Whether or not I'm a fan of CW's programming, I have to admit that Donald Faison's portrayal of Booster Gold on DC's Legends of Tomorrow season 7 finale has certainly raised the profile of the character and introduced him to a whole bunch of people who have never actually set their hands on a DC comic. That's an objectively good thing.

So it is a worthwhile experience to read how the show's executive producer Phil Klemmer finally got around to adding Booster to his long-running show.

Here he speaks to Chancellor Agard for ew.com:

EW: Arrowverse boss Greg Berlanti has reportedly been working on a Booster Gold movie for years. How did the character wind up on Legends?

Klemmer: As you might expect, through the side door you'd least expect it [to]. I just remember [co-showrunner Keto Shimizu] and I were on a call with Kim Roberto at DC, and we were just talking about fun characters. I think somebody threw it out there, of course never [imagining] in a million years would we get Booster Gold. And then it felt like 15 minutes later, DC called us back and was just like, "Hey, Booster's yours." And just you have a moment of being like, "Okay, this is clearly a prank of some sort, because..." We were all giddy and in disbelief and then it just became a quest of finding an actor who was worthy of the character.

EW: Why was Booster Gold on your mind to begin with? Were you just looking for a DC character to bring in at the end of the season? How did Booster end up fitting the needs of the story?

Klemmer: It's always the tonal fit and just knowing, I don't know, there's just something so lovable and unexpected. You just knew that he was going to work as kind of a bit of the merry prankster, a bit of a BS artist.

Klemmer was also quizzed by Joshua Lapin-Bertone at DCComics.com:

DC: How familiar were you with Booster before this?

Klemmer: I just knew about him from the early days of Legends, when I would hear of various projects, whether they were TV shows or movies, in the same halls where I was working. And obviously dealing with Rip Hunter in early seasons as well. I just assumed that he was going to have his own project. I never imagined that he would come into our world.

DC: For building this version of Booster, did you draw upon any particular stories? Or did you build him from the ground up?

Klemmer: The creation of a character really takes place over the course of that first season, and then seasons to come. It's going to really be a correspondence between us as writers and Donald as a performer. We definitely wanted someone who is a little off center, and like, a little bit mischievous. But we also just wanted a charisma bomb.

And we round out our media tour with Klemmer's conversation with Damian Holbrook of TVInsider.com:

TV: Is the plan to keep Donald on the board?

Klemmer: For sure. We're not gonna let Booster get away. I'm really excited to write him—he's the kind of character you wish you could be. You could get away with murder and be so charming that you never really have to suffer the consequences. He's the antithesis of a writer. Writers are deeply neurotic and self-loathing self-doubting, etcetera. I think that's why we writers are drawn to those characters—because those are our secret alter egos.

Season 8 has not yet been announced. Will there be another season of Legends of Tomorrow? If I were a betting man, I'd bet yes (especially if Michael "Booster" Carter is on the field). Legends of Tomorrow is one of the few CW shows that has improved its ratings season-over-season, so I think we should prepare to see more of Klemmer and Faison's Gold come fall.

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Booster Gold fans will recognize actor Eric Martsolf as the first (and so far only) actor to play our hero in a live action production. (For the record, that was on the Smallville episode "Booster" airing April 22, 2011 as the 18th episode of the series' 10th season. Remember this?)

Martsolf is still acting on daytime television and was recently interviewed by Michael Maloney for TV Insider during which he reminisced about his Smallville days.

TV Insider: You got to play humor when you played Booster Gold on Smallville. How much fun was that?

Martsolf: That was my favorite role to date. It was funny, heroic, a comic book come to life; I loved getting to play someone who's completely larger than life. I got credit from my kids for playing a character who's a member of the Justice League. I still have [fans] from the DC Universe and the Smallville world hit me up on social media, trying to get a Booster Gold movie going on, but now I may have to settle for playing his dad. Then again, he is a time traveler.

TV Insider: Was there anything from the Smallville episode you got to keep? Probably not the Booster Gold costume!

Martsolf: No, that custom-made to my body leather outfit, I think, was more expensive more than my first house was! I did get to keep several of the Booster Gold fan club shirts [that were in the show as a story point]. At the end of the episode, I, as Booster, throw one to Clark (Tom Welling) and say, 'You're an XL, right, Clark?' I remember after the scene I gave Tom a hug [goodbye] and he said take as many of those shirts as you want.

Booster's dad, Jonar Carter, is a thoroughly bad seed. If When Booster ever returns to the screen, Jonar would make a great antagonist. And Martsolf would get another shot at keeping his own "body leather outfit," this time as the masked Supernova. Yes, I would definitely watch that.

(The t-shirt Martsolf mentions seen in the episode, by the way, was the Booster Gold Fan Club t-shirt released in 2009 by Graphitti Designs under license of DC Comics with art by Dan Jurgens.)

You can read the whole article, mostly about Martsolf's experiences on the soap operas Days of Our Lives and Passions, at TVInsider.com.

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