Flash, The: The Original Series (Blu-ray Review)

• Reviewed by: Stephen Bjork
• Review Date: Aug 16, 2024
• Format: Blu-ray Disc
• 

Director

Various

Release Date(s)

1990 (June 25, 2024)

Studio(s)

Pet Fly Productions/Warner Bros. Television (Warner Archive Collection)

• Film/Program Grade: B
• Video Grade: B+
• Audio Grade: B+
• Extras Grade: F

Review

In the current age when superhero stories seem inescapable in all forms of media both big and small, it’s easy to forget that the path to reach that point has been anything but a straightforward one. It was a long, strange road to get to the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’s been a longer, stranger road to the far more troubled DC Cinematic Universe. Yet even the MCU owes a debt to DC, because the modern superhero boom began with the unprecedented blockbuster success of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989. (Yes, Richard Donner’s Superman was a landmark of its own in 1978, but it didn’t have as much of an impact on the films that followed.) The genre moved in sporadic fits and starts over the next couple of decades after Batman, with the success of any given film spawning a wave of imitators that didn’t always achieve the same level of success. What Batman began, Batman & Robin nearly ended. Plenty of interesting efforts got lost in the shuffle, among them the first live-action version of The Flash. The Flash landed on television screens right after Burton’s Batman but before Batman: The Animated Series, and perhaps inevitably, it ended up being overshadowed by both of them.

The Flash was the brainchild of two writers with names that you may not recognize, but you should: Danny Bilson and Paud De Meo. Bilson and De Meo were frequent collaborators who cut their teeth working with Charles Band on exploitation fare like Trancers and Arena. Band even gave Bilson the opportunity to direct one of their scripts with the charmingly retro Zone Troopers. They also wrote the script for a later project that would end up getting lost in the post-Batman superhero shuffle: the no less charmingly retro The Rocketeer. Bilson and De Meo had an uncanny knack for nailing the perfect tone for these kinds of stories, always keeping their tongues firmly in their cheeks, but without even the smallest trace of cynicism. They never pushed anything to the point of self-parody, and if whimsy was their trademark, it was a particularly earnest form of whimsy. To put it another way, they took tongue-in-cheek quite seriously.

Finding the right tone can be a tricky thing when it comes to telling superhero stories, so hiring Bilson and De Meo was a smart move. While it’s hardly surprising that Warner Bros. would try to cash in on the success of Batman by producing a superhero series like this, there wasn’t yet a clear template for doing so. (That would come a few years later under the aegis of Jean MacCurdy, Bruce Timm, and Warner Bros. Animation.) It was obvious that Tim Burton’s dark gothic fantasy wouldn’t necessarily translate well to the small screen, and the pop-art satire of the original Batman television series was Sixties lightning in a bottle that would have felt anachronistic in the Nineties. Yet the world wasn’t ready for a genuinely serious superhero saga like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, so the job of finding the right tonal balance fell to Bilson and De Meo.

The Central City that they envisioned for The Flash is a bright and colorful one, with cartoonishly exaggerated villains, but the threats to society posed by these rogues are deadly serious ones. The body count is high for an otherwise family-friendly series, but the violence never feels out of place because Bilson and De Meo took even the silliest elements of the Flash’s world quite seriously. There’s no getting around the fact that the Flash has one of the weaker rogue’s galleries in the DC canon, but they did their best to keep characters like The Trickster, Mirror Master, and Captain Cold feel like genuine threats to the people of Central City. It certainly didn’t hurt that they cast Mark Hamill as The Trickster, two years before he would become the stuff of comic book legend when he voiced the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series.

Bilson and De Meo opted for the familiar Barry Allen version of the Flash, even though Wally West had donned the costume at that point in DC’s comic book run. John Wesley Shipp does a credible job as Allen, although he’s aided greatly by a fine supporting cast. That includes Amanda Pays as S.T.A.R. Labs research scientist Christina McGee, Alex Désert as Barry’s fellow forensic scientist Julio Mendez, and M. Emmet Walsh as Barry’s father Henry. (Paula Marshall was cast as Iris West for the pilot, but for some reason she ended up being written out of the series proper.) Mike Genovese has a recurring role as Barry’s lieutenant, and Richard Belzer pops up frequently as an annoying tabloid reporter. Bilson and De Meo couldn’t resist bringing along a few old friends for the ride, so Jack Deth himself, Tim Thomerson, shows up as Barry’s brother Jay, while fellow Trancers and Zone Troopers vet Biff Manard plays a Central City beat cop. (No Art LaFleur, dammit, but you can’t have everything.) There are plenty of other familiar faces on hand as well, like Jason Bernard, Paul Koslo, Dick Miller, Bill Mumy, David Cassidy, Jeffrey Combs, Angela Bassett, Corinne Bohrer, Bryan Cranston, Jeri Ryan, George Dickerson, Clifton Collins, Jr., Ken Foree, Walter Olkewicz, Wes Studi, Patricial Tallman, Robert Z’Dar, and Sven-Ole Thorsen.

