YEAR 1965: VARLA

As I said in my review of FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, Russ Meyer's formidable film about three go-go dancers involved in murder resists easy summation. The same applies to the film's foremost star, Varla. In a technical sense, Varla, Billie and Rosie form an ensemble of eccentric characters, but Varla is the one that has become immortal in pop culture.

There had been, as this blog has detailed in depth, many female characters who demonstrated facility with the martial arts, though admittedly the cinematic medium doesn't have a very strong showing in this department. Varla, however, is something beyond characters like Nyoka the Jungle Girl. While Nyoka might occasionally best a male opponent, the factor of her lesser degree of strength always made her victories a little forced.

Varla, however, has something different: karate. It's important to remember that even in 1965, karate was a relatively new idea to Westerners. Though Meyer's film doesn't expatiate on the dynamics behind the martial art, it takes on a meaning in his film that it doesn't have in the spy-films: karate is an equalizer for the female.  

Varla only has two female-versus-male fights in PUSSYCAT. Today a martial female besting a grown man means nothing, but in 1965, it was a rare beast. Significantly, Varla never punches her male opponents, and only rarely kicks them. The karate chop is her signature move, and it serves her in the same way that a punch serves a male fighter. I don't know if Meyer was aware of the theory behind the karate discipline-- that in some traditions practitioners allegedly "hardened" their hands so that they would possess greater striking power. But I tend to think that this idea was in the public mind at the time, supported by dozens of exhibitions in which practitioners chopped through wood or stone objects with the edges of their hands.

Varla then is a contradiction in terms. Her mammoth mammaries, like those of her co-stars, code her as "soft," yet her hands, her legs and to some extent her handling of a car code her as "hard."

Varla is not a deep character, but the script is smarter about her than she is. Though her 'take-no-prisoners" attitude is admired, it's obvious that she's also a cheat and something of a hypocrite (she rails against the Old Man for having used his son for murder and procurement, when Varla herself has involved her followers in acts of murder and attempted robbery). It's unlikely that she could have been played adequately by anyone but Tura Satana, who possessed both real martial arts skills and experience as an exotic dancer. Varla isn't precisely the whole show in FASTER PUSSYCAT-- but she is the show-stopper.

YEAR 1965: HONEY WEST

While the Honey West novels are just tolerable time-killers, the short-lived 1965-66 teleseries remains a big step forward for shows featuring female protagonists. While this version of Honey was given a tough male companion in the form of Sam Bolt, he never hogged all the action as did the male companions of female serial-heroines like Nyoka. In all thirty episodes of the one-season series, Honey was invariably seen battling both male and female opponents with her masterful judo skills.
The scripts were light entertainment, but for all that much sprightlier than the BURKE'S LAW series on which ABC's version of the lady detective made her debut, as noted in detail here.

Perhaps the wittiest episode of the series was one entitled "The Fun-Fun Killer," in which Honey faced off against a bulletproof killer robot. And while to be sure, this robot turned out to be a human making a mechanical masquerade, I think it likely that the episode's scripters just might have remembered actress Anne Francis' prior encounter with a far more famous-- and genuine-- mechanical man.

YEAR 1965: WONDER GIRL

As I noted in my essay on the first Wonder Girl, for some time I regarded the earlier character as one with the character who was essentially born in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #60 in 1965.  But even though Bob Haney's script initially kept some continuity with the character from the WONDER WOMAN comic, any commonality was soon forgotten by both the writer and the readers of the TEEN TITANS feature.

In Haney's TITANS, Wonder Girl became her own character, strong and sassy, rather than a reflection of "Wonder Woman as a girl." Because this character was so dynamic, I suspect that few if any fans objected to the retconning in TEEN TITANS #22, where this Wonder Girl was revealed to be a mortal girl from man's world, who was taken in by Wonder Woman's Amazon sisters. given a boost from a miracle-making "purple ray" so that she too became a souped-up Amazon living on Paradise Isle. She also began using the everyday name "Donna Troy" as a salute to her mentor Princess Diana (the one with the lasso and the bracelets, that is). I guess "Troy" was chosen because it had a vaguely Greek-ish sound to it.

The second Wonder Girl's fame remained marginal in both the 1960s TEEN TITANS and a second iteration of it in the 1970s, though she made it into an animated TV series before Wonder Woman did, thanks to the Titans being adapted for segments of THE SUPERMAN/AQUAMAN ADVENTURE HOUR. However, thanks to her appearances in the 1980s series THE NEW TEEN TITANS, Wonder Girl's finally became a fan-favorite, thanks to her artistic depiction by George Perez and her characterization by Marv Wolfman, who had created her back-story in the 1960s story.

Sadly, due to the revisions of Wonder Woman series, the retcon-origin was no longer viable, since it depended on Wonder Woman and Paradise Isle having been known quantities in that narrative. After that, the poor girl was never the same. Over the ensuing years Wonder Girl would receive a dizzying number of reboots and retcons, to the point that I for one neither know nor care what she is these days-- much like another unfortunate victim of promiscuous rebootery, Marvel's hero The Falcon.

But when she was good-- she was very, very good.

YEAR 1965: EMMA PEEL

Though Cathy Gale hit the airwaves first, Emma Peel became the femme formidable most associated with the AVENGERS franchise. 

In the Cathy Gale entry, I wondered whether or not Honor Blackman's take on the tough-girl character might have been just as popular as Diana Rigg's.  On consideration I would say no, in that Blackman had conceived her character largely as a no-nonsense sort of character, for all that she was an amateur.  Rigg, playing the same kind of amateur spy caught in John Steed's weird world of espionage, projects the "aint' foolin' around" air whenever necessary, but in calmer moments puts across a charming insouciance, such as one sees in the shot above, taken from the iconic AVENGERS theme/opening.

More than a few female fans have cited Emma Peel as one of their earliest images of a "strong heroine," not least because of the character's penchant for doling out karate chops and judo throws.  She did on occasion lose a fight, but no more than her partner Steed did.  As series-fans know, Rigg and Patrick Macnee managed to keep viewer interest high by injecting a frequent "are they or aren't they" chemistry, one that fortunately never becomes sappy as in similar American attempts.

Two years later, Emma Peel appeared in one of five paperbacks.  This Emma tended to be somewhat more sardonic and ruthless than the light-hearted TV version..

Three years later-- by which time Diana Rigg had left the AVENGERS teleseries-- Emma Peel made her first comic book appearance from the company Gold Key.  Because of a certain heavyweight competitor, the one issue published was not titled THE AVENGERS but rather JOHN STEED AND EMMA PEEL.