Smallville had Christopher Reeve, Margo Kidder, Terence Stamp, Annette O'Toole, Marc McClure and Helen Slater from the movies and I'm sure Marlon Brando would have done it if he hadn't died. Then they had Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. They even did a little Dukes of Hazzard reunion complete with a Ford Charger. Impressive stuff for one show. I'd love to see Shipp make an appearance and maybe they can throw in Amanda Pays too.
Ya know Shipp is old enough to play an Earth 2 Jay Garrick at this point. A season ending cliff hanger where Barry vibrates to another world. Very much in keeping with the science aspect of the universe they are creating. I would really geek out at that point.
Err, no, "vibrating to another world" is about as far from science as you can get. Arrow may be adding superpowers up to a point, but the show is basically set in a realistic universe, so I'd be surprised if they did anything as fanciful and absurd as transitioning to another quantum reality just by wiggling really fast.
Well there have been repeated mentions of a particle accelerator on news broadcasts on Arrow so I think it's safe to say this will play a part in Barry Allen getting his powers. This is pretty unscientific as well so I don't see how bringing other realities into play is a stretch. Everything about the Flash is fanciful.
So, the way this is headed, The Flash will be the first super powered hero of this version of the DC universe.
But that doesn't mean you throw every fanciful idea at the audience at once. It should be kept in mind that these shows aren't made for comics/animation fans who are used to accepting all this weirdness, but for a general TV audience that needs to be eased into it. You can't push so far that the audience loses its willingness to suspend disbelief. So if you're going to inject fanciful elements into what's been a realistic universe until now, you do it gradually, a little at a time. You don't just abruptly toss out all the rules and spring a whole universe's worth of absurdities on the audience all at once. Well, there have been rumors that Stephen Amell or Grant Gustin would cameo in Man of Steel 2, thus merging the successful Arrowverse with the shaky DC film universe in hopes of shoring it up a bit. But I'd prefer it if they didn't, because it's hard to reconcile Arrow with a universe where Batman's been around for decades; plus there's been no mention in the show of the fall of Metropolis and the discovery of Kryptonians, which was supposed to be a world-changing event. It would be an awkward merger.
Hey, some women can do that! I've thought of this myself. The simplest answer would be, if Amell does appear in the film, to age him 10-15 years. Of course this would mean the audience would have to ignore any direct mention of dates.
You and me both. Well there is a certain symmetry to that, as the Flash launched DC's Silver Age of Super-heroes.
I was going to post that! I am quite wary of how the Arrow universe will suddenly become populated by super-heroes. It is not impossible to do, but certainly means reworking much of the show's premise. I would think Christopher is on the right track, to gradually introduce fantastical concepts. I could see the concept of super powers appear gradually, perhaps with a new Count Vertigo, the Lazarus Pits, or the current Deathstroke. Later on the show can witness reports about Batman and Gotham and then the reaction to Man of Steel should be incorporated. As for Flash, a similar approach could introduce the cosmic treadmill over the course of the first season, ending with a visit to Earth 2 for Crisis on Two Earths.
I've seen a couple sites with this quote from Arrow EP Greg Berlanti, where he discusses whether or not Arrow will crossover with the movies: Here's the CBR story.
I really, really don't want any "cosmic treadmill." It's ridiculous. I don't want the Speed Force, I don't want Barry to be able to run at the speed of light or whatever. I want a Flash who obeys the laws of physics and can't run faster than maybe a few hundred kilometers per hour, tops. I mean, once past about 27,000 kph, you'd reach orbital velocity and just fly off the ground, so there's no possible way a human being could run faster than that; beyond that point he'd have to be flying. That's always annoyed me about the Flash in comics and cartoons, the way that basic fact was ignored, along with numerous other facts of friction, inertia, reaction time, you name it. I prefer a Flash who has some marginally plausible limitations on his speed, like the one from the '90s show.
^ The Flash from the 90s show got a guy out of an electric chair as the switch was being pulled and no one saw him. That's the kind of thing I want to see. Being able to run a little faster than a cheetah doesn't make for an impressive Flash. Some of the problems you mentioned like physics, reaction time and whatnot have been a problem for me as well. I don't have a good rationale, but I sometimes like to think that he's in his own little "bubble" that exists at a different pace and that he's not just moving really fast.
Peta vs. The Flash. "We have cellphone footage of you decapitating half a dozen gorillas, how do you plead?"
I personally want all the bells and whistles that come with the Flash. If you are going to do the Flash, you might as well go all out.
That's not what I said. A cheetah's top speed is around 60 MPH; I'm talking about hundreds of MPH, the speed range of the John Wesley Shipp Flash. I just don't want it to get to the kind of speed that would send an object into orbit, which would be a couple of orders of magnitude higher. And I certainly don't want to deal with the stupidity of someone time-traveling or crossing dimensions just by running on a treadmill. (Although 60 MPH worked just fine for Steve Austin...) Which wouldn't explain it, because the physical processes and laws around him would not be accelerated accordingly. If your perceptions were sped up a hundred times, then one second would feel like a hundred seconds to you, so you'd perceive things seeming to take a hundred times as long to fall to the ground, which would be equivalent to feeling a gravity of one ten-thousandth of a gee. Physics would behave for you as if you were on a small asteroid. Plus the air molecules would seem to take a hundred times longer to be displaced, so it would feel like the air was a hundred times thicker. It would feel more like swimming than running. Not to mention that the air would feel a hundred times harder to breathe. And since physics requires that you measure the same speed of light regardless of your reference frame, you'd perceive distances being compressed to compensate, and wavelengths of light being altered, so you'd find the world around you rendered incomprehensible.