Just using a bit of hyperbole with the cheetah comment. Did Shipp's Flash really run that slow? They might have established a speed at some point but a lot of times it seemed like he could move a lot faster. As for the physics, yeah it can be problematic if you think about it but you can either ignore it or use a bit of creative jiggering to make something sound workable.
I really liked the no-powers universe of Green Arrow, but if the producers are going the Super Powers route then running at the speed of sound is as silly as running at the speed of light. It requires the same kind of psuedo-science technobabble as pretty much everything else in the genre.
Fast is relative. Say a typical city block is about 100 meters long. At, say, 600 kilometers per hour, it would take a hundredth of a minute or 0.6 seconds to traverse it, which would seem incredibly fast to a human observer. For comparison, we're talking something close to the speed of a handgun bullet, and that's effectively invisible to the naked eye. It's also about half the speed of sound, so it's really damn fast. But orbital velocity is more like 27,000 kph, nearly 50 times faster than that. And the speed of light is over a billion kph, 40,000 times faster than orbital velocity. So the Flash can be really, really fast on any meaningful human scale without getting anywhere close to orbital speed, let alone the speed of light. I think being faster than a speeding bullet is plenty fast enough.
In the 90s show he created a sonic boom in the pilot episode when he was testing his limits on a test track.
^Okay, but the speed of sound is only twice the sample speed I gave, so it's effectively of the same magnitude. It's still about 1/25th of the speed you'd have to run before you were too fast for gravity to hold you, and it's still microscopic compared to the speed of light. The problem with us humans is that we tend to treat every magnitude beyond our range of comprehension as interchangeable. So we see every speed that's beyond everyday experience as just being uniformly fast and think it's a short hop from the speed of sound to the speed of light, even though the truth is that they're immensely far apart. It's the same conceptual habit that leads us to assume everything in the past happened at the same time and tell stories about cavemen living with dinosaurs even though the latter were about a thousand times more distant in time.
This speed was set after COIEs when Wally's limit became roughly the speed of sound for a while (the slow moving Flash!). I don't know how long it was before his speeds got ramped up again though.
And later when a missile chased him, while he was running and exploded, it propelled him "through the time barrier" into the future, where he had an adventure and returned to the past using a similar method. That sounds like light speed.
Wouldn't be the first time a Flash adaptation has blended elements of Barry and Wally into the same character. The '90 TV series' Barry Allen was teamed with Tina McGee, part of Wally's supporting cast from the comics, and had Wally's need to eat tons of food to support his metabolism. And we already know from Arrow that this universe's characters can have major, major differences from their comics namesakes. I'm still trying to figure out why Felicity Smoak was named after a businesswoman antagonist/eventual mother-in-law of Firestorm. There doesn't seem to be any resemblance between that character and the Felicity we know and love from the show.
If there's a Detective West in the Flash series, it stands to reason there will be an Iris West on that show as well. And since Jesse L. Martin is playing the detective, that means that Iris will presumably be African-American.
That's good to hear. Arrow started out with a nicely diverse cast, but now most of their black or Asian cast members have either been killed off (Byron Mann, Roger Cross, Celina Jade, Chin Han) or pretty much disappeared (Annie Ilonzeh, Janina Gavankar, Colin Salmon, Kelly Hu), so these days the show is disappointingly lacking in diversity. Nice to see the spinoff is casting at least two of its lead roles as nonwhite.
There is a difference between cast memebers and guest stars, only Colin Salmon was actaully a regular.