vs. gods, there is no sense of her responsibility to humanity or the world at large.

@dshipp17: I'm not going to continue this argument because I think it has gone on long enough. But I do want to briefly use it as an example of why I claimed that you have an obsessive need to be right no matter what, and am doing so in the name of advice rather than argumentation.

Were you to simply do what a reasonable/effective debater does and clarify and qualify your claims, we probably could have settled this a long time ago, but you always (not just in this debate, but elsewhere) cling to every claim that you make no matter how wrong some of them prove to be.

It reminds me of the lengths that astronomers used to go to to try to understand the movement of planets through the sky. Thinking that the earth was the center of the universe they came up with extremely elaborate formulas to explain the patterns they witnessed. Then, Galileo came along and figured out that the sun is the center of the solar system and all of a sudden everything fell into place pretty easily.

Had you simply admitted that you overstated your case a bit and qualified your claim to say that you were only suggesting that it is harder to distance Thor from mythology than it is Wonder Woman I would have agreed. Instead, you've clung to your claim that mythology isn't really important to Wonder Woman at all, which is absurd.

So you claim that Marston's use of mythology is just a "euphemism," and that bondage is more important (really?), or you cite comics that few read and that have done little to have a lasting impact on the character (Messner Loebs as compared to Rucka, Perez, and Simone). Now you're parsing syntax to claim that Mercury isn't associated with Roman mythology (um, the planet is named Mercury because it, like the Roman God, is the fastest moving - any decent astronomer would know that and thus would still associate it with mythology, and most people know that the planets are named for Roman gods, so the association is still there regardless). In other words, you're still clinging to the idea that the earth is at the center of the universe and having to do a lot of work to keep that idea in tact.

All of this is to say, it's fine to admit that you're wrong sometimes, and you'd probably get a lot more respect on these forums if you realized that.