With a Booster Gold movie on the way from X-Men: First Class writer Zack Stentz and The Flash executive producer Greg Berlanti, it’s hard to guess just what kind of film it could shape up to be.
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In the course of his thirty-year existence, Booster Gold — DC’s first major post-Crisis on Infinite Earths superhero — has been a lot of things: in the early going, he as a glory hound and an egomaniac. Later, was a secret Time Master. In between those outings, he was a member of the Justice League in numerous incarnations, most famously during the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis “Bwa-ha-hah” era of the comics, in which Booster and his best friend Blue Beetle got into trouble and dragged the League into get-rich-quick schemes — a status quo that would be shattered when Beetle was shot and murdered by longtime League financier and adviser Maxwell Lord.
There’s a lot to unpack in Booster’s history, and it’s hard to guess exactly how much of which versions might make their way to the big screen. But it’s always fun to make some educated guesses, and among those decades of stories, there are likely to be a few particular stories that stick out.
A few things, of course: given that we’ve heard Booster will not be taking place in the same space as the other DC Extended Universe films (either not in their universe at all, or at least not interacting with them at this stage), we’re going to assume that things like being a part of the Justice League won’t happen.
that doesn’t mean a couple of classic JLI stories might not make their way onto the list. While there’s unlikely to be a 1:1 translation of such a story, there’s always the outside chance that Stentz might find a way to make it work — like, say, using The Time Masters, the Linear Men, or some other supehero team as a stand-in for the League for the purposes of those tales.
And this is, above all, a fun exercise. They’ve said so little about the movie at this point that to assume these guesses are educated by anything more than decades of Booster Gold comics and dozens of interviews would be foolish.
But read on. At a minimum, these might be stories that the less Booster-inclined among our readers might want to try out!
BOOSTER GOLD (vol. 1) #6
The origin of Booster Gold!
Surprisingly, Booster’s origin was not told in his first appearance, and for a while it was teased out as a mystery.
In hindsight, the first few issues read a little odd because he’s now established as a fairly well-known hero and so they’re teasing elements that we as readers generally already know now, but it was a cool way to introduce a mysterious new character — especially in the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe, where time travel had been rare and hints that he was from the future only opened up more possibilities and questions in the minds of readers.
The conceit, for those who aren’t longtime fans, is that Booster is a Michael Jon Carter, a disgraced athlete who, after being caught up in a cheating scandal, ends up working as a security guard in a museum.
Not content to let that be the end of his story, Carter steals a Time Sphere, along with a bunch of high-tech gear from some of the exhibits, and uses it to travel back to the 20th Century, where his advanced technology can be mistaken for super powers, allowing him to carve out a new identity for himself as a hero.
At the time, this was quite a revelation for readers of the series — although there were plenty of clues to put a lot of it together. Reading it from a modern viewpoint, it all seems like it as pretty obvious…but the movie audience is likely mostly going to be made up of people who have never read a Booster Gold solo book.
THE 1000
During the first run on Booster Gold, the character often faced off against fairly generic supervillains working with The 100 (later The 1000), essentially an organized crime syndicate that was comfortable using metahumans to carry out much of their dirty work.
If Booster’s movie doesn’t focus a lot on time-travel, and instead stays more or less put in the modern day, these guys might be the most logical enemies to put against him as they have a power structure and some supervillains, but mostly they’re easily defeated and can act more or less like the grunts the Loki and Ultron threw at The Avengers in those movies.
The fact that their Director ws a shadowy, masked figure later revealed to be a corrupt U.S. Senator means even after he’s taken down, his power structure will still be in place to some extent for potential sequels, too!
BOOSTER GOLD ON TRIAL
It’s happened twice that people have come to try and make Booster face the music for what he did when he stole his gear and traveled back in time.
In fact, once time travel is invented, the only way they can prevent people abusing it is to make it a capital offense and to give law enforcement carte blanche to carry out that sentence pre-trial. It’s kind of an insane notion when it comes to real-world law enforcement, but we guess what’s good for Judge Dredd is good for Booster Gold, too.
During the first volume of Booster Gold back in the ’80s, a cop from the future named Broderick became obsessed with making Booster pay for his crimes, even following the hero back into the past, before finally being convinced that Booster was always meant to travel back in time and do the good he’s doing.
Years later, during the second volume of Booster Gold, Booster was forced to go to prison, where he met up with a villain known as the Perforated Man, who turned out to be Booster himself from the far future, after his body was ravaged by years of chronal energy.
Certainly for an origin story, some version of one of these stories — dealing with why he’s a good thing and not a menace to the timeline — could be a fun thing to explore.
KOOEY KOOEY KOOEY
The most notorious of all of Booster Gold and Blue Beetle’s get rich quick schemes involved opening up a Justice League-themed casino on the “living island” of Kooey Kooey Kooey.
Ultimately, it lost the League a fortune when the living island swallowed up the casino, but luckily nobody was hurt.
If they’re going to go straight comedy with this movie (which would likely be a mistake, but is possible), Kooey Kooey Kooey’s likelihood of being a part of the story goes way up. For a lot of fans, this is the ultimate expression of the zany humor of the Giffen/DeMatteis era, and love it or hate it, the story defines that run for many readers.
52
While there’s no realistic way to make 52 work as a movie, Booster Gold’s first experience with the multiverse could be a pretty cool thing to explore.
In 52, Booster starred in only one of a number of subplots, but his story was key to the bigger picture. Along the way, he learned that “time was broken,” and that Rip Hunter believed it related to Booster.
In fact, it turned out ot be Booster’s little robot companion Skeets who was responsible for chronal anomalies that were compromising the timeline. In order to figure out what was going on there, Booster had to fake his death, let his 21st Century ancestor Daniel Carter step in as the new Booster Gold, and ultimately have Booster take on another costumed identity to “help” the new Booster out.
It was a crazy, elaborate scheme, but when the end result was Booster’s ascendancy to Time Master, discovered the multiverse, and dealt with the importance — and vulnerability — of Booster’s pal Skeets (who really, really needs to be a part of the movie).
52 Pick-Up
Following the events of 52, Booster Gold and Rip Hunter had to figure out how they were going to go about their Time Master duties. What happened?
Well, after years of being perceived as a silly, inept glory hound, Booster was finally ready to step up and become one of the premiere heroes of the DC Universe. When he was offered an opportunity to join the Justice League, though, Rip told him tha the had to turn it down so that they could continue to monitor the timestream, and so that Booster and his ancestors wouldn’t become targets for time-traveling villains.
This is a great way of dealing with the appearance that Booster is shallow and goofy, while acknowledging that he’s actually a hero at heart: force him to pretend to be shallow and goofy in order to project that image intentionally.
