Captain America Week: Silver Screen Hero

Captain America: First Avenger is not the first time that ol' wing-head has flashed his shield on the silver screen or small screen for that matter. Since the early days of America's hero he's been fighting spies and sabatours for pop-corn chompin' audiences across the this great nation of ours, though 'First Avenger' seems to be the first to capture the hero in all his glory.

Cap first appeared on the silver screen in 1944 in a serialized story called "The Purple Death" (also called Captain America and Captain America Returns). Now, he's missing his trademarked shield going with a pistol instead, and he's not even fighting Nazis. This hero is more reminiscence of the 1950's Captain America than the Hitler smashing Cap of the 1940's. Still, as serials go, it's not too bad and has the requisite hero, police chief, feisty chic who gets captured a lot, and a handful of baddies.


Watch CAPTAIN AMERICA SERIAL TRAILER 1944 in Action & Adventure | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Next Cap showed up in 1966, revamped for the silver age in the Marvel Super Heroes cartoon program. Now any comic fan of the time couldn't help but love these cartoons, as limited motion as it was. The cartoons were filled with the original artwork from the comics, many of which was Jack Kirby's mini-masterpieces and Stan Lee's peak 60's dialogue. Plus each hero had their own theme song...



Alas, we come to the 1970's.

In the late 70's Marvel had a hit with The Incredible Hulk television program and a minor hit with the Spider-man series as well. So why not toss some more heroes into the action?

Well, I don't know what these studio heads were thinking but this movie sucked, at least for me as a kid waiting for a highly anticipated action movie of his favorite hero. I don't know, Steve Rogers never seemed to me to be a dirt-bike riding California stoner driving around in a make-out van with some easy-listening music in the back-ground. I mean WTF?

Here, just see what I mean....



Someone needs to get kicked in the nuts even now for this. I mean Cap doesn't even look like himself, and what's with the see-through shield.

Believe it or not they actually made two of these movies. See-through shield, crash-helmet. *sigh*

In the 90's Cap returned to the Silver Screen for, at least, a decent attempt and capturing the red, white and blue avenger but you can only go so far in a B-movie production. The costume was right and at least the story starts in WWII and the Red Skull looked pretty awesome. Not bad but not for the ages...




So finally we come to the present day. It's as if Captain America has been in a state of suspended animation and is only now being thawed out. So head on out to see Captain America: First Avenger (or wait until it gets to the cheap theater -- if you can!)

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!



Captain America Week:
Day 1: Eat it Hitler!
Day 2: Captain America Must Die!
Day 3: And A Phoenix Shall Rise
Day 4: Bring On The Bad Guys!
Day 5: Silver Screen Hero