When it comes to cinematic villains, they’re at the top of the list.( Or is it the bottom?) Oskar Schindler duped’em. Rick Blaine shot one of’em. Indiana Jones killed nearly a whole battalion of’em.
Steve Rogers doesn’t care for Nazis much either. Hey, it’s the heart of World War II and the Axis powers are carving up Europe. How could he? But neither is he eager to go all Indiana on their sorry, movie-screen souls.
I don’t want to kill anyone, he confesses. But, he adds, I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from.
Steve knows all about bullies. The dude looks like he’s the 90-pound weakling in those Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads. He’s got the curvature of a pool cue, the strength of a partially melted Jell-O salad. He makes Michael Cera look like one tough hombre.
But that doesn’t negate the guy’s courage. Steve stands up to bullies wherever he sees them, and he obsessively tries to sign up for the war—even falsifying his records to get in. There are men laying down their lives, he says. I have no right to do anything less. But no military doctor will pass him.
Until, of course, he runs into mysterious and brilliant scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine, who drafts the lad into a secret government program designed to create super-soldiers through the wonders of cutting-edge chemistry. Steve seems the perfect candidate—not because of who he is on the outside, but who he is on the inside. Before long, the little guy finds himself strapped inside a coffin-like apparatus and infused with a weird assortment of drugs. And when the painful procedure is done, out steps …
Charles Atlas, of course.
No, no. It’s just Steve … only he’s about a foot taller and his shoulders are two feet wider. He looks ready to kick sand into the face of Adolph Hitler himself.
But those Nazis won’t leave well enough alone. Wanting the secret superhuman serum all to themselves, a spy sneaks into the lab and, before Steve can flex his mighty biceps just once, shoots several people and absconds with the formula. He doesn’t get far—Steve makes sure of that—but the formula’s destroyed and Erskine is dead. When the scientists made Captain America, they really did break the mold.