The Flash's Speed Force scenes should have been a celebration of all things DC. Instead, those cameos have come under fire for a number of reasons, including questionable (to downright awful) VFX and a debate about whether resurrecting an actor like Christopher Reeve after his death was the right thing to do.
Not helping matters was the absence of many characters a lot of fans would have enjoyed seeing take centre stage, including Grant Gustin's Scarlet Speedster and, dare we say it, some familiar faces from the SnyderVerse!
When Barry Allen encounters the Multiversal heroes who are brought to life as cartoonish CG lookalikes, we get to hear some of them speak as well.
Talking to Screen Rant, The Flash's supervising sound editor Nancy Nugent revealed the creative team's unique approach to utilising that audio.
"I'll tell you the truth; a lot of them were pulled from YouTube," she revealed. "[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."
It's a little bizarre to hear that a major studio plucked audio clips from YouTube, but this may be indicative of the slapdash approach to these cameos. It's also widely believed they were thrown in at the last minute as a way of ending the movie on a fan-pleasing note following the removal of the original ending.
At the same time, this was an admittedly innovative approach to bringing those characters to life on screen again, though fans remain divided about whether The Flash's approach to them and the Speed Force should have ever seen the light of day.
The Flash is now playing in theaters.