![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.moviefanfare.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/Captain-America-19441.jpg\" "\\"Captain")
<\/a><\/td>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.moviefanfare.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/Captain-America-2011.jpg\" "\\"Captain")
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nHe first appeared on newsstands in December\u00a0of 1940, a full year before the country he was named for entered World War II. Leaping across the magazine cover to deliver a roundhouse right to\u00a0the jaw of Adolf Hitler while deflecting Nazi bullets with his\u00a0red-white-and-blue shield, Captain America–the brainchild of legendary comic book creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby–was an instant sensation. Over the next\u00a0seven decades the Star-Spangled Avenger would battle the Axis Powers, Communism, terrorists, racism, White House corruption\u00a0and\u00a0his own disillusionment with the government, even as his name became synonymous with right-wing, law-and-order politics (a point\u00a0Easy Rider<\/a>\u00a0co-creators Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper made by naming Fonda’s scruffy anti-hero after him). Through it all, however,\u00a0Cap has consistently been\u00a0one of the best-known and most popular of costumed\u00a0do-gooders…on the printed page, that is. When it comes to the big (and small) screen,\u00a0his\u00a0track record is a bit more spotty. As Paramount’s Captain America: The First Avenger opens, let’s look back on Ol’ Winghead’s\u00a0movie and TV\u00a0history.<\/p>\n Gardner and his gal Friday must\u00a0track down the mysterious Scarab,\u00a0a villain who is\u00a0eliminating the members of an archaeological expedition so he can\u00a0get his hands on a map\u00a0indicating where an ancient Mayan treasure was hidden. Along with a deadly poison dubbed\u00a0“The Purple Death,” the Scarab’s other weapons of choice include a\u00a0powerful new invention, a “thermodynamic vibrator” (insert your own joke here). I don’t want to give too much away as to the bad guy’s identity, but those familiar with the genre and 1940s actors won’t have too much trouble deducing who’s the Scarab from the opening credits.<\/p>\n Republic’s Captain America, which unfortunately has yet to be officially released on DVD, was a\u00a0fairly well-done– if low-budget–chapterplay, packed\u00a0with plenty of the cliffhanger action that the studio,\u00a0which\u00a0also made 1941’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel<\/a>,\u00a0was known for.Youngsters going to see this Cap at their local Saturday\u00a0matinee, however, must have been a little disappointed that the hero up on the screen didn’t have a shield with which to\u00a0knock out German and Japanese soldiers (were the filmmakers afraid the war was going to be over soon?).\u00a0On a sad sidenote, veteran actor Purcell died of a heart attack just two months after the serial’s debut, at the age of 35.<\/p>\n Captain\u00a0America\/Captain America II: Death Too Soon (both 1979) — A decade after “Batmania” swept across the country’s TV screens, and in the wake of the success of ABC’s The Six Million Dollar Man and its own Wonder Woman<\/a>\u00a0program, CBS turned to Marvel’s roster of do-gooders\u00a0for new show ideas. Some (The Amazing Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk<\/a>) were successful enough to become regular series. Others, specifically\u00a01978’s Dr. Strange and this pair of ham-handed\u00a0reworkings, were not.