Batflash: a 90's Shared Universe?

 Unpopular opinion time.... 

I actually kind of like The Flash movie. Don't get me wrong, it is a bit of a mess, but it's nowhere near the mess that is the original Suicide Squad. As the DC movies go, I do feel it's one of the stronger entries. It took some legitimately creative risks. Whether or not those risks paid off is up to you. For my money, it hit more than it missed, but there is something about it that's been bugging me for some time. 

Why exactly is Batman the one to explain the time travel problem Flash created? 

Backing up, if you haven't seen the film, here's the fastest rundown/summary you will ever need. Flash (real name Barry Allen, portrayed by Ezra Miller) uses his speed to go back in time to undo a personal tragedy to make a better future for himself, his friends, and his family. However, instead of merely changing the future, he changes the past as well. This is known as retrocausality. 

While the movie's explanation of this phenomenon is adequate, I prefer the explanation offered in the animated film Flashpoint Paradox (itself based on a similarly named crossover event in the comics). The briefest rundown of that is as follows: When a speedster uses their power to travel in time, they're essentially outrunning time itself. Going faster than time creates the temporal equivalent of a sonic boom. 

In the film, what Barry creates in his time travel endeavor is a kind of mash-up universe, bits and pieces of alternate timelines playing mix and match into some sort of cohesive whole. In this case, it's comprised primarily of the Batman from the 1989 Tim Burton film and a minor variation of the plot from Man of Steel, namely General Zod's invasion of earth. Other details include Eric Stoltz playing Marty McFly in Back to the Future instead of Michael J. Fox. However, it's what ISN'T spelled out that makes this crossover interesting. After all, Back to the Future is never mentioned in Batman, so who's to say Eric Stoltz isn't the lead in that film and Michael J. Fox is known only as that kid from Teen Wolf? There's also no mention of Superman (Batman & Robin's throwaway line doesn't count as that was a different actor and director, we're focusing on Batman & Batman Returns). While there's also no mention of the Flash, Bruce Wayne (as portrayed by Michael Keaton) doesn't seem all that surprised by his arrival. Sure, there's a little scuffle between them, but it settles down relatively quickly and, as we've said, Bruce is the one who explains the situation rather than Barry. It's almost as if he expected this. Speaking of the past... 

We haven't forgotten this version of the Flash, have we?

This was a series that ran for one season in 1990, 22 1-hour episodes featuring John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen. Production began in 1988, but picked up speed (ha) after the success of Tim Burton's Batman the year earlier. My memory of the series is overall positive, if a tad faded with the passage of time. It was a very well-made show, with exceptional production values despite being spread a little thin over 22 episodes. Of particular note is the costume itself, which ran a pretty penny for the time. It was decided that audiences wouldn't accept a spandex bodysuit, even in a modest television outing of a well-regarded superhero. In fact, it was because of Batman that the sculpted rubber suit was accepted as a justifiable expense. After all, it's in every episode. That makes it an investment. 

My point is that, in terms of overall aesthetics, who's to say these two different properties aren't sharing a setting? Who's to say Shipp's Flash and Keaton's Batman haven't met in the time following Batman Returns? Maybe this Flash isn't around anymore because of his own time travel shenanigans. Maybe he's the one who explained retrocausality to Bruce. 

I'm not pretending this is a perfect solution to what may not even be a problem. In fact, it might even create more problems by bringing another Flash into a film with 3 different Batmen. It could simply be a matter of plot convenience. Perhaps Bruce spent his post-Batman days reading up on Quantum physics. After all, in Flashpoint, it's Flash's nemesis who explains the problems with causality, and since he's not in this new movie, someone else had to take on the role of exposition dump. Like I said, despite some problems with the scene, I think it's one of the best, and Michael Keaton is clearly having fun with every last minute of it. He's still got it. 

The Adobe House Built On Sand

20+ years an industry standard. 10 free stock images.

Adobe's Flash is being forcibly retired at the end of the year due to its shortcomings on the security front. I don't pretend to understand what that means. All it makes me think of is when I was in a training class for a call center job. Someone somewhere had once upon a time embedded Flash-based versions of Sonic the Hedgehog and Tetris into a blank Excel document so as to slip it past our supervisors and the IT department, ensuring that each training class would have access to these little distractions, kind of like a chain letter. 

Many people are very saddened by this for all the various Flash-based websites and small games that are going to be rendered more or less totally pumpkin when the clock strikes midnight. There have been some efforts to preserve these games, including the creation of a specially made platform that emulates the old school player. 

