Top Five Titles For "Untitled Booster Gold Project"

Syfy delighted Booster Gold fans last week when it officially announced that Booster Gold would be added to its development slate for the coming year--a move that probably wasn't completely unexpected after news that Fringe's Andrew Kreisberg had submitted a pilot script the week before. What was a bit confusing, though, was that the project is listed on the development slate as "Untitled Booster Gold Project." Taking some cues from Booster's history, though, we've come up with five potential titles that would make us even more excited for some live-action Booster than we already are. He's a surprisingly versatile character who can be approached in a number of ways, which is probably one of the reasons there's been so much interest in expanding his role outside of comics; each of these titles reflects a slightly different take on the Greatest Hero You've Never Heard Of. Granted, they're probably just debating something mundane, like whether to call it "Booster Gold" or just "Booster," but we can dream, can't we? They Kooey Kooey Kooey Happy Vacation Funtime Hour Okay, so that one's pretty unlikely--but you can't say it wouldn't be hilarious to see Booster getting into wacky scrapes revolving around his get-rich-quick schemes on a weekly basis. At least for a season or so, before they ran out of ideas and it got old. Of course, that's what critics said about Leverage and its elaborate heists...! The Conglomerate Not one of Booster's most memorable time periods in the comics, but it always seemed rife with potential. The Conglomerate was a group of heroes who, more or less, modeled themselves on Booster Gold in the same way that most other heroes try to model themselves on Superman or Batman. They had sponsors, matching uniforms, and an agent/business manager overseeing them, and Booster found his way there because they could help him get credibility and respect following on the heels of a falling out with the JLI. Seeing him struggle with the corporate identity versus the heroic identity on a week-in and week-out basis has a lot of potential for storytelling. It would be, in a lot of ways, the arc that played out in Booster's episode of Smallville, writ large. Come With Me If You Want To Live Okay, so Booster never actually said that. But seeing Booster spelunking through time, fixing things and occasionally brushing up against other superheroes, has a lot of promise. Without the DC Universe to fall back on, writers might be challenged to fit him into real-life history, which would make his adventures a bit more relatable to the average viewer and really play up the Quantum Leap-with-superheroes aspect of Booster's recent comic. Time Masters All of what we just said above? Yeah, that. Plus, the family dynamic that's added by including Rip Hunter and one or two other supporting characters (possibly Booster's sister Goldstar, possibly Liri Lee or some of the other Linear Men). It would be a figurative family as well as a literal one since, unbeknownst to Booster, he's actually related to Rip (Batman: The Brave and the Bold had a little fun with that in an episode that aired last Father's Day), and the idea of juxtaposing the Time Masters' family legacy with Booster's own tarnished reputation is a parallel that has a lot of emotional cache in it. Plus, taking on characters from Booster's recent comics would help writers resist the urge to create new faces out of thin air--something that doesn't sit well with comic book fans and often doesn't turn out that well from a creative point-of-view either. Blue & Gold As soon as it said "Untitled Booster Gold Project" instead of "Booster Gold," this is what many fans suspected, or at least hoped for. Ever since the characters first featured together in Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis' Justice League International, Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) and Booster Gold have been inseparable. Even after Beetle's death, they found ways to bring him back and play around with the format of their buddy stories for a few years until the New 52 brought Booster to a DC Universe where apparently Ted simply never existed. This hasn't sat particularly well with the fans, and bringing Ted back on TV might help to take some of the sting out of losing him on the printed page. And of course, above and beyond all the sentimental or even the plot reasons, there are character reasons to putting Booster and Ted back together again. Many fans would argue that the characters were never stronger or more interesting than they were when they were together. I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, but my favorite Booster stories came out of 52 and Booster Gold Volume II, both of which were heavily informed by Ted's death and what that did for Booster as a character. If they were to put the pair together, though, there's the challenge of making them a laughingstock without damaging  the characters or making the plots seem unbelievable. If they have credibility, the dynamic isn't the same (see Countdown to Infinite Crisis), and without other superheroes and/or years of backstory for context, it's hard to push a narrative of failure on your character.