This week, Captain America: The First Avenger arrives in theaters and people — including their grandmothers — are pumped to see it. We’ve all seen the cool trailers and the fancy posters. One thing is for sure and that is this movie is sleek and a lot of effort has been made to make it one of the mostly highly anticipated comic book movies of all time.
Cool! Fancy! Sleek!
Captain America looks like he’s going to be the newest comic book movie darling of not just America, but the entire world! But it wasn’t always like this, though.
Here, have a shield!
In 1990, a Captain America movie was intended to be released in theaters to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the character. Due to lackluster test audience feedback and the fact that the film totally sucked, it wasn’t released until two years later — straight to video. The movie started off OK with an origin story that pretty much stayed loyal to the comics except for the fact that Steve Rogers didn’t have polio. The Red Skull was awesome at the beginning of the movie too — and then he had plastic surgery.
“Dude, seriously. What happened to your face?” asked Cap before kicking the Red Skull in the balls.
This film –even with its horrible environmental policies plot — is still a decent attempt at a Captain America movie compared to the baffling 1979 TV movie starring a Steve Rogers who is not a soldier but a commercial artist. He is almost killed by spies who stole his dead daddy’s secrets but he is saved and given superhuman powers by a special serum injected into him without his permission during surgery. WTF, right? It gets worse.
Instead of going to the cops, Commercial Artist Steve Rogers decides to use his super reflexes and jacked up strength to get revenge on his attackers. And instead of keeping him locked up or training him, the government gives Commercial Artist Steve Rogers a special motorcycle loaded with all kinds of gadgets and weapons. The only thing dumber than this plot is the TV executive who decided that this movie deserves a sequel called “Captain America II: Death Too Soon”. It was shown on TV the same year.
At least the second poster is slightly more interesting even if it’s just a tricked out version of the first one.
If you think a crappy movie from the 90′s and two dumb movies from the 70′s are the only stinkers that features Cap, you’re wrong — sort of. A serial film in the 40′s was made and it was loosely based on the character. And by “loosely” I mean he’s not even Steve Rogers. In the serial, Captain America is Grant Gardner, a district attorney. He tangles with an evil museum curator named Dr. Cyrus Maldor a.k.a. The Scarab. They fight over weapons of mass destruction including, of all things, the “Dynamic Vibrator”.
Look! It’s us — in 3D! But not in color. LOL
That film serial wasn’t the last time the world would see a movie very loosely based on Captain America. In 1973, an insane Turkish film called “3 Dev Adam” (translated as “Three Mighty Men”) was released. In this movie, Captain America teams up with Santo, a famous Mexican professional wrestler, to take down Istanbul’s most deadly and most violent criminal organization which is led by a diabolical criminal mastermind: Spider-Man!
It’s premise is so insane that it borders on being genius.
3 Dev Adam was not the first unofficial appearance of Captain America in a Turkish movie, though. That honor belongs to a 1968 movie called “Major Tayfun” which featured a thinly veiled Captain America.
Little is known about this movie but if we are to interpret its plot based on the poster then it involves Fake Captain America not knowing how to ride a motorcycle and Fake Captain America pulling a gun on Burt Reynolds.
Enjoy your seemingly guaranteed success with the new movie, Captain America. After all of these movie disasters and oddities, you deserve a really good one.
