For those of you that aren’t aware, there was a live action Captain America movie that was supposed to come out in 1990 that only ended up with a limited release. You may have stumbled across a video essay or Reddit post about it. The film starred Matt Sallinger (son of author J.D. Sallinger) as Steve Rogers/Captain America, Scott Paulin (Christian Slater’s dad in Pump Up The Volume) as the Red Skull, Ronny Cox (he was in RoboCop and Deliverance) as President Tom Kimball, Ned Beatty (he was Otis in Superman The Movie and was also in Deliverance) as a reporter named Sam, Darren McGavin (Kolchak the Night Stalker and the dad in A Christmas Story), Melinda Dillon (the mom from A Christmas Story) as Steve Rogers’ mom, Michael Nouri (Ziva’s dad on NCIS) as Lt. Col. Lewis, and Kim Gillingham (guest star on a bunch of NBC shows in the nineties) as Bernie Stewart/Sharon Stewart.

Spoiler warning…the film isn’t all that good.

It’s not objectively awful. To be fair, a lot of super hero films from the past five to six decades have gotten a reappraisal from me after seeing The Flash from 2023 and in many of those cases I’ve gone from, “That was awful,” to “You know, this wasn’t that bad.”

I have rarely hated a film as much as I hate The Flash. It’s a whole thing.

Anyway, this post isn’t meant to be a review or overview or snark filled essay about the movie. That will come at some point in the future. This is about the two trailers that were made for the film. Because, despite the fact that the movie only got a very limited theatrical release before getting dumped on home video in 1992 (in the US, apparently it got a VHS release in 1991 in the UK) Captain America not only got a teaser trailer, but also a full “theatrical type” trailer as well.

And I saw the teaser trailer in an actual theater.

It was March or April of 1990. My sister Jane and one of her friends went to the theater to see a new film adaptation of The Lord of the Flies. I think they were reading it at the time. I tagged along, not to see that film, but to see the first live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

(Which, by the way, I absolutely loved and still do. That movie aged very well in my opinion. I was a touch too old to really get into the cartoon, but the movie was great.)

So, there I was, sitting in the theater, waiting for the movie to start and this trailer plays on the screen.

I was beyond excited. I knew that the movie was being made thanks to Comics Scene magazine, but here was the trailer, which meant it was actually going to come out. I was going to get to see a Captain America film in the theater. It was going to be amazing.

It was. In 2011. When my wife and I went to see Captain America: The First Avenger.

It only took 21 years.

The teaser is interesting. It’s also has some serious problems with math. The evil the trailer mentions came in 1938. The hero was born in 1943. Now, 50 years later (in the Spring of 1990) that hero is returning.

That math ain’t mathing.

Beyond that, this trailer works for what it is intended to do. Get you excited about a Captain America film.

Later, a full trailer would be cut together with the same narrator. I called it a “theatrical type” trailer because I honestly don’t know if this was ever shown in theaters. It could have easily been made as a trailer for the home video market.

And it writes a lot of checks the movie ultimately doesn’t cash.

I mean, you watch that trailer and think, “Well, that doesn’t look half bad.” And I want to be as clear as humanly possible.

It is…in fact…half bad.

But I’ll get into that in the near future. For now, bask in the glow of early nineties comic book film promotion, made in a time after the release of the 1989 Batman film. A time that promised a renaissance of super hero movies. A promise that was finally realized…

…ten or so years later.

More to follow…