A wise one once said that writing a great novel is a very difficult thing to do because there have been so many books over so many millennia by so many people. However, once you achieve that status of having written a great novel, you're more or less set for life and beyond because your book will still be available in some way, shape, or form. The biggest innovation in publishing in the last hundred years has been the e-book, which only furthers the preservation principle past the printed page. Video games have the exact opposite problem because even if making a great game was a little easier, the longevity is non-existent because the hardware used to play the games changes so rapidly that unless you actively update and rebuild your game for each new platform, you're going to be left in the dust. Furthering the preservation principle in the other direction is the fact that some games are made with specific hardware in mind and it may simply be impossible to port the game to a newer system. 

This is what always bothers me when someone refers to a piece of software as an industry standard. Flash was one such industry standard, especially in animation. To be fair, Adobe reworked Flash into a separate piece of software called Animate, so it's still technically as much an industry standard as it is proprietary software owned lock, stock, and barrel by Adobe. I remember once looking around for some kind of lower-end, budget-friendly competitor once upon a time and every option coming up short. The student version of Flash started at around 1250USD, and there was simply no way I could justify that kind of price, even as a film major with an interest in animation. Instead, I bought a copy of Poser 4 for about 100, used it for 2-ish years then practically forgot I had it for the next 10 years before finding the discs in a binder... where they still are to this day.

At least with Photoshop, Adobe offered a pared-down version called Elements that would sometimes come bundled with a drawing tablet or a photo scanner. They never offered any such option for Flash. There were some third party options that could export an animation to Flash, but these were very hit-or-miss, and most simply didn't run on my computer by way of the partially-eaten piece of fruit on the casing. When Adobe rolled out the Creative Cloud suite, their "software as a service" model with monthly subscription fees in lieu of an upfront cost, I think I felt about every emotion possible between mildly enraged and extremely annoyed in one single sentence, "WHERE THE FUCK WAS THIS VERY WELCOME CONVENIENCE IN 2002!?" 

For the life of me, I don't remember if my department offered any sort of Flash animation programs (thereby bypassing any need to purchase my own copy). If there were, they were for computer science and web design majors. I haven't checked back on it now, but during my enrollment, the university was very oddly-structured when it came to film studies, hence my degree being an Arts & Sciences degree rather than a Fine Arts degree as one would expect. The point is I probably could have changed majors or done some serious lobbying to the powers that be to somehow bridge the gap, but that would have been one more rock-and-hard-place situation I simply didn't want hard enough or whatever other unhelpful bullshit life coach rhetoric would get espoused. The overlaps in their respective curriculums were very narrow, so I would have had to practically start over halfway through my degree, and if any attempts to remedy that situation fell through, I'd be left with nothing to show for it. 

I mentioned Flash being "survived" in a way by Animate. The only thing that animators are going to lose in the shutdown is the player, which most of them likely hadn't used in years thanks to YouTube. Apart from the games produced in Flash, another area where it held the distinguished rank of "industry standard" was in web design. In addition to designing small applications that could run inside a web browser (such as a game), it was possible to design an entire site in Flash. This was a common practice for Dreamcast games. At least, that was the majority of my exposure to it. This was back when the majority of websites had very straightforward (by today's standards) design because of the limitations of HTML. Flash allowed these sites to be, well, flashier, like those animated DVD menus that get an "ooh" or "ah" the first time you see them before getting immediately obnoxious. As the capabilities of HTML expanded and languages such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and Javascript also grew up into big strong web development environments, the Flash sites became old hat. 

Hopefully, the transition from Flash to HTML5 or CSS or whatever was fairly seamless for those who had made that investment in Flash all those years ago, that it gave them some kind of gentle slope instead of a wall. "I went to school for X, but I learned Y on my own from the comfort of my career." is how I imagine they'd sum up the change in scenery. Obviously, it's futile to assume anything will be stable, and Flash did enjoy a long, long period of relevance for a piece of software. Nowhere is it written that a program you use at university is going to remain an "industry standard" for years and years after you graduate. The assumption truly seems to be that learning Flash would get you to a point from where you could comfortably expand your skills into something that will keep your head above water when that ship inevitably sinks.

So, what does that make those companies still referring to X-2000 as an industry standard and required knowledge for their open position in a cutting-edge field? 

Better be a lot of stock images somewhere in there.