Diana Prince - Secret Identity Transformation

Secret Identity Transformation

In the Golden Age, Diana eventually learned the benefits of keeping her Wonder Woman costume under her military uniform, instead of leaving it at her apartment or in a desk drawer. Her transformation often involved her running out of a room, changing clothes at superspeed, and returning to a room as Wonder Woman. Occasionally, panels would show her in mid-transformation, pulling off stockings and revealing her Wonder Woman costume under the uniform.

A Bronze Age tweak gave her a new method of transformation using the magic lasso. The explanation was that Amazon scientists treated Wonder Woman's clothes with a special chemical that would respond to the vibrations of the magic lasso; whenever Diana stepped into the lasso loop and brought it up and down, her Diana Prince clothes would transform into the Wonder Woman armor.

The best known transformation sequence was created by Lynda Carter in behind-the-scenes decisions for the Wonder Woman television show: a spinning transformation. As the spin was refined, it involved Diana Prince making a counter-clockwise quarter turn and then a series of clockwise turns, with a mystical explosion of light, leaving her as Wonder Woman. Eventually, it was revealed that Diana Prince was powerless, until she executed the spin and became Wonder Woman. A couple of episodes would have Diana Prince attempting the spin, only to be interrupted by muggers or having to stop the process due to fear of exposing her secret identity; in which she would not have turned herself into Wonder Woman, implying the process must be completed for her to do so. Also implied is that the process must be precise; the less experienced Wonder Girl attempted the spin only to find herself still an ordinary woman. Only when she thought back to her training in a flashback with Hippolyta did she realize she must mentally focus and think of the transformation while spinning with ballet-like grace to be effective.

In one episode of Challenge of the Superfriends, a reverse of the spin was shown, although ironically not by Diana Prince. Cheetah and Lex Luthor use a time machine to conspire to alter history and prevent the rise of some of the Superfriends. Cheetah travels back to the tournament of the amazons; the winner of which will become Wonder Woman. She uses a ray to stun Diana, allowing her to win the tournament and have Queen Hippolyta transform her into Wonder Woman, wearing the same style leotard except she had blonde hair instead of Diana's dark hair. When Luthor and the other villains commend Cheetah for the successful identity theft of Wonder Woman, she remarks "There will never be a Wonder Woman", and spins around, transforming her outfit once again into her usual Cheetah costume.

The spin was featured infrequently on Super Friends, whenever Diana Prince needed to leave her civilian job and attend to the various crises which she and JLA teammates faced throughout the show.

The "Wonder spin" was copied briefly into the pre-Crisis comics during the period in which the comic book returned to World War II in order to correspond with the first season of the TV series, but Wonder Woman never lost her strength as Diana Prince. The spin returned a few times in the post-Crisis comic book, before the post-Infinite Crisis reboot of the series which brought the spin back as a primary feature, along with the TV show convention that Wonder Woman loses her powers in the Diana Prince identity.

The "Wonder Spin" was also shown in the "To Another Shore" episode of Justice League.