Spoilers DC TV Arrow/Flash Universe Crossover Discussion

This isn't specifically crossover-related, but I wanted to talk about it here anyway.

It's been frustrating me lately that, for some reason, the true extent and brilliance of the Arrowverse has yet to be fully recognized.

The franchise is the first and only that I can think of to have explicitly linked 9 series spanning 24 years and 3 different networks, but, for whatever reason, there are still some out there who don't or won't recognize this, and I can't understand why this is.

 

Nine series... let's see, that would be The Flash (CBS 1990), Arrow, The Flash (2014), Constantine (NBC), Supergirl (originally CBS), Legends of Tomorrow, Vixen, Freedom Fighters: The Ray, and Constantine (CW Seed)? Not sure about counting Constantine twice, since it's theoretically the same version of the character. But I don't think you can mean Black Lightning, since we don't yet know whether it will have Arrowverse links (though I'd be surprised if it didn't tie in eventually).

Also, that's 27 years so far.

 

That's right.

The live-action and animated Constantine series are different projects even though they feature the exact same version of the John Constantine character; a good analogy, IMO, would be the two self-titled albums released by the band Fleetwood Mac some 7 years apart in 1968 and 1975, respectivlely.

I was only counting the gap between the '90 Flash series and the '14 Flash series, which is 24 years.

I'm kind of surprised that we still don't know specifically who was responsible for having the 2014 Flash series be so referential to and build so explicitly and firmly upon the legacy of the 1990 Flash series, but it's clearly something that was decided on fairly early in the development process of the 2014 series given the way in which it was originally conveyed.

 

Probably because it is only linked until it gets in the way and then the other earth is not really linked until time for the next network event.

 

Umm, what?

That's not how things work.

 

These producers are obviously big fans of the '90 show and other older superhero shows and films, judging from all the legacy casting they do. I would assume the '90 Flash references started out just as a throwaway in-joke or two and gradually evolved into something more. Creativity isn't about having everything planned out to the last detail ahead of time, it's about trying things out and seeing what works -- or what you can get away with. The more successful a show becomes, the more its creators are allowed to get away with, so things that they may have initially tried to avoid or just subtly hint at as a wink to the audience can evolve into something fuller -- like how Supergirl went from "We will never, ever cross over with the Arrowverse" to "Kara keeps a dimension-jumping gizmo in her junk drawer."

 

It didn't start out with just references, though; it started with casting John Wesley Shipp as Henry Allen and Amanda Pays and Mark Hamill as Tina McGee and The Trickster, respectively, and just built from there.

Also, it was never said that Supergirl would "never, ever cross over with the Arrowverse"; that is a misconception based on an inaccurate read of comments Nina Tassler made.

Supergirl was always meant to link up to Arrow and The Flash at some point; creating that link just wasn't where the producers' energies were initially focused.

 

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Those started out as Easter eggs, just winks to the audience. But over time, they evolved into something more.

Your problem is that assume everything has only one possible meaning or intention, and that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative process. Creators don't know what will happen in the future. So we hedge our bets. We don't decide everything in advance -- we put in things that might develop one way or might develop a different way, depending on exigencies. Good plans are flexible, able to change in response to circumstances. A great deal of creation is making things up as you go, and discovering new possibilities that you didn't see in advance. What you end up with is never the exact same thing you imagined when you started the process.

 

^ Some creators don't decide everything in advance; others do.

A lot of TV writers will lay out the specifics, either broadly or down to minute details, of their major arcs and let individual episodes evolve as they will within the broader framework of those pre-planned narratives.

For myself, as well as others I've collaborated with, the process has been one of planning out specific overarching narrative plots and letting individual episode ideas evolve on the fly.

 

The CW DC shows are fun, but they have some tough competition in just the live-action tv superhero genre. Netflix's Jessica Jones and FX's Legion are arguably of better quality, for instance.

 

Why does it have to be a competition? I don't see those shows as being competitors with the Arrowverse, because they're not trying for the same niche. Superhero comics are not a single genre, but a mashup of every conceivable genre, so there's room for many different coexisting approaches and no need to manufacture artificial rivalries.

