"...Or make us yearn for the days of John Wesley Shipp fighting Luke Skyw-- uh, Mark Hamill. We'll know in a year."

You say it like the CBS FLASH series with John Wesley Shipp was a bad thing?!?!?!

I loved the television series.
Thought it was great.

Um, why Gotham? Why not Keystone? I doubt they are planning crossovers with the new Batman movie or the failed Birds of Prey show... moving the character to Gotham strikes me as an indication that this is going to be a "change everything from the comic book that worked" experience like LXG instead of a "use what works and change selected things for the general audience" experience like the X-Men movies.

I, too, loved that TV series. I honestly wonder why it was canceled. It was close to the original comic book translation (and it starred the more commercially interesting Flash; to do a faithful translation of the Wally West Flash you'd need a six-hour mini-series describing Flash legacies and describing to me why this guy doesn't have a real job) and it was a better than passable sci-fi TV series. It was better than Robocop and.... not Now and Again, but you know what I mean. Heck, I liked it better than Buffy.

Now, Smallville works because it is faithful to and draws from all eras of the source material. Very little of it is genuinely original stuff and most of it is a twist on old Superman lore. Very few derivations are not taken from the Superman stuff. (Although not having any evil Krpytonians pop up is actually quite a departure from the old Superman lore. Zod has a habit of popping up in whatever incarnation. Go ahead, break his habit.)

Birds of Prey suffered because it used two or three bits, periods, and comic series as source material and wasn't that faithful to any of it. Which means the stories sucked and thus readers ran away. For crying out loud.... metahuman bars? Half of the back-story of this show was riffed from the X-Men. Huntress was primarily butchered. The Birds of Prey comic book series wasn't used in terms of actual back story. That could have helped eventually, given that it was more Mission: Impossible.... and was more interesting than this wierd "New Gotham City" crepe. I'm just guessing that more exotic locations and diverse adventures would be better than another urban "freak of the week".

Not that I'm against super-powered foes, but the show didn't do them very well and I wasn't interested. Mutant X and Smallville did it better for crying out loud.

Where was I? What's wrong with a Flash series with costumes and super-villains and growth? I want Flash-facts. I want police science. "Flash" had some CSI, forensic science, before "CSI".

Dangit. I'll watch a couple episodes. I expect it to stink.

And I already miss the John Wesley Shipp Flash and have for awhile.

CJA

Nope, not a bad thing. I liked the show, but remain on the fence about the costume.

Jayme Blaschke has written an excellent article entitled "The Fastest Cancellation Alive" at http://www.revolutionsf.com/article/1993.html