Flash-backs, and red glad rags.
Now here's a point - a "Flashpoint", if you will - we have something of a surfeit of scarlet speedsters these days. Whether it's the continuing adventures of Grant Gustin as the Fastest Man Alive in the CW's The Flash (in it's fourth season at time of typing), being about to debut of the big screen in the form of Ezra Miller in Justice League (Zack Snyder [and Joss Whedon], 2017) or various appearances in animated adventures voiced by TV's forgotten Ferris Bueller Charlie Schlatter and Alex Niforatos among others, DC Comics' crimson comet has never been so ubiquitous.
Timely enough then, if time be need be, to take a retrospective genuflect at the first live-action iteration of the iconic sonic boom dodger - the 1990 television series starring John Wesley Shipp (Bastian's dad in The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter [George Miller, 1990], Dawson's dad in perpetual teen-angst whine fest that blighted my late teens Dawson's Creek [1998-2001] and the current Gustin-flavoured Barry Allen's dad in The Flash - the guy does seem to have somewhat cornered the market in playing dads). I wasn't aware of the fact that an actual ongoing TV series was extant at the time, it having being shown on Sky in the UK a few years before we got round to having satellite television (though an uncle did have a BSB "Squariel" for those old enough to actually remember what they were and find it amusing - a decision up there with "Beta will outlast VHS, it's just a fad" and "I'm saving up for a Laserdisc player" in the Great Moves irony stakes), but the pilot movie did appear on the shelf of the local video shop, seemingly as a new stand-alone superhero movie in its own right (followed a year later by Flash II: Revenge of the Trickster [Danny Bilson, 1991], guest starring Mark Hamill himself as the villain, a 'sequel' whose slightly uneven feel was by dint of being two episodes of the series edited together. A further trip to the Well of Diminishing Returns would lead to my baffled reaction of "Another one?!?" as Flash 3: Deadly Nightshade [Bruce Bilson, 1992] arrived unbidden to an uncaring world and even my childhood self would suspect that this wasn't a "real film").
A while back, i postulated in a piece for the rather nice website We Are Cult upon the notion of a 'Marvel Phase Zero' - a an early stage of the Marvel Comics Universe pre- Jon Favreau's 2008 Iron Man consisting of the various TV pilots and series of the late 1970s and early '80s (the original article can be found here: http://wearecult.rocks/the-original-dr-strange-and-other-stories-marvels-phase-zero ) - and perhaps the DCEU, such as it currently is, had their own incipient epoch in the '70s and '80s; Christopher Reeve's four Superman outings and Michael Keaton's Gothamite Dark Knight being of the period. The Wesley Shipp incarnation should, in my opinion, stand proud in these ranks of DC's emergent age alongside the aforesaid heroes, as well as Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman, Helen Slater's Supergirl and Dick Durock's Swamp Thing.
The setting of course is Central City, a twilit noirish urban sprawl almost but not quite identical in look and feel to the Gotham of Tim Burton's then-recent Chiropteran Crusader blockbuster Batman, but on a slightly smaller televisual scale (this being filmed at the Burbank studios of Warners rather than Pinewood). This small-m metropolis is under siege from a criminal motorcycle gang known as the Dark Riders led by the enigmatic, charismatic (and probably systematic and hydromatic) Pike - played with a scene chewing elan by Dex Dexter of Dynasty Michael Nader, finally getting the Alexis role of butch bitch and having his own henchmen to boss about and abuse. On the tail of the Riders' trail of havoc and destruction is newly promoted chief of the Central City police Jay Allen (Tim Thomerson, a familiar face in numerous Charles Band movies but chiefly Jack Deth in 1984's Trancers and its many sequels, as well as incarnating the eponymous Dollman [Albert Pyun, 1991]), scion of a family of CCPD cops headed by patriarch Henry Allen (M. Emmett Walsh, who's starred in... oh, everything, really, from Blade Runner [Ridley Scott, 1982] to The Pope of Greenwich Village [Stuart Rosenberg, 1984] to Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat [Anthony Hickox, 1989] to providing the voice of Cosmic Owl in Adventure Time [2010+]). Henry's pride in his eldest son's following in his flat footsteps is matched by his antipathy toward's his younger son's choice of criminal investigation vocation, Barry (Shipp) being a 'mere' forensic science investigator - or a CSI as i believe they're known these days ('tis perhaps only by the caprice of chance of network that the present Flash series didn't find itself titled CSI: Central City).
