While he has previously appeared in The Flash Season Zero comic book adaptation, DC Comics villain King Shark is coming to TV — something that nobody could have predicted.
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Not even showrunner Andrew Kreisberg.
“King Shark came from…we actually put him in the comic book adaptation because we said, ‘No one’s every going to let us do this, and we’re never going to be able to do this,’ since we weren’t going to be using the Squad anymore,” Kreisberg told reporters during a screening of tonight’s episode of The Flash last week. “We were talking about it and it was really Todd Helbing who was just like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ It was a very expensive thirty seconds of the show. Our visual effects team are the best and they really love challenges like this. We’re like, ‘Can we do King Shark?’ Armen Kevorkian, who is the head of our team, got so excited. It was probably the thing that he sent me the most, ‘Check it out. Here’s how it’s coming.’ I literally can’t believe that. That’s beyond feature quality. They realize it so well.”
King Shark, for those not in the know, is a humanoid shark-man. In the pre-Flashpoint continuity he resembled a Great White, but more recently he’s been depicted as a mutated hammerhead shark. Originally a Superboy villain, he was implied to have been descended from the Wild Men of Kamandi fame (his creator, Karl Kesel, was a big Jack Kirby fan). He would later go on to trouble everyone from Jimmy Olsen to Aquaman, and has served stints in the Suicide Squad and Secret Six. King Shark was rumored to be one of the characters in the Suicide Squad movie for a time.
Don’t expect a Grodd-style King Shark episode just now, though.
“It was just fun for us, because obviously we can’t afford to do an entire King Shark episode, so the idea that he’s one of Zoom’s minions,” Kreisberg said. “He said, ‘Zoom sent me here to kill you.’ He’s just the latest in another line, which does mean that there is a King Shark on Earth-1, now that we’ve designed him.”
That there was some doubt as to whether King Shark existed on Earth-1 before may raise some interesting questions about just how canonical The Flash: Season Zero actually is…but that wasn’t the biggest concern in the room. When a reporter raised the point that they’d already accomplished a Gorilla Grodd episode, Kreisberg responded, “Yeah, and we have another one…in which Caitlin plays Fay Wray to Grodd Kong. It’s just a question of using your dollars and cents wisely. “
“I think in Season One, you got to see just a tiny bit of [Caitlin’s] relationship with Grodd,” said Danielle Panabaker, who plays the character. “And you’ll get to see a little bit more of that and understand their connection from before. He’s got some unfinished business with her, I’d say.”
The Flash airs Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
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Image courtesy of DC Studios
