Booster Gold TV Show Still Happening, Work Starting Next Month

Andrew Kreisberg, the Arrow executive producer who has been tapped to write a Booster Gold TV pilot for Syfy, fessed up to being distracted from the project by the demands of Arrow and assured fans that that Booster Gold is still on his radar, and that he'll begin work on the project in December. The series was officially added to Syfy's development slate back in April. "I got a little waylaid by Arrow," Kreisberg said in an interview with IGN. "Booster Gold is going in the next couple weeks before Christmas. We'll see what happens from there. It's such a different project even though they're both DC Comics properties. Booster is much more candy and popcorn, being about time travel and changing the future and being a superhero who can fly. But they're both super-fun projects. As a lifelong DC Comics fan, I am beyond blessed to be working on these projects with all these amazing characters." Kreisberg, of course, is the writer of the upcoming DC series Justice League of America's Vibe as well as the scribe behind the Justice League Unlimited episode "The Greatest Story Never Told," which gave Booster Gold his greatest moment to shine in the history of the fan-favorite animated series. What exactly Kreisberg means by the series "going in the next couple of weeks" is hard to say. In print it's hard to read implications for that kind of statement, but considering back during San Diego Comic Con International he told reporters that he was ready to submit his first draft of the pilot script to Syfy, it seems likely that "going in" means that the script will be submitted. It's hard to imagine him being any farther out from the goal than he was in July, even considering the hectic schedule of Arrow, but it's also hard to imagine it means anything more than script meetings, since something like the submission of the pilot script seems like it would have made news had it happened. Then again, it was said to have happened as early as April, which turned out to be apparently false information if Kreisberg said that he was still working on the script in July. The smart money (since the pilot script was reportedly submitted just before the show was added to Syfy's slate) is on Kreisberg submitting a detailed treatment in April in order to make it to the 2013 development schedule; once that was approved he could get the final pilot script in later. Booster Gold was created in the mid-'80s as a time-traveling hero from the 25th Century who used his superior technology to simulate superhuman powers in order to make a name for himself as a costumed hero. Later, his character was updated to use his knowledge of future events as part of his war on crime. In the late '80s, Booster joined the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis iteration of the Justice League (International), which reinvented the team as a group of B- and C-list characters with U.N. accreditation. The series was widely praised for being character-driven and embracing humor, setting it apart from most of the Big Two comics at the time. In hindsight, many fans would remember only the jokes and not the rest of the series. That led to a long period where the characters involved (most especially Booster and his best friend Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle) were seen as one-note, "joke" characters and rarely appeared in "serious" books. It's widely expected that the as-yet-untitled Booster Gold TV project will lean heavily on Booster's early days as a glory-seeking superhero with mercenary sensibilities. That's how he was portrayed, to varying degrees, in his TV appearances on Justice League Unlimited, Smallville and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. It's unclear how much influence the more recent "Time Master" version of Booster will carry in the show, but the presence of Rip Hunter seems to suggest that it's at least part of the character. "I spent about a half an hour convincing [character creator Dan Jurgens] that I wasn't just some gun for hire–that I was a huge fan of Booster as a kid," Kreisberg said in an interview at Comic Con (which can be seen below). "[Booster Gold] really is the first TMZ superhero, as we say in the show. All of the DNA of that character–with Skeets, with Trixie, with Dirk Davis, with his sister Michelle, with Rip Hunter–all of that is in the pilot." While Rip Hunter was revealed to be Booster Gold's son during the Geoff Johns/Jeff Katz run on Booster Gold, which launched after 52 in 2005 and featured art by Jurgens, some of the other characters Kreisberg mentioned–Trixie Collins and Dirk Davis–haven't appeared in a Booster Gold comic since the 1980s, when the character's first volume concluded during the Millennium crossover. It seems likely, then, that the series may feature a modified version of Booster's first-volume continuity, with the relationship to Rip Hunter added in to make it more accessible to more recent fans and because the relationship added so much to both characters.