News We Almost Got a Daredevil Show in the 1990s, but The Flash Put a Stop To It
- Thread starter JD
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No, really I would be really curious to read the proposal. The idea of Daredevil as a dark urban hero was practically born with the arrival of Roger McKenzie / Frank Miller. Before that he used to limit himself to fighting the usual multicolored supervillain every month. Before these two writers came, I think Daredevil fought "normal" criminals less than a dozen times.You know what? I would have been curious to see THIS tv show
This is a 70s cover, and it is absolutely representative of the pre-Miller period.
Yeah, that does seem more plausible, and there's been almost 30 years, so it's not that hard to believe Smith could be remembering wrong.
Thanks for that information. I hadn't heard that Cruz was working on trying to get Bixby a star on the Walk of Fame (insane that he doesn't have one already, but I shouldn't be surprised). I am disappointed to read that Ferrigno hasn't offered any money for that effort. He generally seems like a down-to-Earth guy who had a great relationship with Bixby.
Cruz and Ferrigno were the first two people I thought of as interview contributors for such a potential documentary so it's good to read that Cruz is making that particular effort with the star.
Ah, the dark ages when more than one comic book/super hero show was a deal breaker. These days I struggle just to keep up with them all.
I assume that's Ben Carruthers and Angela Bowie?You know what? I would have been curious to see THIS tv show
P.S. Here's Bowie auditioning as Wonder Woman: http://www.wonderwomanmuseum.com/An...ition to her appearance,refusal to wear a bra.
And where you can see the super alter ego persona exactly two times per episodes, in the first fifteen minutes and the last.
It started out dark, because it was emulating Batman '89. But it quickly got lighter and started playing up the humor more. By the time we got to "The Trial of the Trickster" at the end of its lone season, it had achieved full-blown Batman '66-level camp.
Seems really hard to figure out the logic behind this move, if the story is correct, seeing as Wonder Woman ran from 1975-79, The Incredible Hulk from 1977-82 and The Amazing Spider-man from 1977-79. Obviously fashions, demographics etc change over the space of a decade on tv, but you’d think coming a few years after the success of the Burton Batman film that there’d have been room for 2 superhero series on 2 different networks.
I admit I didn't see the movie, but perhaps the costume was a factor in NOT picking the series..?
Except that all three of those shows you mentioned were on the same network. Wonder Woman started out on ABC, but it had moved to CBS by the time the other two came along. Although they were competing with at least two non-comics-based superhero shows, The Six Million Dollar Man on ABC and The Bionic Woman on ABC and later NBC. But in that case, the later shows were trying to ride the wave of an existing superhero trend. The Flash, the first live-action network superhero show since Hulk, was an attempt to start a new trend, so the dynamic was reversed. Maybe CBS wanted to nip potential competitors in the bud.
As I mentioned, there were two other superhero series on the air along with The Flash in the 1990-1 season, Swamp Thing on USA and The Adventures of Superboy in syndication. But they wouldn't have been seen as competition on the level of a rival broadcast network. So it's an iffy story, but not completely out of the question.
If anything, it would've been the other way around -- the network suits would've been more resistant to an authentic costume. As I mentioned, The Flash's producers had to talk the CBS suits into an authentic design rather than a simpler track-suit sort of thing. More to the point, America in 1989 was still in the midst of the "Satanic panic," an era of moral outrage over allegations of widespread Satanism, so any use of devil imagery would've brought down the wrath of the religious right. There's no way the suits would've risked that.
I actually rather liked the costume. It looked reasonable and practical for someone who skulks on rooftops and does acrobatic fighting, and it had a "ninja" quality that (though I didn't know it at the time) is a pretty good fit for Daredevil.
Agreed. Plus, that's a really terrible photo. Seeing Rex in it, and how he moves , it's a far better costume than it looks there.
For anyone interested, it's available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in the US, and on the free ad supported Tubi service. Sadly, it's in SD, but they've managed to secure a better looking print than what the dvd release put out years ago.
It’s worth mentioning that the producers of The Flash were fighting with CBS on what that show should be like it’s whole,season. Producer Danny Bilson has said CBS did not want any super villains in the beginning. Than all of the sudden changed their minds when the Pilot aired. But many of the early episodes had already been completed. Some scripts were completely rewritten or abandoned. Bilson said that the biggest frustration of the cancellation was it happened just when they figured out what worked best. No idea if they would have keep the Camp tone of Trial of the Trickster all the time. I suspect not. That worked specifically for the Trickster. More that they were give full permission to explore comic book ideas and characters. Plus the technical and special effects challenges of doing a show like that for television was not easy. They finally got a handle on what they could do and it ended.
I read that they planned to do a Vandal Savage episode if they got picked up for the back nine, since immortality is a superpower that requires no special effects. But even though they got the back nine, they never got around to that episode. The only comics villains we ultimately got were the Trickster, Captain Cold, and Mirror Master, plus a clone of Barry that was their rough approximation of the Reverse Flash.
But yes, the visual effects were pretty groundbreaking. They look fairly basic by modern standards, but they did things that were virtually unprecedented at the time, like combining normal and sped-up film footage in the same shot and having them appear to interact, and using optical techniques to create the Flash's motion blur.
Although to me, one of the most impressive things they did was to build the entire Central City Police Department building facade on the backlot just for the show. They really pulled out all the stops for that production. Last year on my Patreon, I debuted my weekly review series with The Flash '90 and followed it up (or actually alternated it, for a bit) with the early-2000s Birds of Prey (since I was focusing on series retroactively added to the Arrowmultiverse), and it was instructive how differently they both used the Warner Bros. backlot, with The Flash making it look great with excellent cinematography and set dressing, while BoP seemed to do most of its exterior shooting in the back half of the season on a single block of the backlot with very tight camera angles, like it had a tenth of the outdoor-filming budget.