Robot Chicken played an unlikely role in the development of one of The Flash's most memorable villains. This revelation came to light in a recent interview with actress Katee Sackhoff, who has played metahuman crime-boss Amunet Black on The Flash since its fourth season.
First appearing in The Flash: Iron Heights special in October 2001, Amunet Black was the power behind the supervillain black market in Central City and Keystone City. Possessing the power to fuse organic and inorganic materials together, Black became known as the Blacksmith due to her preferred tactic of fusing metal to her own body. This power was modified slightly for the television series, with the Arrowverse's Amunet Black having the power to magnetically manipulate alnico alloys. Otherwise, she was largely the same character in terms of her base concept, operating a black market in advanced technology and enslaved metahumans while scheming to get Killer Frost (who briefly worked for her) under her thumb once again.
Katee Sackhoff spoke about her time as Amunet Black and the work she did to develop the character in a recent interview with Heroic Hollywood, explaining how her voice work on Robot Chicken influenced the character in one respect. Reasoning that Amunet was written as a theatrical sort of person who loved making grand gestures, Sackoff elected to give her "an over the top, unrealistic, British, Mary Poppins, arch nemesis accent that you can’t place." Sackhoff compared the voice she gave Amunet Black to her work playing the Strawberry Shortcake parody character B**ch Pudding on Robot Chicken, claiming the voice also helped to differentiate the character from her most famous role as Kara "Starbuck" Thrace in the Battlestar Galactical revival.
While acknowledging that many fans of The Flash found her obviously fake accent annoying, Sackhoff defended the choice. "You play a character and voice work allows you to do that. And so I do believe that it keeps that craft tuned," Sackhoff explained. "Because love or hate that accent, it’s completely identifiable away from anyone else you’ve ever seen on The Flash. You hear that voice, you know who it is instantaneously, and that’s the power of voice.”
There is a certain degree of logic to Sackoff's claims that the voice she gave Amunet Black defined the character, even outside the realm of the actor's craft. The Arrowverse version of Amunet Black was further distinguished from her comic book counterpart with a revised backstory, revealing that Amunet Black was an alias she adopted when she started a new life for herself after gaining metahuman powers. Originally she was Leslie Jocoy, a flight attendant who had grown up poor and was forced to tolerate continual sexual harassment from her coworkers due to a lack of career options given her lack of education. The same men who groped her on the job became her first victims when she became Amunet Black and began building her criminal empire.
Given the prevalence of British accents among villains in popular entertainment in English-speaking countries, it makes an odd sense that this lower-class woman, upon deciding to become a supervillain, might attempt to affect the sort of voice she thought a powerful woman or a villain ought to have. It would also make sense that her accent would seem so phony to actual Brits or anyone with a modicum of vocal training in accent work. In any case, it is still amusing to think that the character of Bitch Pudding on Robot Chicken had a role to play in shaping the reality of The Flash.