<\/p>\n Once again showing no interest in fidelity to the original storylines that fans wanted to see, the makers of these feature-length pilots decided that their Captain America would be the son <\/em>of the original. USC football player-turned-thespian Reb Brown<\/a>\u00a0starred as Steve Rogers (at least they got the name right this time), an artist\/motocross racer\/ex-Marine content to drive his groovy van along the Pacific coast and “search for America.” That is, until an unknown enemy tries to kill him and wreck his groovy van. A top-secret government group informs Rogers fils<\/em>\u00a0the bad guys were out to stop him from using the\u00a0“ultimate steroid” formula–code-named FLAG, for Full Latent Ability Gain–his dad developed and used to fight crime. An at-first reluctant Steve agrees to be the agency’s first human test subject, and is rewarded, not with “roid rage” and shrunken body parts, but with\u00a0enhanced strength, speed\u00a0and senses. The feds\u00a0give him a\u00a0souped-up, red-white-and-blue motorcycle launched by rockets (!) from the back of his groovy\u00a0van\u00a0(Republic’s ’40s Cap,\u00a0coincidentally, also rode a motorcycle) and a wobbly shield that looks like it’s made out of Plexiglas (and, of course, is the wrong color scheme from the comics). Oh, and he also gets the worst of all the various Captain America costumes, which Steve designed himself…<\/p>\n In the sequel Captain America II: Death Too Soon\u00a0(which improved slightly on the costuming, if not the shield), Brown’s adversary is none other than Christopher Lee<\/a>, playing an international terrorist who will release a chemical that rapidly accelerates the aging process over Portland, Oregon, if he isn’t given a\u00a0billion-dollar extortion payment (apparently Lee can stretch a buck further than Forrest). One would\u00a0think that Lee would have been a natural choice to play Cap’s WWII arch-enemy, Nazi assassin supreme\u00a0the Red Skull, but this was a period when\u00a0movies and TV shows based on\u00a0comic books tried to avoid anything like costumed supervillains that smacked of\u00a0 ’60s Batman camp. After all, who needs an interesting\u00a0antagonist when you can have Brown push a button that turns his super-cycle into a hang glider! Still,\u00a0Hammer horror icon Lee’s performance\u00a0is easily the best thing about either Captain America TV movie.\u00a0Needless to say, Brown’s Winghead did not follow in the series footsteps of Nicholas Hammond’s Web-Slinger and\u00a0Lou Ferrigno’s\u00a0Jolly Green Goliath…although he\u00a0and Ferrigno would team up to play Vietnam War comrades-turned-bar owners\u00a0in the 1989 action film Cage<\/a>\u00a0(Hmmm, Captain America and the Hulk running a bar together…sound like a script idea, Joss Whedon?).<\/p>\n This time, the filmmakers did manage to give audiences a comparatively faithful 1940s origin sequence, the “WWII-hero-frozen-in-ice-for-decades-and-revived-as-a-man-out-of-time” background, a relatively accurate if rubbery-looking\u00a0costume\u00a0(with fake ears attached to\u00a0the cowl!), and the\u00a0Skull as the bad guy.\u00a0Unfortunately, they also\u00a0presented a Cap who gets captured by the Nazis on his very first mission and strapped to a German rocket aimed at the White House (from Europe? in the ’40s?),\u00a0and one whose powers appear to be limited to punching through drywall, stealing cars from whoever tries to help him, and–in a novel switch–running away <\/em>from people on motorcycles. Oh, and the Red Skull, Hitler’s right-hand man in the comics, the malevolent embodiment of Third Reich evil? He’s now an Italian\u00a0who speaks-a his-a lines in an accent that would make Chico Marx blush! What, were the filmmakers afraid of offending real-life Nazis and hurting the film’s Argentinean box office? Speaking of box office, this much-ballyhooed Captain America film\u00a0never even made it to U.S theaters, going straight to home video after\u00a0doing less-than-star-spangled\u00a0business overseas…which is still\u00a0better than producer Roger Corman’s ill-fated, unreleased\u00a01994 Fantastic Four<\/a> project.<\/p>\n Now Chris Evans<\/a>, already familiar with the Marvel Universe thanks to his turns as the Human Torch in 2005’s Fantastic Four<\/a> and its ’07 follow-up Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer<\/a>, steps into the tricolor costume with Captain America: The First Avenger, as well as next year’s eagerly anticipated superhero mash-up The Avengers. As a fiftysomething fanboy, I know I’ll be there opening weekend, but will Evans’s performance as Cap be enough to shake off the character’s less-than-heroic screen past\u00a0and have, to borrow again from Walt Whitman, “the people all exulting”?