Sleep with DC: Ursa

While looking for a picture of a bear to put with my prior blog entry about DC Comics, I found a picture of a DC character whose name makes her sound like a bear but isn’t one: Ursa, the Kryptonian villain played in Superman II by Sarah Douglas. And the thing is: I remember finding the cruel and superstrong Ursa quite attractive when I was ten years old — so maybe I should consider myself lucky for not ending up with more domineering women or even outright dominatrices.
As when bumping into a woman last week who I hadn’t seen since about sixth grade, I am reminded that we may develop a “type” even before puberty, though we tend to forget afterwards that we ever thought in such ways until puberty.
I may have been ten when Superman II came out, but I can plainly see how it’s a short hop from liking Ursa to liking New Wave-era women such as Annie Lennox and her ilk three years later — not to mention Tegan on Doctor Who and Sheena Easton, now that I think about it — and then another predictable leap to dating a skinny woman with her short dark hair always flopping over one eye, in late 1995 (as will be recounted in this coming Friday’s Retro-Journal entry).
That woman was very nice, unlike Ursa, though. She never once threw a manhole cover like a Frisbee into the gut of her foe.
And speaking of New Wave-like women saying, “Oh, Superman…” here’s a video by another woman I thought was the height of cool back in the early 80s — a video that I was pleased to see featured in the Whitney Museum’s massive retrospective a few years ago of representative art from the second half of the twentieth century.
P.S. And speaking of attractive women playing DC Comics characters: At that birthday party I mentioned going to Saturday night, there was a guy (named Andy, not Wong Foo — and not the guy seen in the picture I’ve linked to here) who’s had his picture taken with Julie Newmar, one of the actresses who played Catwoman back in the 60s — and when you see how good she looks in her mid-seventies, it’s a pretty impressive testament to how superhuman she was back when Batman was understandably mesmerized by her (Note: I am aware Catwoman does not actually have superpowers). I think she’s holding up almost as well as John McCain’s and Lefty Leibowitz’s moms.
He also had his picture taken with another of the three actresses to play Catwoman forty years ago, Lee Meriwether, but one could argue that the coolest Catwoman of all was Eartha Kitt, here seen, fittingly, singing a great song about why “I Want to Be Evil.”