Die-hard Green Arrow fans should be pleased to hear that Speedy, the Emerald Archer’s sidekick, might appear on the upcoming CW series Arrow. In fact, Oliver Queen’s partner in crime-fighting may have already been cast.
In the “Arrow” pilot, Queen refers to his younger sister as “Speedy,” an Easter egg that could easily get lost in the shuffle of an already jam-packed episode. But executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg didn’t make the reference just for the reference’s sake. In fact, there’s an early version of the pilot that further teased Thea Queen’s eventual assumption of the Speedy mantle.
“My favorite moment in the original script, which Andrew wrote, that didn’t make it into the pilot is when she’s in the room with [her friend] and they’re crushing up the pills,” Guggenheim told TV Guide. “The original stage direction was she reaches over to the shelf and grabs a junior archery championship trophy to crush the pills. I’m like ‘Why didn’t we do that? We never should have taken that out!'”
“The DC comic fans see that and it fulfills something inside of them,” added Kreisberg. “But at the same time, we’re hoping that the show has a broader audience. We designed it to please both fans and non-fans alike. So, if you’re not a fan, that line just kind of blows past.”
As for other future DC Easter eggs, Kreisberg teased that while we won’t see many of the universe’s more fantastic characters — say, Superman or Green Lantern, for instance — there are plans in the works to take some of those figures and bring them down to a more realistic level.
“I think that there is room in our world to take some of the more fantastic characters in the DC universe and do them in a more realistic, relatable manner,” he said. “We are looking to do that and we actually have plans for one character specifically.”