Cap was chosen because of his heart.
For as long as I can remember,
I just wanted to do what was right.
He fights for the underdogs, people who are being bullied.
He had this charisma that immediately people latched onto.
He was an icon.
I wished to hell I'd have been Captain America.
It's just a guy with a shield.
That was something that was really compelling.
What's great about the Marvel heroes
is that they're interesting without their superpowers.
Nobody can touch the energy that's on Kirby pages.
That's the look he was going for.
The biggest impact comic-book hero of all time.
He represents the figure that we needed.
He was a great character... ultra-patriotic.
The comic-book version of a founding father.
There's an action, there's an energy to it.
It was big. It was in your face.
That's what you wanted to see.
But there's more to the story than that.
They say you should never judge a book by its cover,
for, many times, it is not the world's biggest,
strongest, and fastest on the outside
who have the largest hearts.
Such was the case
with an undersized kid from Brooklyn named Steve Rogers,
who would change the course of comic-book history
in the Marvel universe.
From his first appearance in 1941
to today's blockbuster films, this is
"Marvel's Captain America: 75 Heroic Years."
New York, 1940...
America's great melting pot,
where our country's finest thinkers, industrialists,
and artists converged to forge the true American dream.
Jack Kirby and Joe Simon
very much spoke to the American dream.
They were children of Jewish immigrants
that really sort of had to work their way up.
My father grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan.
They were very poor.
They lived in just this little, typical tenement
all crowded into the one room.
They grew up on some of the rougher neighborhoods.
There were gangs, kids duking out in the streets.
It was very rough.
Two young, not terribly large guys.
They certainly weren't the kind of image of their heroes.
Most times, a fictional character is based
purely on the experiences of that particular author.
Jack wasn't a big guy.
He was feisty. He was a fighter.
In that time, you had to be.
Joe lived in a neighborhood
where there was ethnic strife.
He got bullied a lot.
Kirby had a dislike for bullies in any form.
Regardless of whether the fact he was gonna get beat up or not,
he would always step in to help.
You just don't know when to give up, do ya?
I can do this all day.
That played a big part in the creation of Captain America...
Somebody who would take on the bullies.
I don't like bullies.
I don't care where they're from.
Joe wanted to go to college, and he couldn't get in.
They would only take a certain amount of Jews.
A lot of the writers and artists that worked in comics
couldn't get a legitimate job in the "Mad Men" advertising world.
These incredibly talented people denied fair opportunity,
and they created
some of the greatest American products.
They met at Fox Publishing.
Joe got a job at Timely,
which is what Marvel was at the time.
Timely Comics was founded in 1939.
Martin Goodman was the publisher.
Joe was the editor, and Jack was the de facto art director.
They were brilliant.
I mean, Joe and Jack wrote and drew.
They worked as a team.
They were different personalities...
my father, the, you know, the little, scrappy guy.
Joe was more the guy
who concentrated on the business end of it.
Jack was always hunched over the drawing boards,
working like a demon... two, three pages a day.
The minute Joe Simon saw Jack Kirby's artwork,
he knew this was something spectacular.
How kinetic it was, how it moved across the page.
He saw it as the work of a master.
They were very good friends, besides being partners.
Jack said, "we're gonna move across the street,"
and Joe said, "great."
I thought the Kirbys were our cousins.
At that time, the big problem
was Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.
I guess that where anybody is from
affects the way he writes or draws.
Simon and Kirby, as Jews,
they definitely knew what side of the war they were on.
They were very much aware of what was happening
to not just Jews but to everyone.
Martin Goodman wanted some kind of hero comic.
Joe had this idea for a character
called "The Super American."
They were giving the public
something to sort of feed their interest in this situation.
The times called for a patriotic hero.
This was their way of taking on the Nazi empire.
Creating this character who would take on Hitler.
They worked on, "What's the antithesis?"
The whole idea of America and what it stood for...
Thwart evil, fight bullies, defend the downtrodden.
The underdog winning out over the aggressor.
