In April 2022, The CW cancelled Legends of Tomorrow, which was especially unfortunate considering Season 7 ended on a cliffhanger, making it one of the many good TV shows that didn’t last long enough to finish the story. But another reason the Arrowverse series’ final episode was notable was because it guest-starred Donald Faison as Booster Gold, and had Season 8 happened, the plan was to bring him back. Not only that, it turns out his Scrubs co-star Zach Braff was being considered for a major role alongside him.
Legends of Tomorrow showrunner Keto Shimizu stopped by The Showrunner Whisperer podcast to talk about her time on working on the series, including how she reacted upon learning that the series had been abruptly ended. When host Andy Behbakht inquired about if she and the rest of the creative team considered having Braff play “someone close to Booster,” she confirmed that was indeed the case, saying:
[Laughs] Of course, of course, we love Zach! We thought about him maybe being the voice of his little robot.
Shimizu soon clarified she was referring to Skeets, Booster Gold’s floating robotic companion. For those unfamiliar with the character, in the comics, Booster, a.k.a. Michael Jon Carter, hails from the 25th century, and he was originally a star college football player before being busted for losing games on purposes tied to gambling. He then became a night watchman at a museum that had displays of superheroes and supervillains from the present day. With the help of Skeets, a security robot, Michael stole a Time Sphere and various other pieces of technology from the museum, and the two of them traveled back to our time so Michael could achieve fame and fortune as a superhero. Skeets especially comes in handy with providing Booster with historical knowledge stretching between the 20th/21st-25th centuries thanks to the records in his databanks.
Given how Zach Braff and Donald Faison spent nearly a decade together respectively starring as JD and Turk on Scrubs, not to mention that they’re best friends in real life, casting the former as the voice of Skeets to the latter’s Booster Gold would have been stellar casting. Plus, as Keto Shimizu laid out below, it would have come with an additional benefit for the Legends of Tomorrow production:
Yeah! We thought about that because that would have been an easy way to get Zach in there and have him do the voice as opposed to trying to finding money to pay for him to actually be on the show, [laughs] so that’s what we were throwing around.
Braff previously told Slashfilm that he’d be game to the Ted Kord version of Blue Beetle, which also would have been fun to see considering that he and Booster Gold are best friends who frequently battle the forces of evil together. But as Shimizu pointed out, it would have been more costly to have Braff on the Legends of Tomorrow set, so having him voice Skeets would have been quite the money-saver, and certainly not a forced one considering how important Skeets is to Booster Gold’s lore.
Alas, with Legends of Tomorrow’s cancellation and the main Arrowverse continuity having concluded, the time of seeing a Donald Faison-played Booster Gold and a Zach Braff-voiced Skeets has passed. The good news, though, is that the upcoming DC TV show Booster Gold is in development for the DC Universe franchise, so we will get to see different live-action versions of these characters in the coming years. If you’re now in the mood to watch Legends of Tomorrow, stream it with a Netflix subscription.