I loved Wonder Woman SO much, that at school during playtime on the playground my friends and I would play Superfriends. I of course was Wonder Boy – with the girls fighting over who got to be Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl. The least popular friend of the moment was of course the evil villain we’d be fighting, and then we’d all battle crime on the jungle gym.
I had a costume party when I was 7; of course I had a red top with a WB logo on it (for Wonder Boy – not the WB network). There was a Wonder Woman cake with Wonder Woman paper plates, Wonder Woman napkins & Wonder Woman plastic cups – I even received a telegram from Wonder Woman wishing me a very happy 7th birthday. How did Wonder Woman know it was my birthday? Well, I’d invited her to my party - so she’d sent the telegram letting me know she appreciated the invitation but had business on Paradise Island that meant she couldn’t make it.
That year for Christmas I received perhaps the best gift a boy can receive – a Wonder Woman doll. Now this was New Zealand in the late 1970’s, so of course we didn’t actually have anything like an “official” Wonder Woman doll anywhere on the islands – those wouldn’t be available until the early 1980’s, but my Aunt was a doll maker, and a skilled seamstress. So my Dad had secretly commissioned her to make me a Wonder Woman doll. For Christmas that year, my brother and I had been with our mother in Paraparaumu – I still remember waiting with my brother in the hot New Zealand sun as my Dad was pulling up in his white Toyota to take us back home to Minihaha in Khandallah – Dad let us know he’d met Father Christmas that night and this year Father Christmas had left our gifts from him with our Dad. That way Dad was able to give them to us when we were picked up at the end of the weekend. Ripping the wrapping off the package, I can still remember the thrill of seeing Diana Prince right there in doll form. Diana had her own hand-sewn star spangled outfit, complete with magic belt, tiara, bracelets & lasso.
Later that year after Christmas when I was sick at home one week with some childhood illness (probably the mumps or the measles) my Dad even built Wonder Woman her own invisible jet out of plastic sheeting. I asked for and got my own mini “IRAC” computer – complete with blinking lights – both items had been built in my Dad’s workshop. With these accoutrements Diana and I were set for crime fighting.
Anyway, Wonder Woman was of course my most precious possession, and she was a huge hit with all my friends. Phillipa Scott would have me and Diana over for tea parties with Strawberry Shortcake and her friends Blueberry Muffin, Oranage Blossom and Lemon Meringue. Phillipa was sure that the boy of the Strawberry Shortcake bunch, Apple Dumpling, had a crush and as such would I mind very much leaving Diana with her sometimes so they could get to know each other better. Jodi-Ann Parker and Sharon O’Sullivan would always ask to play with Wonder Woman when they were at my house. Yes, Wonder Woman and I had a full social calendar, what with tea dates and saving other my other action figures and stuffed toys from certain doom at the hands of my brothers evil toys.
One weekend I went to stay over at Phillipa Scott’s house. She had a trampoline in her back yard and her mother was Scottish. Mrs. Scott made great rock cakes and Scottish Eggs. On this particular trip, Wonder Woman didn’t travel with me – I wasn’t sure she and Apple Dumpling were a good fit, and Phillipa and I had plans to be jumping on the trampoline a lot that weekend.
I returned home after a pleasant weekend of exercise and rock cakes to Minihaha. Things were eerily quiet down the far end of the house where my brother and I had our rooms. Walking down the hallway I made the right turn in the ante way to our bedrooms and opened the door to my room to be confronted from a scene taken from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. All of my soft toys were facing each, arranged from smallest to largest, forming a roadway up to an alter made of wood. Perfuming the air of my bedroom was patchouli, the fragrance coming from incense sticks; smoke lazily rising from the hot orange tips of the sticks, smoke hazing the air, the tips glowing amidst all the perfumey smoke. I was able to make out a sarcophagus resting on the wooden alter. (I later discovered the sarcophagus had been crafted from a Roses Chocolate box.)
There’s something strange about walking in on a reverent scene of stuffed animals and toys – you know something is very wrong, but you almost don’t want to disturb things.
I placed my overnight bag on the floor and approached the alter, being careful not to disturb the statuesque soft toy honor guard. I reached down and opened the sarcophagus, and found a mummy lying inside. A doll sized mummy. A doll sized mummy, tightly bound by strips of snowy white toilet paper.
Ripping the toilet paper shroud from off the mummy I was horrified to find that it was my Wonder Woman doll that’d been defiled.
This all smacked of the work of my evil older brother - JASON!!! I can remember crying and running out of my room, yelling for my Dad and my older brother. Yelling that he’d been in my room, and had touched my stuff. Tears on my face, my lovely weekend ruined by his evil ways.
Not even in the comics or on the TV Show had Wonder Woman ever been mummified.
The reaction I invariably get to this story is “Wow, your brother is SO creative. Wow, he’s really talented, does he still build things? Oh, yeah, poor you, that must have been bad.”