Barry balances his daily routine of dodging his father's long streak of pithy remarks at the family dinner table with long day and night shifts of lab work alongside compatriot Julio Mendez (Alex Desert, Swingers [Doug Liman, 1996], Becker [1998-2004]) as well as trying to find personal time for his love life with beautiful bohemian artist Iris West (Paula Marshall, whom i remember well from such films as Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth [Anthony Hickox, 1992], Warlock: the Armageddon [Hickox again, 1993] and Full Eclipse [O HAI, ANTHONY, 1993]). Run down and run off his feet with the demands of life and the nine to five in the morning overtimes as he does his part to analyse clues to help take down the Riders and their anarchic spate of bombings and robbings, Barry finds running very much a theme when one dark and stormy night the elements come together and a stray bolt of lightning strikes the scientist (rather than the postman, as Wayne Coyne predicted) and the convergence of flash of cosmic light and the rack of frothing and broiling chemicals that his blasted body belts into transforms him into (all together now) "THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE".
Recovering rather quickly and checking himself out of hospital, Barry begins to realise that his brush with the beyond via a bolt from the blue may have some side effects when he runs to catch the morning bus and suddenly finds himself accelerating uncontrollably at high velocity for miles before barreling down the beach like a bullet, kicking up clouds of sand and getting in the sea before emerging from the brine gasping for breath and finding that the friction of his velocity his reduced his clothing to rags. Finding that he must consume vast amounts of food to replace the calories burned by his speedy metabolism, Barry reluctantly engages with Dr Tina McGee (Amanda Pays, Theora Jones of Max Headroom [1985, 1987-88], as well as starring in late '80s SF horrors The Kindred [Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow, 1998] and Leviathan [George P. Cosmatos, 1989]) of S. T. A. R. Labs - despite his misgivings at their shady past and alleged unethical experimentation - in an effort to understand his new found abilities and attempt to control the biological battleground of his body. After confiding in Barry that the ruined reputation of her laboratory is because her former partner (in both the sciencing and sexing senses) tested an experimental drug upon himself and sacrificed himself upon the altar of knowledge, Tina supplies the nascent speedster with a prototype Soviet scarlet suit invented to withstand the intense pressures of deep sea diving as an ingenious method of cutting down on the wear and tear of his ensemble coming unseamed as he speeds around a test track.
After it is revealed that the villainous Nicholas Pike was Jay Allen's former partner (his facial dueling scars the result of the elder Allen discovering his crooked compadre's nefarious undertakings and leaving him for dead), Pike sees Jay heading the CCPD task force charged with bringing him down on the local news show hosted by Joe Klein (the ubiquitous Richard Belzer of every cop show going for the past hundred years) and decides to lay and bait a trap for his erstwhile comrade in arms utilising the charms of the alluring Lila (Lycia Naff, who played Ensign Sonya Gomez in a couple of 1989 episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation before essaying the role of T. C. in the Troma-tastic Chopper Chicks in Zombietown [Dan Hoskins, 1989]). After Jay falls for the obvious should-be-jailed bait and Pike takes his cruel retribution, Barry manages to rocket to the scene of the crime only in time to cradle his dying brother in his arms and fling back his head to howl the requisite "Nooooooo!!!" at the uncaring sky. What should rightfully be a cliched scene is sold, though, by the acting of both Thomerson and Shipp. Vowing to avenge his sibling, Barry asks Tina to fashion more of the speed suit: "I need a hood, to cover my face - and gloves, so i won't leave fingerprints" (there's all those years at forensic detection school paying off right there) and becomes a red clad avenger of the night, taking down Pike and his gang and ending their cycle of cycling destruction in a furious Flash of vengeance.
An effective superhero origin story in its own right (something that DC, Wonder Woman [Patty Jenkins, 2017] aside, seems to find it increasingly difficult to manage on screen these days) as well as the pilot for a TV series, the 1990 version of The Flash went on to have a big influence upon the modern televisual incarnation. Not only has John Wesley Shipp appeared multiple times in the newer show as both Henry Allen and original Flash Jay Garrick, but both Amanda Pays and Alex Desert have made appearances as Dr Christina McGee and Captain Julio Mendez respectively, while their original roles of lab chum and sexy but frosty scientist with dead fiancee have been assumed by Carlos Valdes' Cisco Ramon and Danielle Panabaker's Caitlin Snow respectively. While Iris West (played by Candice Patton) has a major co-starring role in the current show, sadly Paula Marshall's Iris only appeared in the pilot and was absent from the subsequent series.
Maybe if Anthony Hickox had directed...
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