The quintessential ideology of the American dream.
There were so many characters
with the word "Super" in their title.
He said, "Captain. Captain America."
Captain America was born.
Captain America was born
out of kind of the experiences of the world.
Everyone was going through a war.
Martin Goodman was afraid
that somebody would shoot Hitler before the comic came out.
They had to turn this thing out quick.
Joe and Jack apparently put in a real string of all-nighters.
On the cover of "Captain America n°1,"
there is a guy who is wearing the American flag...
Bursting into some Nazi bunker
and smashing Hitler with a right cross.
It came out, and it was a huge sensation.
That first issue sold a million copies.
It was so popular.
That cover, while incredibly popular,
was also very, very controversial.
We weren't in World War II at that point.
A political statement on the cover of a comic book.
You don't really stop and think
about how provocative an image that that was.
This was a guy who was the head of state of an entire nation
and a nation that was going to war
with all the people around him.
Jack and Joe received a lot of hate mail
because there were people that felt
that Captain America wasn't standing for their ideals.
The American Nazi party
was very strong in New York City.
They got a lot of death threats.
There were people actually protesting
outside the offices of Timely at that time.
Sinister-looking characters hanging around.
Laguardia actually placed some protection
on the Timely Comics offices.
In a country divided,
Cap's place in culture was in question,
but something was about to happen
that would unite the country completely.
A date which will live in infamy.
Ask any comic-book writer, and they'll tell you
that creating a superhero is no small task.
Creating a superhero that would change the world
is a nearly impossible one.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
America entered World War II.
Captain America was seen as the great symbol
of our willingness to stand up in the face of tyranny.
Suddenly, you had the perfect enemies.
It gave Captain America a whole reason for existence.
He was born out of united belief and united experience.
"Captain America" during the early war years
was selling in excess of a million copies an issue.
It struck a nerve at that particular moment.
Joe and Jack worked on Cap for about a year,
but then they did sign up.
Joe was assigned to the public information office.
A lot of the comic-book people
got to serve in non-combat situations...
Slightly safer service than being on the front lines.
But Kirby didn't just serve.
He served as an actual grunt.
He went to whomever the head of his unit was
and said, you know, "I'm Jack Kirby,
and I draw Captain America."
The guy was like, "go out there to no man's land.
Every place you see a Nazi tank, draw an 'X.'"
Obviously, he was not too thrilled with that.
Jack was in the wave
that came in the day after the first wave at D-Day.
He saw combat.
He saw things that would haunt him the rest of his life.
What he saw in Captain America
is what he saw in his fellow troops...
Guys just willing to die to help each other.
Not anyone could have just become Captain America.
It was what was inside of Steve Rogers.
The fact that Steve Rogers had this morality and these ethics,
this huge heart and empathy,
was something that just got enhanced even more so
by the formula.
Steve Rogers grew up in the depression,
orphaned, sickly,
but he felt this underlying need to join in this fight.
They come up with this serum,
and they give it to sickly Steve Rogers.
Lo and behold,
it turned him into Captain America.
He was created as the first super soldier,
but at the very same moment,
the creator of this formula is killed.
He's now going to be the only one.
Cap comics were immensely popular with soldiers abroad.
Comics became a language.
Didn't matter whether or not you read well.
It was something that you could share with a buddy.
Everybody wanted to be that super soldier.
I certainly know that there were times
when I wished to hell I'd have been Captain America.
There's a huge list of characters
within Captain America that would separate it from the norm.
Joe says it had a drawing of Captain America,
and it had a line on it that said,
"I think he should have a partner."
He said Captain America has to have somebody to talk to,
or he'll be talking to himself all the time.
Publishers felt that these adult superheroes
needed a kid sidekick
so that kids could relate to them.
Bucky Barnes, ironically enough,
was this kid in the middle of World War II,
following Cap around and kicking Nazi butt.
Bucky Barnes was the mascot of their army camp.
