The Pied Piper

Pop star Hamlin Rule 's fans adore him - some so much that they even commit daring robberies. When Joe Atkinson becomes worried about his daughter's tastes in music, Wonder Woman listens closely to Rule's tunes and begins to smell a rat....

This is one wacky episode with music being used as a source of mind control, and the person doing the mind controlling is a flute playing rock star who bares a slight resemblance to David Soul. Groupies surround him, and are used to steal for him. I really liked this one, finding it far out, but imaginative. After all, this is an escapist adventure series based on comic books that are far from reality. There's a great scene where Diana Prince is strapped to the chair and its spun around - then boom she turns to Wonder Woman and takes on former Tarzan Denny Miller.

This episode is difficult to qualify as it is not exactly bad, but it has quite absurd elements which does not make it all that good either. A famous musician uses his knowledge in electronics to make a demolecular device, at the same time he uses his music to hypnotize his young fans and recruit them as a criminal gang, Joe Atkinson's daughter ends up being one of his victims and that's how this gives way to an investigation by Diana Prince. Acceptable episode.

A music star, played by Martin Mull, has a strange power over young women. He plays the flute and they do what he wants. That sounds like it could lead to trouble and it does. It leads to crime.

When people knock the 1970's they usually say it was too "cheesy" or too "silly", etc. And if you watch this episode it's hard to argue with that....haha. It's extremely cheesy and silly. But it almost turns cheesy and silly into an art form. Nobody could be this cheesy and silly by accident it must have been on purpose.

It starts with the odd casting and shallow acting. The only casting part they got right was Eve Plumb (Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch). She's very good in this episode. There's a reality to her acting that's totally missing from the other guest actors. Martin Mull gave it a good try, but he just didn't have the acting "chops" as they say in the business. But I salute his effort.

Another one of the odd things about this episode is that the creepy flute player (played by Martin Mull) and Eve Plumb have the exact same hair color. They look like they're family members of some kind. I wonder if they cast it that way on purpose. Probably just a coincidence though. But it just looks odd.

Overall, it's kind of fun. It's a real time capsule of the 1970's. At least the silly part of the 1970's. Not all of the 1970's was silly, but this episode certainly was - silly and campy and weird. I gave it a "6".

My least favorite of any comic book series on TV are episodes that portray a sympathetic villain seeking revenge for some great wrong done to them, like most of season 2 episodes. Here, Martin Mull plays a rock musician who has his fans robbing the safe of his concert money to keep it away from his managers and promoters. Eve Plumb (Jan from The Brady Bunch) plays a fan who wins an audition to be his stage dancer. She is also the daughter of Diana Prince's boss, bringing Wonder Woman out to uncover the scheme. Like, the first names on earth anyone might associate with pop music are Martin Mull and Eve Plumb, right? It's quite entertaining until piper Hamlin gets his comeuppance, mostly a sermon from Wonder Woman about losing his ideals and principles for a life of greed and crime.

Mind control and the manipulation of nubile groupies by a rock star nursing a platinum-selling grudge against the rapacious vultures of the music industry should have gone to Number One with a bullet in "The Pied Piper," but thanks to an impressively underwhelming performance by guest-star Martin Mull, this intriguing, even provocative premise drops off the charts fast. Not that the lukewarm script-by-committee (which includes David Ketchum, AKA Agent 13 from "Get Smart") does much to amplify its premise beyond token gestures to the rock and roll lifestyle while Alan Crosland's tepid direction trips weakly behind the beat.

Pop sensation Hamlin Rule (Mull) wows sellout audiences wherever he performs--even Diana Prince is a fan--with his literally hypnotic flute-playing that is more than a Jethro Tull-like affectation. (That band's frontman Ian Anderson is famous for brandishing that instrument.) In concert with a sonic disintegrating device he invented, Rule has also perfected a mind-controlling system keyed to his flute that he uses to brainwash already-impressionable young women. For sex and decadence? No. That's too rock and roll. He trains them to rob the concert venues he is playing at as revenge against all the ten-percenters who have scavenged all the money he has earned from his artistic genius. Why Rule didn't make a mint selling his inventions to the military-industrial complex instead must remain a mystery.

Chief among his victims is UCLA co-ed Elena Atkinson (Eve Plumb), daughter of Diana's Inter-Agency Defense Command boss Joe Atkinson (Normann Burton), which is where Wonder Woman starts to come in. Joe is distressed about Elena's neglecting her studies to traipse after Rule, so Diana, about to leave for Los Angeles with Steve Trevor to investigate Rule's string of robberies, invites Joe to come with her instead to check up on Elena. Once in LA, Diana begins to uncover Rule's nefarious operation--including one head-spinning situation when Rule could have discovered her secret identity had he stuck around a few moments longer--as Elena, tapped to advance in Rule's outfit, begins to regret her camp-following but is trapped by Rule's spell.

Given more to do than advance the storyline, Burton still has to follow Lynda Carter's lead while Plumb lacks color and conviction in a pivotal role. However, it is an utterly bland Mull who breaks up the band, projecting dishwater charisma as a slightly snarky, vaguely passive-aggressive dweeb whose performance chops, including his lame rendition of the Paul Williams song "Love Conquers All" (sounding like a reject from Williams's contributions to Brian De Palma's 1974 musical "Phantom of the Paradise"), stick a fork into Rule's credibility as a rock star. This episode really should have been titled "Wonder Woman Meets Jethro Dull."