ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

It's surprising that ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL acquired enough of a cachet to get serialized on various streaming services. Like most of the live-action shows on the portmanteau KROFFT SUPERSHOW of the mid-1970s, each individual episode was about 12 minutes, not leaving much time to get across anything in the way of charm or style. All of the ELECTRA episodes were comprised of a Part One and Part Two of the same continued story, and each Part One was something of a cliffhanger to lead into Part Two, roughly along the same lines of '66 BATMAN. I assume that ELECTRA's nodding similarities to the camp teleseries are the only reasons it's remembered by aficinados of junky TV shows, while nearly no one remembers "Doctor Shrinker" or "Wonderbug."

Cartoon producers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears are credited with creating the series, which means they probably set the general parameters: no backgrounds for the titular crimefighters (Deidre Hall as "Batman" and Judy Strangis as "Robin"), very minor action with inexpensive effects, and a general day-glo look to the show. I don't get the impression that any particular writer or director had much creative input, though it's of minor interest that one of the writers, Glen Strangis, was Judy Strangis' nephew.

Though the heroes get no backstory, the two superheroines have a single aide, Frank Heflin (Norman Alden), who is the girls' technical expert. This contingency suggests that he may have created all of their tech-- their HQ the "Electrabase" beneath a common suburban house, a "Crimescrope" computer, an "Electracar," and the primary weapons of the duo: "Electracoms," bulky wrist-attached devices from which they can project various forces. Frank also stays in contact with the heroines by radios in their coms, occasionally rendering remote assistance through computer programs. Nothing is said about how the two young women-- known only as "Lori" and "Judy"-- came to know each other, though both are apparently employed as newspaper reporters, meaning that the show's creators dipped into "Superman" territory as well.

So each two-part story has a villain appear (always with just one hench-person with whom to trade lines) and then unleash some threat, to which the electra-adventurers respond. The heroines eschew any physical action whatever, always using their coms to tap various energy-powers to defeat their enemies. The heroes speak in the same "gosh-wow" manner as their West-and-Ward models, except that nothing they say is even slightly clever. Not only are there very few episodes, a couple of the villains make repeat appearances, so the duo has an extremely small rogues' gallery. Oddly from my POV, the two repeat-evildoers include the best acting (Peter Mark Richman as "The Pharaoh") and the worst (Michael Constantine, with whom Strangis worked on ROOM 222, as "The Sorcerer.")

The show's best asset was that Hall and Strangis looked very sexy in their spandex outfits, and we get a fair number of upshot camera angles as they run from place to place in their shorts and tights. By an interesting pop cultural coincidence, 1976 also brought forth another camp-pretender, THE MONSTER SQUAD, which shared the same day-glo aesthetic and gosh-wow dialogue. Its scripts weren't really any better than those of ELECTRA, but being longer they allowed for a little more wackiness-- though I wouldn't want to be stranded on the proverbial desert island with either show as one of my viewing options.