Following the events of The CW’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” a lot of things have changed. While the character-centric changes have been cascading through the post-Crisis episodes of Black Lightning, Arrow, Supergirl, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, tonight saw The Flash join the party — and things got really serious. Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) has been tracking some of the biggest differences between the pre- and post-Crisis Arrowverse, and on tonight’s episode of The Flash, we got a chance to look at some of his research. Spilled across a pair of large glass boards, Ramon broke down a timeline of events on Earth-Prime 2000, and what the newly-reconfigured geography of the DC Universe is like.
Videos by ComicBook.com
That last bit? Maybe a few more surprises than you would have expected.
In the South China Sea, not far from Lian Yu — the place where the Arrowverse essentially began as Oliver Queen found his way to safety after the sinking of the Queen’s Gambit — there are other islands, too. One of them is Kooey Kooey Kooey — which, if you are a big fan of the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths run on Justice League by J.M. DeMatteis, Keith Giffen, and Kevin Maguire — may sound very familiar.
In that version of the Justice League, most of the big guns had been removed from the toybox, with Batman and Superman having major stories going on in their own books while chracters like Wonder Woman and Green Lantern searched for a meaningful post-Crisis status quo. Featuring relative unknowns like Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and Doctor Fate alongside new characters created for the title (including Wonder Woman 1984 villain Maxwell Lord), the Giffen/DeMatteis run introduced humanity and humor to the comic, becoming known colloquially as the “bwa-ha-ha” Justice League, named for the raucous laughter that often came from its heroes.
Some characters fared better than others, and it would not be unreasonable to argue that much of the tone of Justice League International is mirrored by a lot of what we see in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow today. And, of course, if you watch that show, you could probably picture a couple of the Legends getting involved with a get-rich-quick scheme that goes catastophically wrong.
That’s where Kooey Kooey Kooey comes in.
At one point, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle blow the League’s savings, investing the money in a Justice League-themed casino and resort on a remote island called Kooey Kooey Kooey. It kind of made sense in a way. After all, you get good prices on waterfront property anywhere — let alone a gorgeous island in the South Pacific — you take it, right? And with the JLI imprimatur, how could it fail?
Well, the island was revealed to be a sentient creature that would occasionally decide to uproot itself and wander about on its own. So that makes it very difficult to sell tickets to.
The Flash returns from its post-“Crisis” break tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, followed by a new episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow at 9.
