Wonder Woman to get her own cosmetics line

Batman Lipgloss!!

"I am VENGEANCE! I am the NIGHT!! I PROTECT WHILE MOISTURIZING!!!"

I'll wait for the nailpolish. Aquaman is much better for moisturizing.

Seriously, there is already Batman cologne. I really don't see the big deal about Wondie makeup.

Batman concealer:

I seek the means to fight injustice. To turn fear against those who prey on the fearful. To eliminate dark circles and puffiness caused by late night crime fighting.

Your shadow seems a little... truncated there GG :S

See that's the thing: I almost don't even see this as a problem with defining/insulting feminism or questioning whether or not Wonder Woman does or doesn't wear makeup. It's more an issue of what makes sense for the character and the general misunderstanding many people seem to have about what she's all about. As Arcanaville was implying earlier in the thread overt excessive vanity is not a quality Wonder Woman has ever expressed. Sure as a woman she's good looking (and probably doesn't mind looking good) but she's never been portrayed going out of her way to dwell on that aspect of her character. The very idea that her character would be used to sell products like makeup is fundamentally laughable.

A rough analogy to this is if Conan the Barbarian was used to sell gardening tools. Sure if Conan ever decided to tend a garden he might use those same gardening tools. But when would you ever seriously think Conan would be overly interested in spending any significant time talking about or actually bothering to garden at all? The concept of "gardening" just doesn't fit into anything Conan is or has ever been involved with.

Now one more time I understand that linking Wonder Woman to a line of real world makeup was simply a marketing maneuver and I'm fully aware many other superheroes have been related to products over the years that have nothing to do with anything their characters are about. Still I consider this a yet another symptom of how many people in the industry don't really "get" Wonder Woman and I'm taking this as yet another sign that the hopes of getting a good Wonder Woman TV show or movie continues to be fairly remote.

But how does it affect her more than any other superhero used to shill merch?

Batman, Superman, Spider-man, Catwoman, etc. have had plenty of movies and TV shows despite anything they've ever been marketed with. It may turn out that "inappropriate marketing" won't hurt Wonder Woman too much, but I hardly see how it's going to be very helpful for her cause either.

I'm convinced the main reason Wonder Woman has not had the same media success the others have had is that the industry in general don't understand and/or know how to handle the character. Linking her to real world products that have very little (if anything) to do with her core character is not going to help that situation. At this point I just don't think the Wonder Woman character can afford any "publicity" which keeps her relegated to the murky media limbo she's been stuck in for decades now.

Well we all know how well the Catwoman movie did........

As to Wonder Woman, I suspect part of the problem is that memories are still rooted in the days of Superfriends and the Lynda Carter series.

And as I've stated before I doubt the Lynda Carter series is remembered for the "emmy award winning acting" or "ground breaking FX" or "riveting dialogue", etc. Call it a hunch.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Well, its more "inspired by" as opposed to the character actually shilling for the products. And this is MAC we're talking about: they are kind of upscale and a bit avant-garde with their marketing. Its actually almost like a french restaurant offering an appetizer platter "inspired by" Wonder Woman. Its not going to be gingerbread cookies shaped like her silhouette. Its going to be her colors, an occasional star or stripe, and maybe a golden pretzel evoking rope.

This is definitely not going to be My First Makeup Kit sold at Walmart next to Wonder Woman lunchboxes.

Actually, the match is a subtle mismatch, but not because of appearance vanity. MAC doesn't focus on that exclusively in their marketing. They tend to focus on celebrity and that's also slightly tangential to Wonder Woman. But not in a jarring way: in the DCU she *is* a celebrity, if an often reluctant one.

Granted the Catwoman movie was less than "worthwhile" but at least it was one more movie than Wonder Woman's had in a while. And sadly the fact that things like the Catwoman movie, the Elektra movie and the recent Bionic Woman TV series collectively stunk probably (at least indirectly) hurt Wonder Woman's chances for movies and/or TV shows anytime soon as well.

As far as the Lynda Carter "legacy" goes that certainly hasn't helped matters much either. I'm not saying Lynda did a bad job or "messed" up Wonder Woman as much, like you're suggesting, since she's the only serious example of a live-action version of Wonder Woman everyone's stuck thinking that any new version of the character would somehow have to be a clone of that campy 70s style. That "mental inertia" has clearly been hard for a lot of people to overcome.

Hey, if Batman could make a comeback from Adam West (which was HUGELY popular and was the major face of Batman for quite awhile), I don't think Wonder Woman's position is all that bad. Especially now that both companies seem to be trying to get all their A-listers their own movies.

Whoa there, I'm not blaming Lynda Carter; far from it . That show was a product of the camp of that era.

Over the top plots in most episodes, the FX I suppose was as good as it could be for that era and the show's budget (debatable). The performance of the cast.....eh. I suspect they knew what they were working with and did what they could but they probably could have just phone it in and gotten the same results.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Oh I'm not saying it's impossible. But it only took Batman roughly 20 years to jump from Adam West to Michael Keaton. It's been around 35+ years since Lynda first portrayed Wonder Woman with no obvious replacement in sight. Just highlighting that there's been a significant difference between the two. *shrugs*

I don't think the Xena series helped much either. Fun show, but at times the camp level was rather high.

The Xena series also deserves the same question I have posed about the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series, just exactly why did most people watch it?

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

No I wasn't saying you blamed Lynda for today's lack of Wonder Woman attention.

I was trying to say that, like you, I think a key problem with Wonder Woman is that, unlike say Superman or Batman, we've really one had ONE memorable live-action Wonder Woman. To most people Lynda IS Wonder Woman as far as what they expect so it's pretty hard (unlike Superman or Batman) to imagine anyone else playing the role. That's part of the "mental inertia" I was trying to describe.

Actually regardless if you liked the show or not Xena was probably the most successful "Wonder Woman clone" series since the actual Lynda Carter series. Other shows like Buffy:tVS, La Femme Nikita and Alias were very vaguely Wonder Woman-esque, but Xena probably has come as close to Wonder Woman as we've seen so far.

Now I'm not suggesting a new Wonder Woman show made in 2011 would have to somehow copy what Xena did (assuming you could quantify that). I'm just suggesting if a show like Xena could last 6 seasons I really don't understand why someone couldn't figure out how to do that for Wonder Woman too.

Yes I'm aware that this is a MAC campaign and I agree that does make the whole thing a notch classier than it being for "My First Makeup Kit sold at Walmart". You also have a good point that the involvement of Wonder Woman's character with this could be seen more as a connection to "celebrity" rather than to simple "vanity".

Who knows, I could be totally wrong about this and history may show that the starting point of the big summer blockbuster Wonder Woman movie (released let's say in 2012 or 2013) rested firmly on the overwhelming popularity of this makeup campaign. Perhaps 30+ years of waiting for some positive news towards an actual Wonder Woman movie/TV show has made me somewhat cynical about the whole thing.