Bucky stumbled into Steve Rogers changing in the tent,
and in the world of the charming comic book,
he goes, "all right, well,
I either have to kill you or you become my sidekick."
Who Cap very carelessly
- led into World War II. - Yeah.
He, like, took a 10-year-old into battle.
You've got super serum and a bulletproof shield.
Let this kid just come along.
I mean, it's like, "okay."
You can't talk about Captain America
without talking about the Red Skull.
He is the super soldier experiment gone wrong.
Just evil incarnate.
Here was Cap,
who looked more like the idyllic version of the Aryan race
as a blond-haired, blue-eyed perfect specimen,
and then here was the Red Skull, this red-faced creature
who would scare children at night
as opposed to inspire them.
You see Captain America fighting the Red Skull.
You know whose side you better be on.
Are you ready for our dance?
Peggy's someone that's a strong character
and someone that was an equal in many ways to Captain America.
Agent Carter's fighting for the rights of people
in the same kind of way that Steve did.
Her set of ideals is Captain America,
and everyone else has to meet that set of ideals.
It just also goes to the chemistry between her and Cap.
They had such an effect on each other.
She opens her heart up romantically.
She had something more to offer.
Go get him.
Throughout the world,
throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe.
A grateful nation gives thanks for victory.
Superheroes had served a real purpose during the war,
but when the war was over,
all of a sudden, they looked like
they had nothing to do anymore.
We wanted to get back to normalcy.
People, perhaps, had had enough of war.
A myriad of genres proliferated.
There were a lot of crime comics.
There were a lot of romance comics.
Aliens come into focus. Sci-fi starts taking over.
The enemy was gone. We won.
And, you know, Captain America, as you can imagine,
took the biggest hit.
I mean, he's only there
to fight a certain enemy, and they're gone.
The creators involved don't quite know
what to do with Captain America.
Cap, at that time, was referred to as
"Captain America... commie smasher."
The Cold War isn't exactly
the greatest war in terms of action.
Comics were not the preferred way
for kids to get entertainment.
Everybody had a television.
People just started to read less.
And so all the comic books sort of went away.
Sales tanked.
My publisher, Martin Goodman,
told me, "let's drop the Captain America books."
Captain America and Human Torch and Sub-Mariner
were canceled in 1949.
We had every reason to believe that there would never again
be any real superheroes in comics or anywhere else.
It wasn't until the 1960s
with the birth of Marvel comic books
and the rebirth of the modern superhero
that comics really turned around.
Timely's comic-book division
relaunched in full during 1961
under the name it would known as from that day forward...
Marvel Comics, coined by Goodman himself.
Marvel started their own new group of titles,
beginning with The Fantastic Four.
Once The Fantastic Four became a hit,
Martin Goodman obviously wanted to retool everything in the shop
over the period of the next couple of years
into superheroes.
So many of the characters that we know today,
whether it's Iron Man or Thor or Captain America,
suddenly found themselves in a brand-new world.
The rebirth of Captain America,
the resurrection of Captain America, so to speak...
A brilliant idea by Stan Lee,
where The Avengers uncover him in a block of ice.
I had always liked Captain America,
and I felt the war is now way past us,
he was a great character, why don't we bring him back?
So we came up with this idea that during the war,
he had been in a plane that was shot down,
and the plane crashed into an iceberg,
and his body was sort of frozen.
And years later, people found it and dug him out,
and he came back to life.
And suddenly, there's this whole different
element to the character.
He's a man out of time.
Amazing tragedy in his life...
Not only has he lost
these decades of his life and his friends,
- he lost his best friend... - Grab my hand!
... best friend Bucky.
He still thinks of things the way he did
just before and during World War II,
and he's the ultimate patriot in our country.
He wasn't just a guy fighting the bad guys.
There he was, bursting out on that cover.
The minute he was back, you knew he was a star.
Jack and Stan had an unparalleled
and just an unimaginable amount of success.
Marvel becomes so popular so quickly
that Stan got to a point where he was writing every book.