The deliberately low-fi aesthetic of The Flash might seem a little cheesy to audiences who have become accustomed to the mega-budget world of modern superhero films, but it was actually an expensive series to produce back in 1990. While some of the problematic visual effects were created on videotape, the show was shot on film, with impressive sets and an elaborate molded Flash costume for Barry Allen. Danny Elfman was brought in to write the main theme, while the dearly departed Shirley Walker contributed the scores for each episode (and she doubtless arranged and conducted Elfman’s theme as well, just like she had done for his entire Batman score). Whatever flaws that The Flash may have, it looks and sounds the part of a proper superhero saga.

Unfortunately, CBS struggled to find an effective time slot for The Flash, so the series never retained a consistent audience and it ended up being canceled after a single season. That seemed to be the story of Bilson and De Meo’s lives, because their tonal mastery didn’t always translate into box office success or Nielsen glory. Mainstream audiences just don’t know what’s good for them sometimes. Yet while The Rocketeer and even Trancers have managed to build up loyal cult followings over the years, The Flash still isn’t as well remembered outside of those who managed to catch it on television back in 1990. It’s always deserved better.

Cinematographers Francis Kenny, Greg Gardiner, John Newby, and Sandi Sissel shot The Flash on 35mm film using spherical lenses, framed open-matte for television at 1.33:1. Post-production work was completed on standard definition video, although some of the visual effects were composited optically first. The rest were generated on video. For this Blu-ray version, the original camera negatives were scanned at 4K resolution and then reassembled to conform to the videotape masters. The effects that were completed on video (which includes the bulk of the high-speed effects) had to be upscaled from the SD masters instead.

So, let’s get this out of the way up front: the upscaled effects look really rough, and not just because of their low-resolution origination. Upscaling algorithms continue to improve, as the BBC remasters of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Doctor Who have proved. Yet these look particularly soft, and they’re riddled with aliasing as well as deinterlacing and/or combing artifacts. It’s most egregious during the opening credits and in the running sequences in the pilot episode, but while those running effects do improve in the later episodes, they’re never completely free from artifacting.

Fortunately, despite the fact that The Flash was produced with generous budgets for each episode, they’re not filled with wall-to-wall visual effects. The actual effects shots make up a relatively small portion of the total run time, so the majority of the footage here was derived from the negative scans, and they’re up to Warner Archive’s usual high standards. It’s possible that some light filtering was applied in order to clean up any dirt—it doesn’t seem likely that the entire series was cleaned up on a frame-by-frame basis—but not in a way that’s detrimental to fine detail. What’s potentially more destructive is the modest encode that’s typical for Warner Bros. products, with the bit rate averaging around 20mbps and frequently dipping well below that mark. That also affects the fine detail, and there are some mild compression artifacts that may or may not be noticeable depending on your display. It’s still a huge upgrade over DVD, bringing the colorful world of Central City to vivid life.

Audio is offered in English 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English subtitles. The Flash was created shortly before the television networks started broadcasting in Dolby Surround during the early Nineties, but in this case at least the music is offered in stereo. (It’s not clear if it was originally broadcast that way.) The dialogue and sound effects are primarily mono, although there’s some occasional (if wildly inconsistent) steering. For example, the passing cars in the establishing shot after the opening credits of The Trickster pan from left to right and right to left, but that’s the exception, not the rule—most of the time, sound effects like that stay locked firmly in the center. Still, The Flash doesn’t really need a full surround mix anyway, as long as Shirley Walker’s music is presented in stereo. Her work on The Flash was up to her usual impeccable standards, and it sounds wonderful in this rendition.

Warner Archive Collection’s Blu-ray release of The Flash: The Original Series is a 6-Disc set that houses all of the discs in a hinged Amaray case. (I’ve had bad luck with those in the past, but in this case, all of the hinges were still intact.) The following episodes are included:

DISC ONE

1. Pilot (94:04)
2. Out of Control (46:31)
3. Watching the Detectives (47:57)

DISC TWO

4. Honor Among Thieves (47:53)
5. Double Vision (46:19)
6. Sins of the Father (46:20)
7. Child’s Play (48:15)

DISC THREE

8. Shroud of Death (46:55)
9. Ghost in the Machine (46:54)
10. Sight Unseen (47:39)
11. Beat the Clock (47:09)

DISC FOUR

12. The Trickster (47:18)
13. Tina, Is That You? (48:16)
14. Be My Baby (47:32)
15. Fast Forward (47:04)

DISC FIVE

16. Deadly Nightshade (47:38)
17. Captain Cold (47:34)
18. Twin Streaks (48:17)
19. Done with Mirrors (48:04)

DISC SIX

20. Good Night, Central City (47:33)
21. Alpha (47:23)
22. The Trial of the Trickster (47:37)

While Danny Bilson, John Wesley Shipp, and the late Paul De Meo have all appeared on various podcasts over the years to talk about The Flash, there’s not a single extra included with the set. Nada. Zip. Still, the fact that Warner Archive has finally brought the series into the world of High Definition, warts and all, is cause for celebration. Hopefully, having it available in the best possible quality can add to its fanbase, with or without any extras. These are perilous times for the physical media market as far as the big studios are concerned, so we need to take wins like this whenever we get them.

- Stephen Bjork

(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, and Letterboxd).