Were Steve Trevor's Wonder Woman Soldiers Based on The Losers?
While Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad were chock full of DC Universe Easter [...]
While Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad were chock full of DC Universe Easter eggs, the recently-released Wonder Woman film was fairly light on that front.
...Or was it?
A cursory look at the multiethnic, hardscrabble team of soldiers and soldiers of fortune assembled by Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman raises a question of longtime DC readers: could this be one of the earliest iterations of The Losers?
Created by Robert Kanigher, who appeared in the Wonder Woman credits, The Losers were an elite combat unit during World War II, named for their terrible luck and habit of surviving dangerous situations. They fought Nazis behind enemy lines in the European theater of operations. The team membership included Captain Storm, Gunner MacKay, Johnny Cloud, Sarge Clay, their dog Pooch and briefly Ona Tornsen.
The team first appeared in 1969's G.I. Combat #138.
While the war is wrong, that might not have stopped the writers from slipping a little Easter egg into the story. Years later, "The Losers" became a kind of unofficial unit designation, and Andy Diggle and Jock turned it into a Vertigo series that proved popular enough to inspire a movie starring Chris Evans, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
So who's to say the "legacy" of The Losers doesn't go back the other way, creating a legacy of similar units going back at least as far as World War I?
Certainly there was no guarantee -- and war comics as a whole were pretty commonly constructed in such a way as to play on larger-than-life characters, ethnically diverse teamings, and so on.
But watching Wonder Woman, and seeing Steve's team with their fatalist humor, their piecemeal approach to strategy, and their damned luck, it felt like maybe the film's writers were trying to evoke The Losers.
Before she was Wonder Woman, she was Diana, Princess of the Amazons, trained to be an unconquerable warrior. Raised on a sheltered island paradise, when an American pilot crashes on their shores and tells of a massive conflict raging in the outside world, Diana leaves her home, convinced she can stop the threat. Fighting alongside man in a war to end all wars, Diana will discover her full powers…and her true destiny.
Wonder Woman is directed by Patty Jenkins and is written by Allan Heinberg, Geoff Johns, and Zack Snyder. The film stars Gal Gadot (Diana Prince/Wonder Woman), Chris Pine (Steve Trevor), Robin Wright (General Antiope), Connie Nielsen (Queen Hippolyta), David Thewlis, Elena Anaya, Lucy Davis (Etta Candy), Danny Huston, Ewen Bremmer, Doutzen Kroes, Samantha Jo (Euboea), Florence Kasumba (Senator Acantha), Said Taghmaoui, Eleanor Matsuura (Epione), Emily Carey (Young Diana), and Lisa Loven Kongsli (Menalippe).
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