So to sit there and type scripts
would have just taken an incredible amount of time.
So, in the case of Jack,
Jack was as much a writer as he was an artist.
So what Stan was doing,
which then eventually became known as the Marvel method...
Jack would come into the office,
and Stan would act out the story and say,
"this is what happens in this issue," right?
"Here's point 'A, ' 'B, ' 'C.' There's your story."
Jack would go home and break it down into 20-some-odd pages.
And so, in essence, he would beat out the story,
add little elements here and there.
One of those fantastic fight sequences
where, you know, he would have six panels of Captain America
fighting Batroc the Leaper,
and it was just like this is a master class
in how to stage an action sequence.
Then those pages would come back to Stan,
and Stan would look at these pages
and then start to have ideas of his own.
And then he'd start to write his own dialogue.
And sometimes, maybe that's what Jack had in mind,
and sometimes, it might not have been.
Jack was doing four books a month.
You know, most guys who draw books today,
if you get six books a year out of them, it's a big year.
His characters came off the page.
Unbridled talent led to this pace of work that just said,
"I'm gonna draw what I'm thinking of."
It led into stuff that no one else was drawing
'cause he's the only guy who saw it.
Those stories inspired me so much,
because the way Stan and Jack would start a story,
there was a shot of Captain America
spread eagle like this, falling out of a plane.
The shot was from above, right, so he's just falling.
No time to explain what's going on.
Let's go!
That is perfect storytelling.
Was he wearing a parachute?
No.
Who cares why he's falling out of a plane?
Where's that plane from?
Where's he landing?
You don't need to know all that! It's happening!
Just roll with it.
And it is here that the struggle for Vietnam
may ultimately be decided.
The late '60s were a time of great change for our country,
and that meant great change for Captain America.
At that particular time,
it was the time of the Civil Rights Movement,
street protests, and so forth.
What's great about Stan Lee's writing...
He believed in America.
He did not close his eyes
to what was wrong in the country,
but he made Captain America represent
the spirit of the possible.
He made me believe in the hope of America.
We needed another black character in our books,
and I thought Captain America was one guy who was a real loner
and I thought it might be interesting
if he had somebody as a partner, a sidekick,
or at least a good friend.
Stan had always hated sidekicks.
He just didn't like them.
That's why he was happy to see Bucky go.
I came up with the idea of the Falcon,
somebody who had the ability to fly.
You know, if you think about it,
Captain America is really the only Marvel superhero
who doesn't have a superpower.
He can't fly.
He's not bulletproof.
He's not invisible.
He's just a guy
who is better than anyone else at what he does.
So I thought it would be interesting
to give him a partner who had a superpower,
who could fly,
and I'd make him a black man and call him the Falcon.
The first time I read a Captain America comic
was when I raided my brother's comic stash.
He had an old "Captain America and Falcon" comic,
and I just remember being struck by that image
and saying, "Holy cow. This is... this is amazing."
Seeing black faces in a book was pretty rare.
Falcon became this amazing character
who connected Cap
to the real world in the '60s and '70s.
Here is the modern voice
of what youth culture at that time
was really going through.
In Harlem,
the funeral of a teenager who had been shot by a policeman
set off demonstrations against alleged police brutality.
The fact is the "Madbomb" story is an incredible story.
A bunch of rich elites want to overthrow the constitution,
and they want to achieve that
by driving Americans mad so they kill each other.
We're living that now.
That is America today.
We're living in the "Madbomb."
It is one of the most prescient comic-book stories ever written.
I mean, that's the spirit of Marvel, right?
You do something shocking and provocative
that people really care about.
And then there's Watergate.
Then there was this gigantic scandal
with President Nixon.
With Watergate and Vietnam and everything else happening,
there was this seed of disillusionment
with Steve Rogers
and his persona of Captain America.
Watergate just took over America.
The whole idea that the president
might have done something illegal
was a mind-blowing concept in the '70s.
Captain America has got to respond to it.
