Okay… fuck it. John Wesley Shipp is the Flash. No one else. I am in love with this series.
I’m up to disc five of six. It started off slow… poor stories, poor acting, and poor everything all around. But I’ve come to love it. Mirror Master, Captain Cold, The Trickster… they nailed that shit. And John Wesley Shipp plays the Flash so well. He’s kind, unsure of himself, and so goddamn handsome. In the same way that I always hear Kevin Conroy’s voice when I think of Batman, I’ll hear John Wesley Shipp’s when I think of the Flash. And the costume is perfect, goddammit.scalar quantity
The Flash live action series has redeemed itself. I watched episode thirteen, “The Trickster,” last night and greatly enjoyed it. Why? Because it had the goddamn Trickster in it!
The Trickster has always been a weird sort of supervillian. I mean, he’s sort of lame: his super power is MPD and a terrible sense of humor. Exactly like a certain (more memorable) Batman villian. But there’s also a lot of badass stories about him. The only reason to read all 52 issues of the 2007 Countdown series is for the Trickster/Piper storyline, which is absolutely phenomenal.
So how do you make the Trickster a good mainstream villian? You get Mark Hamill to play him, of course. Hamill did the voice of the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series, and here he more or less takes that voice and gives it a body. It’s amazing to watch. I thought Heath Ledger did a good job as the Joker in The Dark Knight, but Mark Hamill’s Trickster blows that out of the water. As he’s screaming “But I loved you!” and being dragged away by police at the end of the episode, I get serious chills. He plays the sadistic, unapproachable villian perfectly.
I’ve been watching the Flash live action series. It’s not so great.
It’s also not so terrible. I’m actually surprised by how watchable it is. I mean, the lead actor plays the Flash pretty well. The cinematography is very competent. Where it falls flat is in the stories. They are so goddamn boring. I’ve watched seven episodes so far and each one seemed like a rejected Law & Order 4 Kidz script. Shouldn’t the Flash be, like, fighting a giant gorilla instead of doing a drug bust? It’s the frickin’ Flash, not Watchmen. Leave the gritty stuff out of there and write something engaging.
Three points that I stress over…
1. It is always dark in Central City. Which is funny, because it was almost always the middle of the day in classic Flash comics. The Central City on display here is more or less a duplicate of Gotham from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie.
2. References to the source material or very obvious and forced. “Meet me at Garrick Street.” “What? Garrick Street?” “Yes, Jay… Garrick Street.”
3. Iris is nowhere to be found past the initial episode. She’s a teenage artist in the pilot, then she suddenly runs away to France. Shameful. There are two rock solid comic book couples in my mind: Lois & Clark, and Barry & Iris.
Posted in nostalgia on 02/04/2009 03:55 pm by Zachary
A Nintendo Customer Service training video from 1991. Training video is meant to convey information clearly… so what’s up with the soft-focus butter lens? I imagine some film school drop-out was not happy with his life choices.
