Redesigning Wonder Woman’s TV Costume

Ever since the costume for NBC’s Wonder Woman pilot was unveiled on Friday, it seems that everyone with access to Photoshop has been playing around with it.  Bleeding Cool has posted a nice collection of these re-designs and, interestingly, I’d say that all of them are as good as or better than the original Adrianne Palicki picture.  Usually better, really.  Here is my favourite re-design, originally posted by C. Wallace in the Bleeding Cool forums:

Brightly coloured superhero costumes rarely work on screen.  When placed in a real world setting, they look kind of ludicrous.  What works in comic books and cartoons just doesn’t translate into live action.  Thus, lately, all of the successful superhero movies have muted the colours of the costumes.  For example, Iron Man is red and yellow in comics:

While in the movies he switches to burdundy and a slightly dulled gold:

These changes seem to be an unofficial rule in adapting comics for the screen.  Red becomes burgundy, bright blues get dulled, yellow turns to gold, anything too colourful gets swapped out for a black leather jumpsuit.  And it works well… most superhero properties end up looking really good onscreen (Superman Returns excepted… that costume was a mess).

Anyway, I say all of that to point out that the current Wonder Woman TV costume is just too bright and shiny.  I’m worried it’s gonna look garish on television.  It needs to be muted, and the shiny spandex should go away.  If they do that, Palicki will look less like an impressive cosplayer at ComiCon and more like a believeable, real word superhero.