I'm the only guy in the world writing Captain America,
and if I don't do this, then it doesn't happen.
And it just makes sense to me that it should.
This group, The SecretEempire,
had infiltrated the very highest levels of American government.
He uncovers the whole conspiracy,
and the fact that it reaches so high
completely disillusions him,
and he actually gives up being Captain America.
And so Steve Rogers comes back
in his new costumed identity as Nomad,
the man without a country.
But the problem was,
the name of the book was "Captain America"
and Nomad wasn't gonna sell that book,
and he becomes Captain America once again.
That led to Captain America breaking into the Oval Office
and revealing that the person behind the conspiracy
was Richard Nixon.
You don't see Nixon's face, but there's no question.
Everybody knew that it was Nixon,
but there was no way that I was gonna, like,
actually put Nixon in a Senate hearing, you know.
I mean, first of all, not very good comics.
They took the Watergate idea
and played it out to its logical conclusion.
That basically gave us
the Cap-versus-government scenario,
which has been a standard ever since.
It's a huge story in the Captain America canon,
and there have been sort of variations
of things that have been played on it over the years
in different circumstances.
"Winter Solder," "Civil War"...
You know, that's the character that we still know today.
S.H.I.E.L.D. is not what we thought it was.
It's been taken over by Hydra.
I really love the fact that Marvel, over the decades,
has really figured out
how to make the legacy work
and still make sense in 21st-century terms.
When we were doing comics in the '70s and the '80s and the '90s,
nobody ever really thought there was a world beyond comics.
It was a different time.
It was very, very tough to produce
what we do in the comics properly on screen.
Well, I think it's important to note
that I'm probably older than dirt.
I remember seeing the movie serial.
Captain America was the very, very first Marvel character
to ever make it onto the big screen.
Martin Goodman, Marvel's publisher,
gave the rights to Republic Pictures for free.
He did not charge a penny for them
based on the publicity that the magazines would sell better.
But they changed literally everything about him.
Not Steve Rogers?
He didn't have a shield. He carried a gun.
Wait, wait. I'll talk.
It thrilled me.
He was larger than life,
which all great superheroes need to be.
I really did not become a Marvel fan
until I saw the first Marvel TV show,
which was "The Marvel Super Heroes" animated series
that came out in 1966.
They were done with very, very, very limited animation.
It's like a picture of the Captain
and just his mouth moving.
I suggest we return to shore.
But they were adapted
directly from Stan's stories in the comics.
Bucky!
The artwork was adapted directly from the art in the comics.
I've got him.
Look out, Bucky!
"Captain America" movies were bad.
There were two of them, actually,
and they were just terrible.
Captain America's motorcycle might be something
that we want to talk about.
Uh... it seemed...
Awesome.
Awesome in a way that things were awesome back in 1978.
I look back at that old Captain America
with a ton of fondness,
because even though it's incredibly imperfect,
as a kid, all you want to see is you characters come to life.
Feels like he was just always there.
I know I had some friends who read comic books.
I wasn't really too into the comic book,
but I think the first exposure might have been
in the form of a video game.
You know, I didn't see the 1990 version of Captain America.
I'm good.
That looks like...
You're not getting those hours back.
I loved it.
As a kid, you don't care.
You're just happy to see someone in costume dancing about.
You just think, "Tthis is a Captain America movie.
This is incredible."
All I could remember was smiling the entire time.
Mr. President... Thanks.
"Captain America" title and the character himself,
like any popular, iconic character,
has gone through his ups and downs,
you know, sales peaks and sales valleys.
But I think the nice thing
about a universe of characters like Marvel
is that you have different characters for different eras.
And there's just periods where you just have to accept...
It's like music or fashion or anything.
There's just periods where the character isn't gonna be popular.
In a world where the Punisher and characters like that,
the ones that are getting all the attention,
that's a world where Captain America
has a little difficulty fitting in.
Wolverine... he had the spikes that would come out,
and he wasn't afraid to use them.
I think people want cool.
