John Wesley Shipp who now plays Henry Allen on The Flash airing on The CW, has been very open about his time on the series as well as his role of Barry Allen/The Flash on the 1990 The Flash series that aired on CBS, through both the ups and downs, you can see all the different interviews with John Wesley Shipp, which has plenty of different feelings he shares.
ComicBook.com spoke with John Wesley Shipp, as they recapped the two-hour Pilot for 1990’s The Flash on their site.
So you didn’t want to be in the suit all the time.
Then I talked to Danny and Paul and they said, “Look, you’re not going to be running around in red tights. We’re spending $100,000 to build four suits. Oscar winner Bob Short is doing the suit, it’s going to be a construction, you’ll only ever see pieces of it. It’ll be a blur, it’ll be a shoulder, it’ll be a leg.” Now, as soon as we got on the air, the network was screaming “We want to see the suit, we want to see the suit, we want to see the suit.” And my take was once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.
Danny Bilson said to me, “It’s going to be a comic book show for adults. If I get my way, we’ll be getting complaints every week from PTAs across the country that it’s too dark and too edgy.”
Watching the pilot, I remember even as a kid really loving the bit where you tell the guy, “I know it was probably an unhappy childhood that led to this.” It was obvious that you had so much Batman influence in the pilot, but that scene felt like Christopher Reeve’s Superman films. You guys really did manage to split the difference effectively, I think.
I always felt that my job was to play Barry. That was my job. And to find as much of the human element in Barry that audiences could relate to. I thought the fun for the audiences would be if I could hook them into Barry and they could relate to some of the hapless things he would go through, the situation with the family, when things would backfire.All of these little things that would make him human, would, as Amanda would say, “take the piss out of Barry,” which makes him a little bit more vulnerable and lets the audience relate to him so that when I went into the suit, the audience went with me.
And then once the Shirley Walker or Danny Elfman theme would start and the lights went down and the suit came on, my job was done. The suit, the lights, the music and the action carried it. Dane Farwell, my stuntman, was as much The Flash as I was, in my opinion.
To read the full interview head over to Comicbook.com.
If you want to watch the two-hour Pilot movie head on over to Amazon where you can watch for Free or the whole series. I do hope one day Warner Bros. decides to finally re-release this series either on DVD with special features or Blu-Ray restored with Features.
THE FLASH (1990) THEME BY DANNY ELFMAN AND SHIRLEY WALKER (of Batman: The Animated Series fame)
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