Ten years ago today, a nine-minute video went on sale and UltraGirl stopped being something that existed only in my head and in still photographs.
She is a great deal older than that. She started in 1991, when I was dating a girl in Atlanta who liked to role-play and would often dress up as a superheroine for me. She had no name back then. She was an idea I had in my head, and I have had it ever since.
The shape of her came from comic books and from the superheroine shows of my youth: Supergirl’s costume, and the power belt weakness the television Wonder Woman had. That combination was the whole idea, and it still is.
In September 2005 I ordered a custom photo set from DawnStar Productions. That was how I learned there were producers out there making custom photo sets at all, and he was the first one I ever worked with. It turned a private idea into something that existed outside my own head.
And on September 20, 2016 was her first on screen adventure.
How it actually happened
In June 2016, Constance sent me a message on Twitter. She had noticed my tweets, worked out that I was also in Texas, and asked whether I wanted to shoot.
I said no.
She thought I was a producer based on what I tweeted. I was not. At that point I was a fan, not a filmmaker. I had assisted at exactly one shoot, a decade earlier, in 2006. What I did do was counter-offer: if she was ever open to shooting with a fan rather than a producer, I would be interested. To my genuine surprise, she said yes.
We moved to email, and she taught me the business — what she normally shot, what she travelled with. The blue leotard and the Wonder Woman costume were already in her kit. I bought the red heels and the pantyhose. That is the entire origin of the first UltraGirl costume.
We shot it for me. It was never meant to be sold. I edited it myself, sent it to Constance to see what she thought, and she asked for permission to put it up for sale. Part one went live on September 20, 2016, part two on September 27, 2016. I am in it as well, as The Shadow, which was not a casting decision so much as the only crew available.
Why she is UltraGirl Prime
Watch it now and one thing is conspicuously missing: she is bound with her power belt on. The trope that drives almost every UltraGirl story since — the belt comes off, and the powers go with it — had not made it to screen yet. This story leans instead on her simply being too woozy after the capture to get herself out of it.
The costume kept growing after that. Constance and I shot more together, I kept buying pieces, and what accumulated became the UltraGirl costume that most of the videos use today. The original outfit still turns up a few times, including in the Ultraverse Crisis — and once the Crisis turned the whole thing multiversal, the first one needed a name of her own. So this version was retroactively dubbed UltraGirl Prime: not an early draft, but her own UltraGirl, from her own Earth.
Thank you, Constance
Constance said yes to a fan with an idea and no track record. She did not have to, and the honest truth is that if she had said no in June 2016, there is a good chance none of the rest of this exists. She was the first UltraGirl anyone could actually watch, she was generous with what she knew when I knew nothing, and she was the one who thought the finished thing was worth selling.
It went up under her own banner, Constance’s Crazy Cinemas, and that is where the first UltraGirl anyone could watch came from.
So: thank you. Ten years on, you are still where all of it starts.
And to every UltraGirl since
There have been a great many since — every one of them bringing something to the costume that was not there before her, and every one of them making the roster deeper than a single character ever could have been. The image at the top of this post is how I think about it: one woman in a blue leotard and a pair of red heels I ordered online, and behind her, everyone who followed.
Thank you, all of you. Here’s to the next ten.
Over time, credit card restrictions and posting rules have changed where the original versions of this first adventure are not available for sale anywhere as of today. I hope one day to rectify that.
Read the full behind-the-scenes account, the synopsis and the release details on the video’s own page: UltraGirl vs The Shadow. More on where the character came from in Who is SH Binder?