It just becomes harder and harder
to be that kind of hero.
He's a funny one, because in some ways,
he can be just incredibly earnest and uptight.
As a result,
I think Captain America faded back a bit.
I don't think Cap ever faded back entirely
because there were too many comic-book writers
and artists who adored the character.
Well, the guys at Marvel knew I was a big Cap fan.
It became sort of a dream book
that I wanted to do at some point.
This is around 2000,
and Marvel came and approached me
about doing a reboot of Captain America.
We start talking about what we could do with it,
something that was different.
I wasn't a fan of the costumed villain-of-the-week idea.
I wanted to deal with more of real-world scenarios.
So I agreed to do it,
and going through ideas, we spent several months,
and we were getting close
to putting some kind of script together
and getting work done on it.
Then 9/11 happened,
and we immediately knew that we were scrapping what we had.
We didn't know what we were gonna do.
There was something a little more cruel at our doorsteps.
My Captain America was in a lot of pain,
and he was angry.
9/11 affected everybody tremendously.
Marvel Publishing is based here in New York City.
I was here during 9/11
and got to witness, like so many of us,
the horror that occurred here.
In the pain, in the trauma of the moment,
everybody was shaken.
It was a transformative period for the country,
and that was filtered through the eyes of Captain America.
A character wearing the flag
was going to have a reaction, going to have a response,
and was gonna have to have a response to this.
It felt callous if we did not in some way
address what had happened when the towers fell,
and we dealt with it head-on.
Our story picks up with Steve Rogers at the site,
helping look for survivors and dig through the rubble.
And as we're working on it,
I had a lot of people in my mind.
Not just the victims and their families,
but the firemen, the policemen of the city and all over the country.
It was more of a metaphoric tale
of our heroes not being able
to do anything in the face of this,
not even being the true heroes of a tragedy like this.
And it's a story in which our heroes stand back
and spiritually support
the rescue workers that were there saving people
and being inspired
by the humanity that was being expressed here.
September 11th could be a preview of what could come.
There are thousands of these terrorists
in more than 60 countries.
In Afghanistan,
we see Al-Qaeda's vision for the world.
The world had changed. America had changed.
When we had always seen Steve Rogers
being so clear in terms of what was right,
he was now someone who was questioning authority.
He was questioning the government.
He was questioning things.
That led to, I think, a little bit of a renaissance
and interest in the character
because people were looking to it.
And I think it's kind of permanently changed
the character in the way it's viewed even today.
He somehow becomes more relevant,
because, you know, we're tense.
We got issues.
We got political issues that he can have a say in.
It is now my honor to sign into the law
the USA Patriot Act.
The Justice Department has gone too far.
Tempers were at a high.
One of the most pervasive debates of the time was,
exactly how much of your liberty
are you willing to give up for more safety?
"Civil War" is an event we did
that had something to say about the real world.
We are having a retreat
that wasn't a particularly good retreat.
We're kind of going on day three.
No one was really getting along,
everybody's being kind of grumpy,
and we started talking about heroes versus heroes.
It begins with a tragedy,
where someone's trying to stop a villainous action.
A huge explosion occurs, and civilians are killed.
And so began the superhero registration act.
Tony Stark took a very strong position,
which was that heroes should register themselves.
Cap went back to the things
that he had remembered from the 1940s.
Captain America represents the ultimate in liberty,
and liberty means that you don't follow
every move of your citizens.
Cap would always come out for the rights of the individual.
This caused a split within the superhero community.
And that's where you have a civil war.
We tried to take a balanced view of the opinion.
The same way that there are two sides of the fence
in regards to exactly what types of measures
should be taking place to deal with terrorism,
our fans were asked to sort of take sides in this story.
Which is kind of where
the "whose side are you on?" Tag line came from.
Whichever side Cap is on
will probably seem like the right side
to most of the readers.
He looked around, and he saw
that he was creating divisiveness
that was not better for society,
and he surrenders himself.
And it was really a masterpiece of execution.
