Kevin Smith doesn’t have an issue with The Flash repurposing the likenesses of long-dead actors to pad out its runtime with needless fan service, but there are quite clearly a lot of people who do, although we really hope the View Askewniverse creator doesn’t get his wish and become a porno sensation in the event of his passing.
Whether it’s the poorly-rendered Chronobowl sequences that saw director Andy Muschietti claim that it was supposed to look terrible or the needless expense of hiring Nicolas Cage, putting him in a Superman costume and then shooting him on a soundstage only to make him look like his face was created out of Papier-mâché, the inquest into how that reported $200 million was spent will be one for the ages.
Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be any more layers of incredulity slathered on top of the The Flash, supervising sound editor Nancy Nugent revealed to ScreenRant that one of the most valuable resources in bringing back the likes of George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Adam West to name but three was YouTube.
“I’ll tell you the truth; a lot of them were pulled from YouTube. We were finding those old clips, and then it was a matter of removing music if there was music tied to it, or just cleaning it up. Because it was such a design-y moment and there was music going on, we could hide a lot of that. Whereas if it was just playing by itself, [it] might require us digging deeper into the archives–if that stuff even existed. Really, it was just a matter of finding out what we were legally allowed to use: which properties, and whose voices, and all of that, and then finding it on the internet and cleaning it up.”
It might have been the smarter – and probably less contentious – move to simply abandon those deep cut guest appearances altogether, but with The Flash on its way to losing an absolute fortune at the box office, it’s really just a minor concern at this stage.