At the same time that she was toiling at Bayview and bantering Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy-style with Jed Allan’s Don Craig on Days of our Lives, Deidre Hall was donning Lycra and joining Judy Strangis in the fight against an eclectic array of evildoers on Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.
Deidre Hall Reminiscences About Her Superhero Past
Hall was, of course, head crime fighter Lori, newswoman by day, Electra Woman by night (and sometimes day depending on when those deplorable degenerates struck), while Strangis was her teenage sidekick Judy AKA Dyna Girl.
It was impossible to do both [DAYS and ELECTRA] so, of course, we did both shows,” Hall mused during a special Q&A organized by The Hollywood Show. “I would come to KTLA during the week and then, they’d shoot my Days of Our Lives scenes on Saturday. We got it done.”
Though Hall and Strangis grant filming the series was a raucous good time, the costumes, the props, and the unforgiving Hollywood summer heat proved bothersome. “It was so hot,” relayed Hall. “We didn’t have air conditioning. We had these costumes on, and wired microphones wrapped around our bodies. To go to the bathroom, we had to take the whole costume off.”
Said Strangis, “When you’ve been in the business, you realize it is what it is. You look back and go, ‘Oh, my God!’ The computers? They did nothing. ‘Bump, bump, bump.’ That’s all we heard.”
Though Hall and Strangis’s alter-egos were forever memorialized in plastic and on lunchboxes, it was news to the actresses. “What we didn’t know is that they were doing all kinds of merchandising with the show,” insisted Hall. “We learned about them when [fans] brought them to us at shows like this.”
As for the guest stars who made up the menagerie of menaces, Hall has a favorite: Princess Cleopatra, “played by my best friend, Jane Elliot.”
The pair also spared some thoughts on their other TV triumphs. Strangis reflected on her time starring on Room 22 and guest starring in the likes of Bewitched, The Mod Squad, and CHiPs, while Hall recalled her turn as Wiseguy‘s Claudia Newquay.
“That was before I knew to ask for my wardrobe when I left a show,” she good-naturedly quipped before adding that filming in Canada engendered a familial bond between her and costars Tim Curry (who played Claudia’s ne’er-do-well husband, Winston) and Debbie Harry.
Do you have a fond memory or two of watching Deidre Hall and Judy Strangis busting baddies on Saturday mornings? Let us know in the comments below.
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