There's a short list of characters
whose deaths are kind of quintessential
to the characters they're related to,
probably the primary one being spider-man's Uncle Ben.
You bring Uncle Ben back, you got nothing.
For years,
Bucky was the great loss of Captain America
and that was the dark cloud he carried with him,
and nobody had ever figured out how to do this and make it work.
It's amazing to me that they kept Bucky dead as long as they did,
and I'm still a little bit surprised they brought him back,
but it makes for a great story.
Ed Brubaker, a hell of a good writer, said,
"What I want to do is I want to bring back Bucky."
"Okay, Ed, if you want to do this,
you want to convince me of this, how did he survive?
Where's he been?"
You know, Ed's answers to all of this
became the spine of the story he told.
Now you see Bucky years later.
Experimentations have been done to him.
He's a killer.
Bucky has no idea who he's fighting.
He doesn't know who he is.
I thought that was a fantastic reimagining of who Bucky was,
and I thought, "well done."
Cap is always best
when he's fighting against himself
and fighting against his memories and his past.
A red, white, and blue icon died yesterday,
and he may have taken the last remnants
of an idealistic America with him.
Steve Rogers,
better known to comic-book fans as Captain America,
was shot to death
in a comic book released yesterday.
It was shocking when it happened,
and it was very successful,
largely because, you know, they just such an excellent job
positioning "Captain America" the series and the character
in the manner of a modern-day political thriller.
Right at the point that you were able
to kind of get Bucky sort of back to himself
is exactly the point at which Captain America gets killed.
Other people tried to be Captain America, and it didn't work out.
Bucky, at one point,
took over the mantle of Captain America.
And that became a whole series of stories
that, again, kind of pushed the character
in a different direction, gave you a different view
on what it meant to be Captain America
right up until the end
when we brought Steve Rogers back.
But as America continued to change, so did Steve Rogers,
realizing that the time had come
to hand over the shield to the next best man.
The Falcon seemed like a natural character to take over,
and he comes with his own belief system, his own ethics,
and I think it just adds a whole other dimension
to the mythos of Captain America.
It's always been a part of the fabric.
Just as America evolves
and what it means to be an American evolves,
there should be absolutely
an African-American Captain America.
For me, as a kid, if I had seen that,
I would have lost my mind.
It's not just for me,
and it's paying it forward to the next generation
to say, "you can be Captain America."
I think it's incredibly important,
and I think it's totally necessary.
And at the same time,
is it something that should be made a big deal?
It feels like it should just be normal.
In 2008, "Iron Man" had hit rather well...
and that gave Marvel the incentive to finally say,
"all right, we're gonna make a handful of movies
leading up to 'The Avengers.'"
Finding the perfect Steve Rogers
was so important to our film slate moving forward
because we had The Avengers in mind.
We were preparing for that.
You had to find an actor that could play off of
Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man, Tony Stark,
and we struck gold with Chris Evans.
I mean, the guy is Captain America.
I was a little apprehensive,
and it's just because of the love that he has.
So many people have followed him for so long,
and there's just a fear as an actor
that you won't do it justice,
that people will be disappointed.
For us, it's unimaginable
to have anyone else play Steve Rogers.
Chris Evans looks like a Jack Kirby drawing.
Obviously, he's very handsome,
but he's handsome in that wholesome way
where you trust him.
I thought the casting,
from top to bottom, was terrific.
Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull...
- Hail Hydra. - Hail Hydra!
Look what we have.
We have a massive hit, the biggest hit of summer.
I think the place that Captain America really shines
is in "The Avengers" movies.
He has his place, I think, firmly within The Avengers.
It's very different,
but that also makes for great comic moments.
Hulk?
Smash.
You know, there's a natural,
wonderful chemistry, I think,
between him and Iron Man in particular.
We need a plan of attack.
I have a plan... attack.
When they started filming "The Avengers,"
"Captain America" hadn't come out yet.
I was trying to play it cool.
I was nervous. I was nervous.
You don't want to be the weak link in the chain.
