New John Wesley Shipp As The Flash Photo Revealed For Arrowverse Crossover

Arrow and DC's Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim has shared a new, up-close [...]

By Russ Burlingame

Arrow and DC's Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim has shared a new, up-close look at John Wesley Shipp in his role as The Flash from the upcoming "Elseworlds" Arrowverse crossover.

While the costume may look nearly identical to the one worn by Shipp during his first go-round as The Flash in 1990 and 1991, Guggenheim credited The Flash costume designer Kate Main with "pulling off this miracle," developing a costume that looked like the original but presumably did not leave Shipp as miserable as that one did.

In the original series, Shipp has said that they only had one or two costumes, and that they were so hot that he would end up sweating into them for days at a time. They had to be specially laundered, so mostly they could not afford the time away from production to clean the suit, meaning that the suit was usually not just uncomfortable, but rank.

"I talked to Danny [Bilson] and Paul [DeMeo] and they said, 'Look, you're not going to be running around in red tights. We're spending $100,000 to build four suits. Oscar winner Bob Short is doing the suit, it's going to be a construction, you'll only ever see pieces of it. It'll be a blur, it'll be a shoulder, it'll be a leg,'" Shipp told ComicBook.com. "Now, as soon as we got on the air, the network was screaming 'We want to see the suit, we want to see the suit, we want to see the suit.'"

Shipp first played Barry Allen/The Flash on TV for a single season beginning in 1990. Years later, he returned to The Flash when the show was revived on The CW. This time around, he played Henry Allen, Barry's father. After Henry's death at the hands of Zoom, it was revealed that Henry's Earth-3 doppelganger was in fact Jay Garrick, the "Golden Age" Flash from the comics, giving Shipp another chance to ride the lightning.

Garrick has appeared rarely since he was revealed, and given the mystery surrounding "Elseworlds," it is impossible to know whether Shipp is playing his version of Barry Allen, the Jay Garrick we saw previously, or something else entirely.

In The Flash's first season, Barry Allen's first trip into the timestream provided him with glimpses of the past, future, and alternate Earths -- including one where Shipp's Barry Allen was wearing the classic costume from the 1990 series.

While the plot of "Elseworlds" remains a bit of a mystery -- and arguably gets more confusing by the day -- we do know that it will see Supergirl, The Flash (Grant Gustin), and Green Arrow(Stephen Amell) crossing paths with a wide array of DC Comics characters.

In addition to Superman and Lois, the event will include the live-action debut of Kate Kane/Batwoman (Ruby Rose) as well as appearances from Dr. John Deegan (Jeremy Davies), The Monitor (LaMonica Garrett), and Nora Fries (Cassandra Jean Amell).

"The crossover is f---ing bananas," Amell explained during a recent Facebook Live. "It's crazy... I think that this will be the best crossover event that we do. And not just the best but the best by a really, really wide margin. And I think that last year was fantastic."

The three-night "Elseworlds" event will begin with Supergirl on Sunday, December 9th, before carrying over to December 10th's Arrow and December 11's The Flash.

4comments
Comments ( 4 )

of