Remember a while back when I expressed cautious enthusiasm for the SciFi Channel’s upcoming take on the venerable Flash Gordon character? Well, I’m no longer so optimistic about this project, not after seeing who the producers have cast as Flash and his lady love, Dale Arden.

I’m not disparaging the talents of either Eric Johnson (Flash) or Gina Holden (Dale). I’m not qualified to do so, considering that I’m utterly unfamiliar with their previous work. The problem is that they just don’t look right for the roles to me, at least not in the photos that accompany the articles I linked above. Holden, like that of many of the young ladies currently working in Hollywood, is attractive but pretty generic, and Johnson just looks too damn young to be “The Hero.”

A little googling reveals that he’s 27, which puts him exactly in between the two best-known previous Flashes, age-wise (Sam Jones was 26 when he played the character in the 1980 movie and Buster Crabbe was 28 when he filmed the first of the three classic serials), but those other guys have always seemed older to me. I suppose my perception of them could be skewed because I was a child and they were grown-ups when I first saw their respective Flashes, but the character of Flash Gordon has always struck me as at least 30.

Of course, the character has usually been established as some variety of professional athlete — a polo player in the ’30s serials, an NFL football player in the 1980 film — so I guess he would have to be in his mid-20s, given the paucity of real-life thirtysomething pro athletes.

I don’t know… maybe my feelings on this matter are being influenced as much by my own advancing age as anything, but it really seems to me like pop culture in the last ten years has glorified youth to a much greater degree than ever before, and it’s starting to bug me. Flash Gordon in all his various incarnations has been a hero to me for most of my life, and I guess I want to continue to have a Flash I can relate to. I have little interest in a Smallville-style “Young Flash Gordon” series.

A spiritual forerunner of Flash, John Carter of Mars, was depicted by his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, as unaging, but about 30 years old in physical appearance. I guess that’s about how I tend to imagine my swashbuckling heroes as well.

I’m probably making too much of this, considering I haven’t actually seen Eric Johnson act. It wouldn’t be the first time. On the positive side, at least he and Gina Holden won’t have to change their hair color. This may be the first time in history that the cast of a Flash Gordon adaptation will actually have the same hair color as the characters in the original comic strip! (Sam Jones and Buster Crabbe both had to bleach their brown hair blond to play Flash, while Melody Anderson and Jean Rogers — the 1980 and ’30s-vintage Dales, respectively — had to dye their blond tresses.)