ARROW and THE FLASH Creator Talks Costumes and That Comic Book Feeling
On Arrow, Oliver Queen’s costume has evolved over time. He only traded in his smudgy, smoky guyliner for a mask near the end of the second season. The show has also slowly introduced more dramatic, over the top villains, moving from a secret cabal of corrupt businessmen (and women) in the first season to Deathstroke and Mirakuru serum in the second. Sort of spin-off The Flash won’t be taking things so slowly, although the pilot does leave plenty of room for things to develop. Greg Berlanti, who executive produces both shows, spoke to reporters at a roundtable at San Diego Comic Con in July about the show about allowing the stories and looks room to progress while still making things recognizable to fans. He was asked specifically about Smallville’s aversion to Superman’s costume. Here is what he said,
"For me, I feel like it's weird. You want the characters to be like you read! Even if they aren't there yet, sometimes I think if you're doing an origin story and they're not all the way there -- like our suit here isn't what it's going to be and Arrow isn't Green Arrow yet, we've sort of said that -- but in this day and age, especially when they can go to the movies or download a film where the character is in a suit and you're dealing with the competition not just against your show but actually against all the superheroes that are out there in the universe that people can see, that are live action, you want I think the most true version of that.
“So even though because in TV you can spread it out over a long period it may not be as realized as it is at the end of the series, we still want enough of it at the outset that it doesn't feel like, ‘Wait a second, I'm watching a show about Ambush Bug but he doesn't look like Ambush Bug!’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Berlanti said that he wants to evoke the feeling of the comic, even for non-comic book fans.
“The most successful version of it is, when I get to the end of it if my mom, my dad, my sister -- if people who didn't read the comics the way that I did -- watch the episode and they get the same feeling that I got when I would read the comic books, then I've done my job right.
“So it means we can make changes in terms of elements of the character but at the core, they have to have the experience that I got when I read Crisis on Infinite Earths.”
A reporter chimed in, “Interesting choice of title…”
“Well, no, because that was where he died, you know? And so I cried. I was 13 in a flea market, reading the comic books and sitting there crying, you know? He was that kind of character, that he could elicit that kind of emotion.”
Berlanti finished up by explaining why he thinks some hero stories are better suited to TV than to films.
“Anyway, in TV we do have more time to do more -- it's novelistic. Look at Game of Thrones, right? That's the wonderful thing about television right now is that it can go in all these wonderful directions at the same time and both The Flash and Arrow to me were things I thought, ‘I would almost enjoy that more in a series because of all the other things I'd want to include, than to have to do nine movies to have that kind of stuff.’
“In particular, Arrow was an origin story and we can show him on that island for five years, you know? A movie can't do that -- it would be 20 minutes of the film and it would be really tight and cramped in.”
The Flash will run across your screens on October 7, and Arrow returns on October 8. They are two of the shows I am most excited about this fall. The Flash's pilot is really fantastic, and I can’t wait for all of you to see it.
Source: ComicBook.com