Before Stephen Amell took on the role of the Green Arrow in Arrow, Justin Hartley donned the hood in Smallville. So it should come to no surprise that the Arrowverse team tried to get the original Emerald Archer to appear on The CW drama.
"I'll tell you, Justin is someone I've been trying to get on Arrow for years," Arrow co-creator Mark Guggenheim told Fake Nerd Podcast. Sadly, it never worked out and Hartley did not make an appearance on the series.
However, just because Guggenheim could not get Hartley, that does not mean that the series could not honor the Smallville character.
"I did send down the request, 'Could we borrow the costume from archives?' They said yes, but they said yes with a lot of caveats, not the least of which is, 'No one can wear it' and 'You can't get it dirty.' So we put it on a dummy, so thereby we satisfied that loophole, and as far as not getting it dirty, hopefully whoever at archives provided it to us never actually saw that episode."
Guggenheim is referring to the stinger that aired on The CW's Arrowverse series right before the "Elseworlds" crossover began. The dummy version of Hartley's Green Arrow can be seen lying in the dirt after failing to protect Earth-90. The camera pans past it before revealing Earth-90's Flash, as played by John Wesley Shipp.
Arrow stars Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, David Ramsey as John Diggle, Rick Gonzalez as Wild Dog, Juliana Harkavy as Black Canary, Katie Cassidy as Black Siren, Katherine McNamara as Mia Smoak, Joseph David-Jones as Connor Hawke and Ben Lewis as William Clayton-Queen.