Secrets of Isis

You never can tell, can you?  What seemed perfectly innocent as a title for a kids' TV show in the seventies, forty odd years later now seems to have sinister implications.  I don't think that Secrets of Isis was ever shown in the UK.  At least, not on terrestrial TV in the seventies or early eighties, when I might have noticed it.  In the US it apparently formed a double bill with Shazam on Saturday mornings during 1975-77.   Lately, episodes have been turning up on a couple of streaming services that I watch.  Nowadays, of course, with a title like Secrets of Isis, you might be expecting some kind of drama or documentary about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists - every week their dastardly plans to commit an atrocity in small town America are foiled by heroic FBI agents.  (In which format, it would stand alongside the Chuck Norris movie Delta Force as an attempt to cathartically rewrite history in a more reassuring form, so that the good guys won, in the film's case it was the TWA hijacking that was re-imagined, in this case it would have been the FBI's failure to stop 9/11 that was being 'corrected').  

Instead, though, what we get in the real Secrets of Isis is a female superhero, (who just predated Wonder Woman on TV), in this case a High School science teacher (and descendant of an ancient Egyptian queen), who comes across an amulet bearing the symbol of the goddess Isis.  This allows her to transform into an avatar of Isis, complete with various powers, in order to fight crime.  Pretty low level crime, it has to be said (it was aimed at kids, after all).  Rather than crazy Islamic terrorists, the usual villains were car thieves, crooked property developers (perpetrating UFO hoaxes to drive property prices down) and robbers.  In addition to these, Isis also found herself dealing with escaped gorillas, bears and school cheats, (every episode had a moral).  All dealt with in less than thirty minutes.  The biggest mystery, (as ever with superheroes), was why none of her friends could see that the teacher and Isis were one and the same person.  Apart from the change of costume, her only 'disguise' was to wear glasses and have her hair styled differently when she was the teacher.  Moreover, like Clarke Kent and Superman, they were never in the same place at the same time, surely a dead giveaway?  Compared to present day Superhero TV series (which now seem to be primarily aimed at adults), Secrets of Isis seems quaintly innocent and unsophisticated, (despite the title implying, for contemporary audiences, all manner of bloody terror-related mayhem).  I shudder to think what a modern remake might be like...