Certainly those shows you mention aim higher and tell more sophisticated stories than the Arrowverse. But what the Arrowverse does better than anything else on TV -- and even better than the MCU -- is capturing the sheer, unapologetic zaniness and fun of Silver and Bronze Age comics. Marvel has gotten to the point where it can do things like Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok, but a lot of its shows try to remain fairly "grounded" and resist fully embracing the costumes and code names and crazy powers and storylines. Arrow did that at first, when it was still new and trying not to scare off the casual audience, but by now, the Arrowverse just goes whole hog with the telepathic gorillas and evil sorcerors and parallel Earths and alien invasions and all of it.

The Arrowverse is also the most successful live-action equivalent of the interconnectedness of comics universes. The MCU comes pretty close, but its interconnectedness is undermined by the fact that the movies pretty much ignore the TV shows, and the Netflix shows barely acknowledge the movies (and persistently fail to put Stark/Avengers Tower in the Manhattan skyline). But in the Arrowverse, everything is fair game for crossing over.

 

It is the largest live-action comic book based universe, and it's only a matter of time before it overtakes the DCAU (exactly how soon depending on how you count all the non-NuclearArrowverse stuff and the status of Black Lightning) as the largest overall.

 

The Arrowverse isn't anywhere near to overtaking the DCAU in terms of content, since, between television series and feature-length movies, the DCAU's content is exactly double that of the Arrowverse (18 entries to the Arrowverse's 9).

 

Hi folks
Sorry I've been away so long I had other things brewing.

But what was so wrong with creating a dedicated 'Crisis on Earth X' thread to handle that just as there are dedicated spoilery threads for the latest genre blockbusters as and when they're released?

Hi Timelord Victorious, obviously it's your thread and you should be able to do with it as you will. What I would say though is that this thread was created in February 2016 and the crossover didn't debut until almost December 2017 and until then there wasn't a red spoiler warning affixed. Anyway that's my last word on this other than to recommend in future that a rule be laid down that a well-established thread that doesn't have either a spoiler warning in the thread title or a red spoiler tag should suddenly become so.
Anyway enough of that. Onto the crossover itself. I enjoyed it, preferring it to the 'Invasion' crossover last year which I also enjoyed. This time I found that the story was much more cohesive - I thought the 'Arrow' segment of 'Invasion' didn't really do that - and things flowed nicely right down to the common opening credits though it would have been nice if we'd seen more of the 'Legends' in episodes one to three along with the Earth-38 'Supergirl' supporting casts. As for specifics:-
Am I the only one who was concerned about Sara's relationship with Scotch given that both her father and her late sister have/had drink problems?
The Kryptonite arrow, where did Ollie get it from and how did he know about it?
What happened to the bodies of Nazi-Oliver and his troops after the Battle of Central City?
Will we ever know any details of the encounter between Earth-1 Reverse-Flash & Earth-38 Superman? By the way I interpreted what Thawne said to Supergirl about being faster, not that he was able to escape the Man of Steel but that he was able to kill him. Think how that dialogue would have sounded if the show had been a Western and Thawne was a gunfighter.
Kara to Nazi Kara: "General, would you care to step outside?" Loved it.
I would have liked it if it had been Ray rather than Nate that caught Supergirl when she fell to the ground (a scene I felt was taken from 'Superman Returns') and said to her: "Easy miss, I've got you." before going on to extol the statistical virtues of flight as the safest form of travel.
Someone upthread mentioned the business with the unloaded gun trick and Olliver falling for it (which given his familiarity with weapons you'd have thought he'd cottoned onto) and asked had anyone not fallen for it. I can't remember the specific show but I remember a scene where the hero escapes captivity armed with an unloaded gun and when the villain and their henchman catches up to the hero and recaptures him the hero gives the gun to the villain who says something like: "You do know this gun wasn't loaded, don't you?" The hero replies: "After what I just did do you think I'd have given it back to you if it was loaded?" I just wish I could remember where that's from.

