One Season Wonders: The Flash (1990-1991)
The Flash aired a year after Tim Burton’s Batman, and the influences of the film on the show are massive. Flash’s Central City has a dark, dripping, gothic look to it, not as over the top as Burton’s Gotham, but still there. Pay special attention to the art deco civic murals that seem to adorn every building. Danny Elfman even does the theme song. Even the camera angles–from street level looking up, cutting across streets at angles–and the cartoony look of the villains owe something to Burton’s Batman.
Watching the pilot episode on DVD some seventeen years after the show aired, I forgot about the Burtonesque feel of it. Or maybe in 1990, blown away by Batman, I thought all superhero shows should look like that. I still really like that style, but with the distance of time I can now see it for what it was: a trend, probably best left behind.
The story in the pilot episode is simple, even formulaic. A freak lab accident involving lightning and chemicals grant Barry Allen the power of speed, which he learns to control with the help of Dr. Christina McGee. He’s reluctant to accept his powers at first, but when his brother is killed by a motorcycle gang wreaking havoc throughout the city, he dons the red suit and seeks justice. A formulaic story, but well done in this case. It doesn’t try to be any more clever or complex than it is, and therefore doesn’t muddy the waters.
This time around, the thing I really enjoyed about the show is the characters. They have snappy dialog, good chemistry, and real human depth. They have families and feelings. This doesn’t feel like a show about a superhero so much as it feels like a show about a regular guy who happens to acquire a superpower and has to figure out what to do about it. (Sound familiar? Maybe that’s one of the reasons I haven’t gotten into Heroes. It just doesn’t feel all that new to me.) John Wesley Shipp and Amanda Pays are lots of fun to watch, and I look forward to delving into the rest of the episodes on the DVD set. Future episodes include Mark Hamill as the Trickster, and he seizes the role with obvious relish, seeming to use it to finally lay the specter of Luke Skywalker to rest.
A funny side note: Barry works in a police department crime lab and gets no end of grief from his beat cop father–and the rest of the force–about not being a “real” cop. That sort of storyline never would have happened in a world with CSI.
Alisha said,
Wrote on December 5, 2006 @ 7:38 pm
I loved this show. As much as I like Heros, I would trade it for The Flash in a heartbeat.