Costume Party

And what costume shall the poor girl wear
To all tomorrow’s parties
"All Tomorrow’s Parties" by Lou Reed





We're going to talk about what the heck happened to the wardrobe of certain superheroes when they made the transition from the pages of a comic book (or "graphic novel" if you like to talk loudly in comic book stores) to the screen in the moviehouse. We will be especially looking at the female form. By its very nature, then, the theme of this piece becomes a guilty pleasure…


…a guilty pleasure like the memory of Reba McEntire in her red dress at the 1993 CMA Awards…





…or Slip Mahoney calling out "Routine 9!" (or any other number) for a round of fisticuffs in a "Bowery Boys" escapade…



…or an old lingerie pose by former teen pop star Tiffany before she became the plump hausfrau in the SyFy Channel flicks "Mega Piranha" and "Mega Python vs. Gatoroid"…



…or a Three Stooges pie fight…



But first, some historical digression. There have been, of course, literary heroes who have assumed masked alter egos, including the Scarlet Pimpernel and Scaramouche. Poking through the mists of ancient tales, we find Odysseus, the mastermind behind the Trojan Horse, masquerading as an elderly hermit before wreaking grim vengeance on his wife’s predatory suitors, possibly making him the first superhero in disguise.





Radio dramas featured masked or costumed crime fighters such as The Shadow and the Lone Ranger. The tradition of superheroes wearing masks and formfitting unitards began when Lee Falk, the creator of Mandrake the Magician, introduced The Phantom on February 17, 1936.

In November of that year, The Clock debuted as a masked hero in a three-piece suit.

Superman first appeared in the first edition of Action Comics in 1938, earning his own self-titled comic book in June 1939. Batman debuted in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics, later popularly known simply as DC Comics. (Trivia interjection: The notion that early comic book superheroes wore costumes of spandex predates the 1959 invention of the synthetic fiber by more than two decades; even more trivial interjection: spandex is an anagram of "expands.")



The majority of superheroes to follow would not wear capes - a garment most closely associated with the two most widely recognized figures just mentioned - in no small part due to the diligence of watchful legal eagles eager to protect the Man of Steel from copyright infringement. Such was the litigious fate of Captain Marvel, who was forced to hang up his cape in 1953. (Captain Marvel made an unceremonious comeback two decades later.)







When it came to bringing Superman to the screen, not much has been lost in the translation, from the animation of the storied Fleischer Studios in the 1940s…






…to the 1948 motion picture serials starring Kirk Alyn…




…to George Reeves’ endearing portrayal in the ‘50s television series "The Adventures of Superman"…




…to Christopher Reeve’s starring role in four "Superman" films from 1978 to 1987…





…to Brandon Routh in "Superman Returns" (2006)…






The same can be said for the early depictions of Batman...

...beginning with the 1943 serial "Batman," starring Lewis Wilson…

…continuing with the 1949 serial "Batman and Robin," featuring Robert Lowery…

…and onto the late 1960s series featuring Adam West…

The Batsuit was remodeled from spandex into an armor-like exoskeleton when director Tim Burton reinvented the "Batman" franchise in 1989, starring Michael Keaton, reaching its high-tech refinement as an advanced military-inspired "Nomex survival suit" worn by Christian Bale in "Batman Begins" (2005) and "The Dark Knight" (2008).












The sore thumb sticking out, like Sissy Hankshaw’s gigantic digits in Tom Robbins’ novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, was the unholy inspiration to put nipples on the Batsuit by director Joel Schumacher, who said he got the idea from statues of Greek gods. The otherwise Teflon-talented George Clooney had the misfortune to don the notorious costume in his mercifully singular appearance as the Caped Crusader in "Batman & Robin" (1997).







They even gave nipples to actor Chris O’Donnell as the Boy Wonder, Robin…





Puzzled male viewers everywhere were wondering what happened to the nipples on costar Alicia Silverstone’s costume as Batgirl…








"Batgirl" was actually the name given to a number of separate characters who have appeared in the pages of DC Comics. The original "Bat-Girl" debuted in April 1961 as a Robin-like sidekick for Batwoman.

Batwoman herself was a character created as love interest for Batman, in a shortlived diversion to disprove longheld suspicions that Batman and Robin were gay.

Unquestionably, Yvonne Craig stands out, in more ways than one, as the enduring embodiment of Batgirl, during the final 1967-1968 season of the campy TV series "Batman."



Trained as a ballet dancer, Craig performed as a member of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1950s. She costarred with Elvis Presley in "It Happened at the World’s Fair" and "Kissin’ Cousins" and had a brief but memorable role as a Soviet ballerina in the 1967 spy spoof "In Like Flint," starring James Coburn.





"Star Trek" fans fondly recall her as the green-skinned, dancing slave in the third season episode "Whom Gods Destroy."



On "Batman," her true identity - librarian Barbara Gordon, daughter of Gotham City Police Commissioner Gordon - was known only to Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred. Years later, Craig recalled, "They were adding Batgirl to the show because they needed someone who could encourage an over-40 male audience and a prepubescent female audience. That’s the real reason they hired me!"