 

You're forgetting, though, that the DCAU's episodes are half the length of Arrowverse episodes. Let's see... The DC Animated Universe had a total of 384 half-hour episodes, four movies running an average of about 74 minutes each, and 44 brief web shorts averaging c. 3 minutes (between Gotham Girls and Lobo, though their canonicity is questionable). The Arrowverse (including Constantine) currently has 284 hour-long episodes (306 if you want to count the 1990 Flash), the Vixen movie running 75 minutes (encompassing the web episodes so I'm not counting them separately), and the 6 episodes of The Ray running maybe 5 minutes each. So the Arrowverse has already gone well beyond the DCAU in terms of total hours of content, and by the end of next season it should've roughly tied or surpassed the DCAU in terms of number of episodes.

 

I decided to put this here, rather than the Black Lightning thread as it concerned the whole 'Arrowverse', but does anyone else think there is significance to the inclusion of Black Lightning in this extended 'suiting up promo' with the other four shows vis a vis whether its part of the 'Arrowverse'? http://www.superherohype.com/news/4...n-extended-suit-up-promo-from-the-cw#/slide/1

 

No. Black Lightning is not an Arrowverse series and isn't likely to ever become one.

 

No, because it's a promotion for the network. They want people watching all the shows, and they think the fans of their other superhero series would want to watch this one too. It's got nothing to do with in-story continuity. The CW has done plenty of promos where characters from different, unrelated shows interact.

Now, unlike DigificWriter, I think it's inevitable that we'll eventually see some sort of crossover if BL succeeds, because the Berlanti shows are big on giving fans what they want to see, and because the established multiverse premise makes it easy enough to achieve. I mean, this is a franchise defined by friendliness to canon immigration -- Constantine, Supergirl, and implicitly the 1990 The Flash have all been folded into continuity despite being from different networks and, in two cases, different production companies as well. So it's hard to believe they wouldn't be willing to find a way to fold in a show from the same network and the same production company. Sure, the fact that it's filmed in Atlanta creates an obstacle, but keep in mind that Supergirl was filmed in LA when the Flash first crossed over to it, so that obstacle is not insurmountable. Naturally they're going to want to let BL establish its own separate identity at first, but we might start seeing crossovers in season 2, perhaps. (Sort of like how Static Shock started as its own separate thing -- even referring to Superman as a fictional character in its second episode -- but then had a Batman: The Animated Series crossover as its second-season premiere and was increasingly integrated into the DC Animated Universe over time.)

What I find interesting is that the promo included Kid Flash as one of the heroes suiting up, although I'm not sure if we saw Keiynan Lonsdale's face in the suit. Maybe that doesn't mean anything except that the promo was planned and shot before certain story decisions were made, but maybe it's a hint that KF's time in the Arrowverse isn't over.

 

The reason I don't think Black Lightning will ever be integrated into the Arrowverse is that I see no evidence of there being any interest in doing so from anyone involved in the series.

With the other integrated Arrowverse shows - the 90s Flash and especially Constantine - there was plenty of evidence to back up there being an interest in making them part of the "shared narrative family".

Supergirl, for its part, was never NOT part of the Arrowverse, despite perceptions to the contrary, so there was no integration necessary.

 

What is there to see? I'm always bemused by the general public's assumption that the few dribs and drabs of information they get about a new series or movie represents everything there is to know about it. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we see in the public record is just the tip of the iceberg, especially for a brand-new series that hasn't premiered yet and whose makers are understandably keeping a great deal about it secret. Most of what goes on in the making of a TV show is never reported to the public, at least not until some time after the fact.

See, here you're contradicting yourself, because you're acknowledging that there were perceptions to the contrary. When Supergirl was new, there were news items in which the executives denied that a crossover was on the table. You didn't believe those claims at the time -- I just went back and checked your posts from the period -- so why are you so quick to believe the exact same sort of claims about BL?

Also, even if you're right that there's currently no intention of a crossover, it's always possible that those plans could change in the future.