As the seventh season of DC's Legends of Tomorrow winds to a conclusion, Scrubs and Clueless star Donald Faison has signed on to play a mystery character -- but fans are pretty convinced they already know who he is. Based on a character description provided by The CW, the social media consensus is that Faison (who also brought comic book characters to life in Josie and the Pussycats and Kick-Ass 2) will play a version of Booster Gold, a time-traveling superhero who spent years as a member of the Justice League and is most commonly associated with his longtime friend and ally, Blue Beetle.
Booster Gold is one of the first, and most successful, new characters created after the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the line-wide crossover event that reshaped DC Comics in the mid-1980s and did away with the multiverse for decades. Created by writer/artist Dan Jurgens, Booster is Michael Jon "Booster" Carter, a college football player from 25th Century Gotham who was tossed off his team after he gambled on the game to pay for his mother's medical treatment.
After losing his fame and future, Booster became a janitor at a museum, where one exhibit featured costumes, weapons, and other items related to 21st Century superheroes. After stealing a microweave costume, a force field belt, and a Legion of Super-Heroes flight ring, Booster decided to travel back in time and reinvent himself as a superhero. Originally calling himself Goldstar, Booster Gold got his name by mistake. After having saved the life of a U.S. President (originally Ronald Reagan, but with DC's sliding time scale it would likely now be Barack Obama), Booster was so nervous introducing himself that he accidentally started to give his football nickname, followed by an attempt at correction, resulting in the mash-up "Booster Gold." Later, his sister would become a superhero as well, taking on the name Goldstar.
In his original 1980s appearances, Booster's defining characteristic was that he was the first corporate-sponsored superhero. Taking on endorsement deals and running his own for-profit corporation, Booster was unlike any character DC had introduced before him (although many of those themes would become more popular in the years that followed). He wasn't a Hero For Hire in the way Marvel had done, but instead a superhero who responded to threats like any other would, and has his needs taken care of through his corporate partners.
In the mid-2000s, after the events of 52, Booster Gold got another comic book title. In this volume, Rip Hunter recruited Booster to be a Time Master, on the condition that he had to continue to allow the world to believe he was just a corporate shill, because being underestimated would allow him to operate in the shadows and prevent villains from trying to kill him before he can be a hero. Dubbed "the greatest hero you've never heard of," Booster fought to preserve the timestream, all without any credit for his heroism.
So, why do fans think Faison's as-yet-unnamed Legends of Tomorrow character is going to be Booster Gold? Check out the official character description, which the network provided along with his casting notice earlier today:
"The Legends first encounter this character at a different phase of his career whose golden years are in the rearview mirror. He is good guy deep down; his ego is looking for a boost that only fame, fortune, and glory can provide. While he claims to have been recruited to work for a mysterious time organization, he wasn't offered much of a choice in the matter. As an unauthorized time traveler with high-profile aspirations, he developed a mischievous streak and cuts a few corners along the way to achieving his dreams. He knows all about the Legends of Tomorrow and finds them inspiring because they are the kind of heroes who started at the ground floor, as opposed to inheriting their powers from an alien planet, a spider bite, or wealthy parents. But the big question is whether his respect for the team is going to be able to help the Legends out of hot water or get them into hotter water!"
This sounds like it could be a riff on the "volume 2" version of Booster, who worked with Rip Hunter and hid his good deeds from the universe. Of course, in that same volume, fans also learned that Booster was Rip's father, meaning that if they keep that part of the canon intact, he could have ties to the very foundation of the Legends as we know them on TV.
Booster is one of the characters who fans have always argued belonged on the Waverider. A time-travel character with a long history of strange and funny stories, on paper he seems like a perfect fit. The character always seems to have something going on, though; at one point, Syfy was developing a TV pilot for Booster, with former The Flash executive producer Andrew Kreisberg attached. Later, The Flash and X-Men: First Class writer Zack Stentz took a crack at a feature-film version. Neither of those got past the development stage, and since then, rumors have circulated about the potential for a Blue Beetle/Booster Gold team-up movie. If Booster is indeed coming to Legends, it's likely a sign that Warner Bros. has no intention of using the character in the upcoming Blue Beetle movie for HBO Max.
You can see some of the fans' reactions to the casting, and speculation about the potential for a Booster Gold connection, below.