Making her first appearance in the spring of 1940, Catwoman was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane as a villain who shares a complicated love-hate relationship with Batman. She took an unexpected vacation from comic book pages in September 1954, due to pressure from the newly developed Comics Code Authority, which wasted no time in establishing itself as the reigning censorship arm for the U.S. comic book trade.



Catwoman returned in 1966, and since the 1990s has been drawn as more of a complex antihero than an antagonist. (As for the Comics Code Authority, the last publisher severed their connection in 2011, rendering the Code defunct.)


This publication cover illustrates the several incarnations of Catwoman…






Statuesque (5’ 11") dancer Julie Newmar made a stunning three-minute appearance as Stupefyin’ Jones in the 1956 Broadway musical "Lil Abner," a role she repeated in the 1959 film version.



Newmar, who in the 1970s received U.S. patents for designing pantyhose (named "Nudemar") and a brassiere, created her own costume as Catwoman during the first two seasons of the "Batman" TV series. She chose to place the belt at the hips instead of the waist to accentuate her eye-catching hourglass figure. The costume is on display at the Smithsonian Institution.






For the 1966 theatrical movie "Batman," starring Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin, Lee Meriwether replaced Newmar as Catwoman. Meriwether, a former Miss America (1955) who would enjoy small screen success as Buddy Ebsen’s crime-solving daughter-in-law in the ‘70s TV series "Barnaby Jones," simply lacked the cat scratch-appeal of her sultry predecessor.

Famed cabaret singer Eartha Kitt, best known for her hit Christmas song "Santa Baby," brought her signature sass and soul to the role of Catwoman in the third and final season of "Batman."

Director Tim Burton gave the character, as portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer in "Batman Returns" (1992), the home-stitched, patchwork look of a fetishistic quilt.




Actress Sean Young ("Blade Runner," "Dune," "No Way Out") was originally cast as Vicki Vale in 1989’s "Batman" but lost her role to Kim Basinger after falling from a horse and breaking her arm. Inspired to win the role of Catwoman in "Batman Returns," she fashioned her own costume, in which she vainly tried to impress both director Tim Burton and star Michael Keaton.





Afterwards, she gamely poked fun at herself as a guest on NBC’s "Late Night with David Letterman," when she suddenly stripped off her coat to reveal a Wonder Woman-like getup and dashed, not unlike a superhero, into the audience.

Three years after winning the Best Actress Academy Award for her empowering role in "Monster’s Ball," Halle Berry slipped into something more uncomfortable, an S&M-inspired dominatrix costume, as the star of the 2004 turkey "Catwoman."





Arizona Republic critic Bill Muller, in an amusing mock letter from the Academy, asked Berry to return her "Monster’s Ball" Oscar. "Catwoman" swept the Golden Raspberry Awards, winning for Worst Picture, Worst Actress, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay. In person to accept her Razzie, she said, "First of all I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in this piece-of-shit God-awful movie."


In an era when DC Comics seemed dominated by male superheroes, William Moulton Marston, a psychologist and inventor (he developed a systolic blood pressure test that later became a component of the modern polygraph), acting upon the urging of his wife, created Wonder Woman in 1941 as a "distinctly feminist role model."




Marston noted, "Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman."







…Not to mention, evidently, the peculiar allure of titillating bondage…




"The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound," the strange Mr. Marston wrote. "Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element."







But again we digress. Cathy Lee Crosby, a onetime professional tennis player, starred in the 1974 made-for-television movie "Wonder Woman," perhaps as a pilot for an intended series, but the plot, and costume, failed to ignite interest.







When Crosby was later hired as a cohost of the proto-reality show "That’s Incredible!" network executives sent her what became known as the "nipple memo" (this was during the heyday of jiggle TV’s T&A craze - think "Three’s Company," "The Dukes of Hazzard," "Battle of the Network Stars"), informing her that it would be "acceptable" if she appeared braless on the show. Her responding memo stated, "I would prefer to choose my own underwear."



From 1975 to 1979, Lynda Carter, a former Miss World USA, of Irish and Mexican heritage, starred in the TV series as Wonder Woman. During its first season as "The New Original Wonder Woman" on ABC, the show was set in the 1940s with Nazis as her foes. When the series moved to CBS, as "The New Adventures of Wonder Woman," the network unblinkingly updated it to present day.






Near the end of the show’s run, Lynda Carter, in an Us magazine interview, remarked, "I never meant to be a sexual object for anyone but my husband. I never thought a picture of my body would be tacked up in men’s bathrooms. I hate men looking me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me."




As a superheroine who just happens to be a vampire, Vampirella was created by the world’s greatest horror-phile, Forrest J. Ackerman, for a series of black-and-white comic books developed by Archie Goodwin, chief writer and editor of the popular horror comic books "Creepy" and "Eerie," along with artists Frank Frazetta and Tom Sutton.