\u00a0That is Marvel’s and Paramount’s “American Dream.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Movie FanFare offers a star-spangled salute to the movie and TV appearances of shield-slinging superhero Captain America, from 1944’s Republic serial to this year’s big-budget actioner starring Chris Evans as Cap. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":44600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1388,1457],"coauthors":[1720],"class_list":["post-14100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-articles","tag-action-movies","tag-comic-book-movies"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a>Captain America (1944) —\u00a0This Republic serial may have\u00a0been the\u00a0crimefighter’s movie debut, but any resemblance to his comic\u00a0book incarnation was purely coincidental. Instead of\u00a0scrawny Army reject-turned-super soldier Steve Rogers, Captain America’s secret identity here was the non-powered, crusading district attorney Grant Gardner (Dick Purcell<\/a>). This Cap’s uniform was missing the trademark “ear wings” on the cowl, along with other minor changes.\u00a0And what’s more, he didn’t even have a shield, but instead carried a gun that he didn’t\u00a0hesitate to train on the bad guys (Gardner obviously was a strong Second Amendment proponent). In a final\u00a0change…one that the movie Cap probably considered a plus, in lieu of teen sidekick “Bucky” Barnes, Gardner had\u00a0a pretty\u00a0secretary\/assistant named Gail Richards (Lorna Gray) who knew his dual persona.<\/p>\n<\/a>The Animated Captain America: A Cartoon Aside — In the comic book world, Captain America\u00a0spent the post-WWII years frozen in suspended animation inside a block of Arctic\u00a0ice, until Marvel Comics guru Stan Lee teamed with artist\u00a0Kirby to thaw him out in 1964 as a member of the Avengers (a brief 1950s revival as a Cold War Red-buster\u00a0was later explained away as being an impostor). Cap took his place alongside such new characters as the Hulk, Iron Man and Thor–plus fellow ’40s refugee the Sub-Mariner–in a syndicated\u00a0series of 1966 animated (by which I mean the studio copied Kirby’s\u00a0artwork and zoomed back and forth to simulate movement) adventures. They weren’t much to look at, but at least the theme song did explain to us what happens “when Captain America throws his mighty shield.”\u00a0Since then, the Sentinel of Liberty\u00a0has guest starred in other Marvel-based toons, from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends to X-Men Evolution, and currently is on the roster of both The Super Hero Squad Show<\/a> and Disney’s\u00a0The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes<\/a>. Now, back to the live-action Captains…<\/p>\n<\/a>See what I mean? So much for his career as an artist. Anyway, Rogers’ mission in the first movie is to capture the criminal mastermind (Steve Forrest) who wanted him dead, and is now planning\u00a0to detonate a neutron bomb inside\u00a0Phoenix, Arizona,\u00a0as part of his scheme to make off with 1.5 billion dollars in gold from the city’s vaults (He should have consulted Auric Goldfinger first to learn how difficult hauling\u00a0a billion-and-a-half in gold would be). The new Captain America saves the day, and Brown\u00a0decides to\u00a0add “costumed government agent” to his artist\/motocross racer\/ex-Marine resum\u00e9.<\/p>\n<\/a>Captain America<\/a>\u00a0(1990) — Fans of the big-screen Marvel blockbusters of the last dozen or so\u00a0years, starting with\u00a0the X-Men and Spider-Man films, may be unaware that, two decades ago, the publisher’s biggest-profile features to date were the 1986 megadisaster Howard the Duck<\/a>\u00a0and Dolph Lundgren’s 1989 title turn as The Punisher<\/a>. Cannon Films co-founder Menahem Golan,\u00a0who had already sunk the Superman franchise\u00a0with 1987’s\u00a0Superman IV: The Quest for Peace<\/a>, was one of the producers behind this on-the-cheap adaptation starring Matt Salinger (yes, he’s J.D.’s son) as Steve Rogers\/Captain America, along with Deliverance<\/a>\u00a0canoe buddies Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox and Scott Paulin as–finally–the Red Skull.<\/p>\n