This is no way to celebrate a cult classic. Not even close.
Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, which marked its 40th anniversary last year with a YouTube-fueled reboot (which we'll look at another time), marked 25 years in 2001 with a failed pilot commissioned by the WB Network, which apparently was looking for a slice of the audience of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which, by this point, had moved to UPN.
Markie Post (ex-Night Court) took over the role of Electra Woman, originated by Diedre Hall (Days of Our Lives) in 1976. Now, Hall was still working at the time, and I am not sure if she'd been approached about this project, but it'd been years since Post had anything significant on the air in the post-Night Court years. EW is now a bitter, alcoholic divorcee, whose ex-husband left her for the original Dyna Girl. A young girl whom EW had rescued years earlier is now all grown up, and locates EW, ultimately becoming the new Dyna Girl (Anne Stedman).
I think you'll see in the video just why it didn't make it, and that it would take 15 more years before a serious reboot was mounted.
So the new Dyna Girl has a little Tim Drake to her (Batman fans will get the reference), in that she deduced EW's true ID. While the original series was itself a parody of Batman and a homage at the same time, what with the diagonal camera angles, it earned its own place in pop culture in history (the original theme song is used in the pilot). I think you can see why Diedre Hall turned down the project if offered.
Satire & parody are done best if done with the proper respect to the source material. This falls short.
Rating: D.
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