Captain America Film Retrospective

Celebrating (?) the announcement of a director for the upcoming Marvel Comics film.

The news this week that veteran director Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo) has signed to helm Marvel Film’s upcoming The First Avenger: Captain America didn’t exactly make us explode with enthusiasm. We like Cap, have since we were kids, and we’ve got the longbox full of back issues to prove it. Coming on the news that Kenneth Brannagh would direct Thor, the man behind Jumanji taking on the Avengers’ leader was bittersweet news at best. UPDATE: the ad that aired during the Super Bowl didn’t look too shabby, even if it’s editing makes the term “teaser” seem a bit too generous.

Nevertheless the bar for this latest version is set really, really low by previous attempts to translate the Star Spangled Avenger from comics to cinema and television. Whether from their low budgets or low ambitions, or both, the hero known to fans simply as “Cap” has had an especially pungent run of bad luck. Moreso, for sure, than even Spider-Man and the Hulk, who’ve also got plenty of bad adaptations lurking in their respective histories.

What is it about Cap that makes the transition so hard? Is it the deceptively simple concept of a patriot trying to embody his country’s ideals? Does such undiluted optimism about America not figure into the modern cultural zeitgeist? Like Superman, Captain America is an idea meant to be writ larger than life, a central figure on an almost mythic stage. Maybe it’s that huge presence that makes flawed adaptations seem so much worse: the Hulk only looks silly in an unconvincing special effects sequence. A guy wrapped in a flag just looks sad, as some of these adaptations plainly illustrate.

Captain America (1944): Boasting the odd distinction of being the most expensive Republic movie serial ever made, this 1944 Saturday-matinee series recast the captain as District Attorney Grant Gardner (Dick Purcell), who used a gun instead of Cap’s trademark shield. The super-soldier serum that gave him his powers is not used, and the villain is a saboteur called The Scarab. The series actually met with a warm response from some critics, who praised its elaborate stuntwork.

Captain America Animated Series (1966): Marvel’s top-tier characters all got their own quickie cartoons in the mid-60s, only a handful of years into the company’s reformation. The rushed and bargain basement production shows in every turgid frame of the clip below, much of which looks lifted directly from the actual comics’ art. Actually, the finished product is typical of  the cartoons Marvel was putting out at the time. For the truly curious, or for those just wishing to punish their eyes, many of them (including episodes  starring Iron Man and The Hulk) are availabe in their grueling entirety on YouTube.

Captain America and Captain America II: Death Too soon (1979) These two made-for-TV films, released within a year of one another, recast their hero as the son of the original and a surfer dude on a custom street bike. The first telefilm depicted the new Cap (Reb Brown) battling a group of terrorists trying to blow up Phoenix (Phoenix?) with a hydrogen bomb. Death Too Soon, markedly the better of the two films, included Christopher Lee as a touring company Dracula and Connie Sellecca as Cap’s love interest.

Captain America (1990): Another low-budge effort from a period in Marvel-inspired cinema that also included a Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four film that was never even released, this 1990 attempt starred Matt Salinger (Revenge of the Nerds) as the captain and Scott Paulin as his archnemesis The Red Skull. Veteran character actors Ned Beatty and Darren McGavin wander into frame on their way to the pay window. 

Captain America: The First Avenger opens nationwide July 22, 2011.

- Michael Kabel

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