With the release yesterday of the five-minute extended trailer for The CW’s Arrow spinoff The Flash, everyone is buzzing about the series like they can’t control their weird, vibrate-y speed powers.We decided to take a look at the trailer in some depth and to spot some of the stuff that you might not notice if you weren’t a comic book reader, or were just too absorbed in the action to look for details.We did, however, skip over things like “Oh, there’s Iris,” since her casting notice more or less covered that and she is, after all, the female lead in the show.“Guess I wasn’t fast enough.”Young Barry reiterates something that Barry will struggle with all the way up until the moment he’s hit by lightning; he’s chronically slow, disorganized and running behind.This is an example of the “bumbling Clark Kent” archetype that was popular in the Silver Age, with superheroes often masking their true selves by making the man behind the mask seem incompetent or otherwise an incredibly unlikely candidate in order to throw people off the scent. Barry being slow, though, is a plot device that writers have kept even as that particular fad ended. Clark Kent isn’t bumbling anymore, but Barry remains a bit behind the curve.We get a little of the clumsiness even with adult Barry in the ad.The attack on Barry’s momBarry Allen’s parents were never a key part of his mythology until 2009, when Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver made Flash: Rebirth, a story that reinvented Barry for a modern audience after his return from the “dead” in Final Crisis.In that miniseries, Nora and Henry Allen were retconned to give Barry a tragic past and a familial motivation to become a CSI and, later, a superhero.
Videos by ComicBook.com
