- Title: Captain America (1979)
- IMDb: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us back to one of the more unusual adaptations of Captain America. 1979’s made-for-television movie Captain America is a bizarre experience that reminds you just how far Marvel has come over the years in licensing their characters for live-action films. Set in the 1970s, Reb Brown stars as Steve Rogers. This Steve isn’t a World War II veteran. Instead, he’s a former soldier and dirt bike racer, now retired beach bum. Dr. Simon Mills (Len Birman), a colleague of Steve’s father, reaches out with an offer. There’s this serum you see which will only work for Steve. A couple of attempts on Steve’s life, one leaving him near death, lead to Steve being reborn as Captain America, a name we’re told his father’s enemies used as an insult, or at least a Six Million Dollar Man approximation of what Captain America would look like on a shoestring budget.
While he fills out the craptastic Evel Knievel version of Captain America’s costume (where a motorcycle helmet is built-in), Brown’s wooden delivery leaves something to be desired. To be fair, the script doesn’t give him much to work with, and it’s nearly two-thirds through the movie before we see this version of Captain American in action for the first time (armed with a suped-up motorcycle and the lamest version of Captain America’s shield ever created). Only in the movie’s last scene do we see Captain America in a more traditional costume (which makes you wonder why they even bothered with his other version). Along for the ride are Lance LeGault and Steve Forrest as two of the more notable bad guys who are attempting to steal money from a gold depository using a neutron bomb. Captain America doesn’t belong in the so-bad-it’s-good category, but it does provide plenty of groan-worthy moments and unintentional humor that a few, very few, fans may enjoy.
