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 It's hard to believe that Flash ended up on the good guy side because he must have been a boiling pit of impatient rage underneath that pantyhose. To explain why I think so, I'll use a story from my childhood. In sixth grade, my school spent its special education funding on a used mechanical riding bull for the teacher's lounge. They wanted something to relieve tension between classes and since the janitor humped it on the showroom floor, they had no choice but to buy it. This meant that all of the special ed wranglers were fired and the special needs students were mainstreamed into regular classes. This made the curriculum change from American History to Coloring and slowed our education down to a rate so slow they didn't teach us a word to describe it. In fact, by the time eighth grade came, we'd still only learned 5 words for each letter of the alphabet. With the exception of letters N through Z, which we hadn't got to yet. So when we were asked to describe our education to parents and evaluation boards, we only had our choice of GOOD, APPLE, and BEAR. The point is, if Flash was a normal sixth grader, the rest of the Super Friends were a group of mainstreamed retarded children who slowed him down to the point of... BEAR. It must have seemed like a year waiting for the rest of his hero friends to finish their sentences, and that's not counting Apache Chief. He talked so slow he had to give his audience an intermission when he was reading them a one panel Family Circus comic. And thanks to a federal mandate from the Cartoon Native Preservation Act, the show was legally required to give him at least two lines a week. If you added up all time of our childhoods taken up in the silence between that damn guy's words, we could have all learned how to needlepoint. Now just think: if you were the Flash, every person you met would sound like Apache Chief. 
The cartoon never really brought up the Flash's frustration, and they never seemed to think his powers all the way through either. If you drive a motorcycle at 80 miles per hour, your cheeks fill with air and it kind of feels like your face is trying to tear itself off. And if a bug hits you at that speed it feels like tiny lumberjacks climbed onto your shoulder and are hitting your head with their adorable but deadly axes. It hurts. If the Flash really ran at the speed of light, you'd find his body about 200 miles away from where the wind sheared his skin off, and he'd have a beachball-sized hole in his chest from where he hit a grasshopper at a zillion billion miles an hour. His powers weren't close to the most insane part of the Flash, though; his villains were. There was no super villain equivalent of him like all the other heroes got. No Admiral Fast or some kind of Time Master guy, or even just a dude with lots of fly paper he could lay down. The Flash's arch-nemeses were Gorilla Grodd and Captain Cold. In someone's crazy mind the perfect counter for super speed was an eskimo with a snowball gun and a talking monkey. Why not. The same logic worked for our Olympic hockey team when we countered the Russian team's speed by finding a wingman that had a tail and a really fucked up hat. |
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