Great Metrano week: day four

To celebrate Art Metrano's birthday earlier this week, this reviewer is enjoying a week long look at 7 guest starring roles from the 70's & 80's by the man also known as The Great Metrano. Today is day four: Wonder Woman: Skateboard Wiz.

Yes, it's another episode in which Steve Trevor only has two scenes, and they are both at IADC headquarters. Also, it's another one of those where Diana Prince interacts with old acquaintances whom we never saw before on any other episode. This week there are three: former IADC supervisor personnel member Leslie O'Neil and her teenage daughter Jamie, plus former LA cop now turned traitor Skye Markham.

Diana has her first vacation in about a year (probably the first one ever, since she started working at the Inter Agency Defence Command as soon as she got back from Paradise Island in 1977) And she wants to spend it with her gal pal the widow Leslie. But the real genius in the family is daughter Jamie. Not only is she a fantastic roller-skater and arcade computer gamer (specializing in a 'Torpedo' type of game), she also has a photographic memory and can memorize top secret information with just one glance. On top of that she has a big mouth, introducing Diana as a spy to her African-American skater pal Kevin who's is only there to be awestruck and totally supportive of Jamie all the time. I'm telling you, there's a bright future for this girl at the IADC. But of course this is the third and final season so we won't see her again (and we wouldn't have seen her again even if the series had continued).

For the first time in this week of reviews, Art Metrano does not play the main villain, but a flunky instead. He runs the electronic arcade down near the beach, which has a secret passage to an illegal casino. This job is not as easy as it sounds: Arty (or Friedman as he's called here) has to change clothes between the two sections of the operation all the time: from frumpy looking manager to suave casino patron. Meanwhile Diana Prince goes to the beach and is almost killed by two muscle heads. She hadn't even realized there's a evil afoot and the poor Amazon's already a target.

The actual head bad guy is real estate shark Evan Donelson, played by Eric Braeden. This actor actually did appear on Wonder Woman before, but as another villain and in another time-frame. He was Nazi pilot Captain Drangel in the 1975 pilot movie, and if he hadn't shot down Steve Trevor Sr. over the aforementioned Island of Paradise at that time, Wonder Woman would never have traveled to the good old U.S. of A. at all. So we should really be grateful to Braeden here. And since Lyle Waggoner plays both Steve the father and Steve the son, maybe possibly we can imagine that evil Donelson here is the offspring of that Ratzi Drangel. Obviously the family changed their surname after the war...

So, Diana noticed that somebody (read: the son of the man who shot down Steve the first over Paradise) is threatening several landowners into selling their property to him. And with a little reluctant help from Skye she's started to investigate. Jamie and her pal Kevin are still hanging around the boulevard arcade where an always just out of frame carousel is constantly playing Civil War era songs like "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Suwannee River". We've also witnessed dumb cowboy gambler Duane Morrisey being kicked out of The Great Metrano's top secret casino on account of his losing streak. The various plot lines begin to come together when Duanne convinces Jamie to help him out with her photographic memory, and she happens to set eyes on a map of Donelson's real estate plans. 

So now Donelsen wants little Jamie silenced and Art Metrano and another henchmen are tasked to do the dirty deed. But at least they have the courtesy of letting her enter the local skateboard competition first (the main prize: a trip to San Francisco). Naturally it all ends with a chase scene in which Wonder Woman uses Jamie's board to catch up with Art's big American car and before you know it, Arty and the other henchman are flying through the air and looking perplexed lying on the ground (that's three out of four times Metrano ends up on the ground this week). 

8 out of 10

The Great Metrano week will continue tomorrow with The Incredible Hulk: Stop the Presses, which, amazingly enough, was broadcast on the same night as this episode of Wonder Woman, on the Super Hero network CBS.