The following contains spoilers for The Flash, in cinemas now.
The Flash used audio clips ripped from YouTube as the basis for some of its biggest legacy DC Universe cameos, according to supervising sound editor, Nancy Nugent.
Nugent confirmed that her team sourced the vocals for cameos by the likes of Christopher Reeve's Superman and Adam West's Batman from YouTube in an interview with Screen Rant. "I'll tell you the truth: a lot of them were pulled from YouTube," she said. "[We were] finding those old clips, and then it was a matter of removing music if there was music tied to it, or just cleaning it up. Because it was such a design-y moment and there was music going on, we could hide a lot of that. Whereas if it was just playing by itself, [it] might require us digging deeper into the archives--if that stuff even existed. Really, it was just a matter of finding out what we were legally allowed to use: which properties, and whose voices, and all of that, and then finding it on the internet and cleaning it up."
Other iconic DC heroes and villains seen or heard in The Flash include George Reeves' Superman, Helen Slater's Supergirl, and the Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson incarnations of the Joker. In a recent interview, director Andy Muschietti confirmed that the film originally featured several more cameos that were cut during the editing process. Among the characters mentioned by Muschietti were Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman and Burgess Meredith's Penguin. The director also indicated that Romero's Joker and Marlon Brando's Jor-El were meant to factor into The Flash's cameo sequence more explicitly, as well.
Kevin Smith Supports The Flash's Cameos
Muschietti's decision to include actors such as Reeve and West in The Flash has proven controversial, with some critics and fans arguing that using CGI to bring these deceased performers back to life is distasteful. However, The Flash's cameos have at least one high-profile defender: filmmaker and comic book scribe Kevin Smith. "It didn't bother me all," Smith said in a recent interview. "I thought it was just a really nice homage to the past. It didn't feel like an insult. That felt like an homage. Some people are like, 'Yeah, but they're not alive to say yes or no.' And you know, I don't know any actor who would be like, 'Don't use my image when I'm dead.'"
Complaints about The Flash's CGI cameos aren't limited solely to ethical considerations, though. The quality of the actual visual effects involved has also come under fire -- a criticism a member of The Flash VFX team recently addressed on TikTok. According to VFX artist Zach Mulligan, The Flash's "poor" CGI is the result of the effects houses involved struggling to meet the production's unrealistic deadlines.
Source: Screen Rant