In the little
flat that I share with Saffy and Amanda, the news that the new Wonder Woman TV
show has been cancelled before the pilot even aired has been greeted by the
kind of anguish you normally get when a child’s ice-cream cone plops to the ground.
“This is ridiculous!” Saffy moaned
the other day. “They make the most stupid shows all the time. Stupid ghost
houses and stupid fairy tales come to life, but they won’t make more of this
kick-ass material? Seriously?” She hit replay on the YouTube clip for the
fifteenth time that morning. It was a leaked montage of highlights from the
show. In another room, Amanda was on her laptop searching for more footage.
The clip is only a couple of minutes
long, but it’s a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. Wonder Woman
leaps over cars. She hurls her magic glowing lasso at the bad guys and pulls
them off their feet. She looks majorly pissed as she hurtling towards another
guy who’s shooting bullets at her which she blocks with her magic bracelets.
There she is in her invisible plane. There she is kicking aside a ten-foot
container with one star-spangled leg.
“She’s always beating up guys!”
Saffy marveled. “I so love this show!”
And overlaying the whole montage is
the Wonder Woman theme song – a fast beat, thumping melodic hook. “Change their
minds and change the world!” Saffy croaked throatily.
“How can this be?” she muttered, hitting the replay
button again. “This has got to be a mistake! Look at this! Look how fabulous
this is?” she said, pointing to the sequence where Wonder Woman glides up
through the air, her long tresses stylishly whipping around her.
When news first broke that Joss
Whedon, the creator of ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’, was making a movie about their
favourite Amazonian princess, Saffy and Amanda thought they’d died and gone to
heaven. And when that project was cancelled, Saffy went out and bought the DVD
of the original Lynda Carter series and watched it with Amanda for a month of
weekends.
“Seriously, can we go out tonight?”
I remember asking as I stood next to the TV. “Watching a 70s show on another
Friday night is really, really sad! Hello?”
On the couch, Saffy and Amanda sat in their PJs,
sharing a box of popcorn. On screen, the bespectacled Diana Prince twirled
prettily and exploded in a flash into Wonder Woman. A quick check that her
golden tiara was on straight, she dashed off to fight the Nazis.
“She is so amazing,” Amanda told
Saffy.
“Oh, totally! I want to be her.
Jason, get out of the way, you’re casting a shadow on the invisible plane.”
The girls perked up slightly when
Hollywood announced it was making a new TV series instead. And just as quickly,
they went into mourning when the pilot was cancelled.
“Why are they toying with our
emotions like this?” Amanda wondered the other day on the crowded train to
work.
“It’s ridiculous,” Saffy agreed.
“It’s like being trapped inside a scene from ‘Truman’! God, why is this train
so crowded? I hate this commute. I hate my job. I want to be a crime fighter.”
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could
just spin around, explode and have changed into any outfit we want?”
Saffy gave the matter some thought.
“I don’t think I’d be spinning for very long. I have so few outfits to wear.
And when we spin into our new outfits, would they be dry-cleaned too?”
“I wish I could deflect bullets with
my magic bracelets, too,” said Amanda, killer corporate lawyer and Harvard
graduate.
“And let me tell you,” Saffy
murmured as she moved her face out of someone’s armpits, “there are a few
people on this train that I wouldn’t mind magic lasso-ing down a steep flight
of steps. Don’t they shower in the morning?”
Amanda says her obsession with
Wonder Woman is all about empowerment. That, and a smoking hot outfit and
glittering accessories. “She doesn’t take crap from anyone,” she said recently.
She added, with a rueful smile: “And if anyone tries, she’ll kick their ass!
Such a great role model!”
“Aiyah, you or-ready like that,
what!” Sharyn said, owlishly. “You don’t take crap from udder people oh-so. All
the men in the office run away from you. Singapore men scared of power women
like you, you know. Why you think you are still single?”
Amanda blinked. Clearly, she’d not
looked her life in that light before. This evening, she replaced the Wonder Woman
DVD, settled into the couch and proceeded to weep her way through ‘Eat Pray
Love’.
“Oh, dear,” Saffy said.
1 comment:
wait, Amanda takes the train?
Post a Comment