It seemed for years that this song, exclamation point and all, would never quite get its due. Queen is as embedded in the culture as the Beatles at this point. Their soundtrack work, however, always seems to get short shrift. This is understandable. It's not like Highlander or Flash Gordon were huge hits. Play this song on the way to a comic convention, however, and try to find a single person who doesn't have it memorized down to the sampled movie dialogue. It's not exactly "The Show Must Go On," but it's an iconic piece of rock history, forever connected not only to a fun movie, but to a lineage of science fiction superheroes going back to the thirties. What H. G. Wells began with speculation and creativity led to an entire genre, much of it popularized by characters like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. "Flash!" isn't just a theme song, but a celebration of that genre.
Check out "The Champ" by my alter ego, Greg Forrest, in Heater #12, at http://fictionmagazines.com.
I used to do a mean Glenn Danzig impression. Now I just hang around and co-host The Workprint podcast at http://southboundcinema.com/.