Like Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie, the character of Vampirella, who debuted in September 1969, initially "hosted" anthologies of scary stories. She eventually became her own leading character, a "good" vampire from the planet Draculon committed to ridding Earth of hometown vampires.




In 1978, Barbara Leigh became the first live model to wear the character’s barely-there costume on the cover of a Vampirella issue. Part Irish and part Cherokee Native American, Leigh is a former fashion model and sometime actress who claimed romances with Elvis Presley and Steve McQueen, with whom she appeared, briefly, in director Sam Peckinpah’s "Junior Bonner" (1972). Her voluptuous image would grace the cover of a number of editions of the comic book, as would that of Julie Strain’s…



A Penthouse Pet of the Year in 1993, Julie Strain is sometimes referred to as "Queen of the B-Movies," with over 100 movies to her credit, most of them low-budget exploitation flicks that never saw the light of a projector in a theater.

Not surprisingly, Vampirella’s skimpy wardrobe has been a perennial favorite for exhibitionist fans at comic book and horror film conventions…



…Which only heightened anticipation for the 1996 direct-to-video movie, "Vampirella," especially when star Talisa Soto, a Bond girl in "Licence to Kill" (1987) and kick-ass Princess Kitama in the pair of "Mortal Kombat" films, appeared in costume on the cover of the fanzine Femme Fatale.


Sadly, the finished production, directed by Jim Wynorski, a poor man’s Roger Corman, and costarring thespian-challenged Roger Daltrey of The Who, plopped the unfortunate Soto into joy-killing granny underpants and snuffed any hopes for a sequel, despite the promise otherwise in the end credits.





Admittedly not a comic book or comic strip at the onset, "Aeon Flux" began as a series of bizarre science-fiction animated shorts, stripped of any discernible dialogue, created by Korean-American artist Peter Chung and first aired in 1991 on the MTV program "Liquid Television." In a surreal, dystopian future, the titular character - described by A.V. Club critic Tasha Robinson as "a lanky, silent…heroine built like a heap of giraffe bones laced in sinew and minimalist leather gear" - is an extraordinarily acrobatic assassin.



"Peter Chung’s original animated ‘Aeon Flux’ shorts were aggressively alien concoctions of B&D imagery and ultra-fetishized violence," Robinson noted. "Her missions were incomprehensible and she not only failed at all of them, she inevitably died in the attempt." In 1995, a season of ten half-hour episodes aired as its own series, rated TV-MA.

More than a full decade after its premiere, "Aeon Flux" got a $55 million big-screen, live-action makeover. According to Robinson’s "ultra-short version" of the convoluted plot, "It’s 2415, Marton Csokas (Lord Celeborn in the "Lord of the Rings" films) is the head of a fascistic regime, Charlize Theron, as vengeful super-rebel Aeon Flux is out to kill him." Two years earlier, Theron garnered an Academy Award for her unsettling performance as real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in "Monster."

"Aeon Flux," a first-time feature for director Karyn Kusama ("Jennifer’s Body"), proved to be a critical disappointment and a box office bust. No one involved with the original animated program had a role of consequence in the movie’s production. For one thing, they got Aeon Flux’s costume all wrong…


















Original creator Peter Chung said watching the film made him feel "helpless, humiliated and sad."


Once again, it was up to free-spirited fans at comic conventions to get the outfit right...

















Elektra Natchios, an international female ninja assassin (or "kuroichi," if you’re into martial arts terminology) who wields sai (more martial arts lingo to give the impression that we’re savvy in the moviehouse), was created by the extraordinary Frank Miller as a love interest for the blind superhero Daredevil. She debuted in a January 1981 issue of "Daredevil."



Jennifer Garner, best known as the star of the series "Alias" (2001-2006), first appeared as Elektra in the 2003 film "Daredevil," starring Ben Afleck (who just happens to be Garner’s real-life husband). In 2005 "Elektra" and Garner got a movie of their own. The end result produced a lackluster box office and unkind reviews, but at least they got the costume right…







Finally, we come upon a comic superhero whose costume filmmakers could not help but get right in the transition from page to screen. Kekko Kamen ("Splendid Mask") originally appeared in a mid-1970s series of Japanese Shonen manga comics. Lurking in the shadows of a high school ominously named Sparta Academy, where female students are singled out by the misogynistic teaching staff (masterminded by a jester-like villain known as "Toenail of Satan") for twisted humiliation, Kekko Kamen endeavors to protect innocent first-year student Mayumi Takahashi. What makes Kekko Kamen’s superhero costume unique is that it consists of a red rabbit-eared mask, matching gloves, scarf, boots and nothing else.

At least ten live-action films have depicted Kekko Kamen’s adventures. Using a variety of martial art styles and weapons, her finishing move (aka the "Pubic Hair Jump" - we’re not kidding) is a spreadeagled leap through the air onto her opponent’s face and breaking his neck with her thighs. In death, the bad guys inevitably have a smile on their faces.

And that’s what we call a happy ending.