Spoilers are unmarked, for both this show and the 2014 reboot.
- Awesome Music:
- Danny Elfman's theme song
. - Shirley Walker's music for the two-hour pilot and all the episodes (Walker became the first woman to be entrusted with a show of this nature - and it was her work on this that led to her doing Batman: The Animated Series).
- Danny Elfman's theme song
- Complete Monster: See here.
- Cult Classic: It was always been this for those who saw it, but the homages made by The Flash (2014) progressively made it into one to a newer generation.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: The Trickster was far and away the most popular villain on the show, with Mark Hamill's Large Ham performance nailing the comic book bad guy in a way none of the other rather more pedestrian villains could.
- Fight Scene Failure: The Flash suit looks fantastic in still shots, but unfortunately forced Shipp to move very stiffly in fight scenes. Compare to the 2014 suit which opted for the reverse priorities.
- Growing the Beard: The first half of the series was quite bland and repetitive, which featured The Flash solely fighting crime bosses and human villains that aren't really much of a match for him, but an increased influence from the comics (marked by the introduction of Breakout Villain The Trickster, followed by the rest of his Rogues Gallery and other metahumans) and more focus on science fiction over crime capers halfway through the series saw the show's quality increase significantly.
- Harsher in Hindsight: A day short of the twenty fifth anniversary of the airing of this show's final episode, John Wesley Shipp's character in The Flash (2014) was killed off. The Henry Allen character, at least; Shipp later comes back as Jay Garrick, Henry's Earth-3 doppelganger. Even worse, the Arrowverse outright states that every single character from this show is dead, save for Barry himself, because of the Monitor's actions.
- Heartwarming in Hindsight: The fact that the new Flash series doesn't shy on giving homages to this show in any way they could. It was eventually even canonically made a part of the show's own multiverse. And then in the Season 2 finale Shipp even gets to play the Flash again as Jay Garrick, and then reprises the role of this series's Barry Allen in Elseworlds.
- In his final moments before he died in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Barry thinks only of Tina.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Mark Hamill's performance as the Trickster really comes off as a dry run for his iconic portrayal of The Joker in the DC Animated Universe; his second, far more manic appearance in "Trial of the Trickster" — featuring him acquiring a Harley Quinn-like sidekick, Prank, and getting a new, mischievous leitmotif by Shirley Walker herself — feels uncannily like a live-action B:TAS episode at times. In addition to which, Hamill later plays different versions of the Trickster in Justice League and The Flash (2014) (a mostly harmless and mentally-ill villain in the former, and two different versions of a sinister reprise of his 1990 role in the latter).
- The Pilot Episode was shot (and aired) in 1990, the same year that Grant Gustin, the actor who will eventually play Barry Allen in The Flash (2014), was born. It gets better since John Wesley Shipp plays Barry's father there.
- In the pilot, Barry comes very close to spilling his identity to a random bad guy before thinking better of it. Compare to the 2014 version infamously throwing the secret around willy-nilly to everyone but his love interest.
- In in the episode "Done With Mirrors" the Flash takes on the villainous Mirror Master played by David Cassidy... his daughter turned up on The Flash (2014), as part of her Arrowverse duties.
- Mark Hamill's performance as the Trickster really comes off as a dry run for his iconic portrayal of The Joker in the DC Animated Universe; his second, far more manic appearance in "Trial of the Trickster" — featuring him acquiring a Harley Quinn-like sidekick, Prank, and getting a new, mischievous leitmotif by Shirley Walker herself
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Iris West. She's Barry's wife in the comics and the aunt of Barry's sidekick and successor Wally West leading to some interesting possibilities for the character, but here is reduced to a one-off girlfriend who gets Put on a Bus and isn't even a reporter.
- Unintentional Period Piece: The show was made at the very beginning of The '90s and it shows not only in the fashion, but also the decor and the now thoroughly outdated computer and lab equipment and digital effects.