And yet, there's never a doubt in his performance
that he is going to own this role.
Then, after "The Avengers," we get "The WinterSoldier."
That, to me, was an extraordinary achievement.
You know, kudos to the Russo brothers.
Well, that's the best thing about the Russos.
When they wanted to do a movie that felt like a 1970s thriller,
you think, "well, I hope these directors can pull that off,"
and they did.
I have to think
The Winter Soldier," the second one,
to me, is the quintessential Marvel movie.
I think it's the best film that we've made
up till this point, anyway.
Joe, at this point, is in his mid-90s.
We decided to throw a party at his apartment
and watch a DVD that had been sent to us
by "The First Avenger" film team.
He just all of a sudden started shaking his head,
and he goes, "Man, I wish Kirby was here to see this."
He... aw, he was so proud.
One of the most extraordinary experiences of my life
will probably be the moment
when Steve Rogers grabs the trash-can lid
and swings it around to protect himself against the bully.
And I'm sitting there in the dark,
and in front of me I hear, "Ah. That was good."
He loved it.
He loved the fact that they took the origin
almost exactly from what he and Jack had done,
and there's no experience that can equal that.
I hope that Jack would've been pleased
with the portrayal of his character.
Well, honestly, I think he would've loved the movies.
It's really a shame he didn't get to see them.
So... I'm sorry.
This happens every once in a while.
Um, yeah, he would've loved seeing...
He really would've loved seeing the movies.
I'm very excited to see how they adapt
into the present and into the future.
Cap stands for something so clearly,
people can't help but root for the guy.
Let us show you what this character can really be.
You've operated with unlimited power and no supervision.
That's something the world can no longer tolerate.
Do we have the right to register people
and follow their every move?
That's one of those things
that actually would really split them right down the middle.
It's interesting when you put Captain America
in a situation that he doesn't have an answer for.
And with "Civil War," they do a really good job
of making it hard to figure out
which side of the fence you're gonna fall on,
and right is shades of gray.
There's also one hell of a personal story.
When Captain America fights Iron Man,
I don't know the outcome of that.
- What do we do? - We fight.
Captain America in the video games... bring it.
This is going to be insane.
We're about to go into the fourth season
of "Marvel's Avengers Assemble."
So the animated series has Cap firmly at the center
of what's going on with The Avengers there.
In the comics, you know, there's a couple more twists and turns.
As wonderful as "Civil War" was,
we're actually currently working on a sequel to it.
Hopefully, we'll be able to tap into the same sort of spirit
we were able to access in the original "Civil War"
without just doing the same story over again.
Coming this summer,
Marvel puts its original Avenger back in comics,
as Steve Rogers returns as Captain America.
In the television series, we have "Agent Carter."
If you hadn't cast Hayley Atwell,
you wouldn't have a TV show.
There's more going on in her personal life,
and you'll see a lot more humor with her and Mr. Jarvis.
Once people get a load of what "Agent Carter" is all about,
I think there's gonna be an awful lot of people
that are reinventing themselves to be more like Agent Carter.
In the second season, we're talking about the Cold War
and the communist scare that is happening,
and she punches and kicks a lot of people.
New hairstyle?
Love the hat.
There was always a Captain America somewhere.
Maybe it wasn't wearing kind of leathered spandex,
but there was always a Captain America.
Suiting up to try and give yourself
for something bigger than you
because you believe in something,
you believe in something good and right and just.
It's powerful.
Captain America can go on
as long as there is heroic entertainment.
It's about what he represents as a symbol of an idea.
And that's who he'll be 75 years from now.
He's open. He's honest.
So the more unanswerable questions you present to him,
the more dynamic the character becomes.
The Marvel universe is best when it takes big swings
and moves the ball down the field.
You're telling stories,
visual stories with writing and art,
and you've got to have both.
You've got to have people on both sides of that equation
doing their best work if you want the best final product.
The interest in that kind of storytelling,
those kinds of characters is not gonna go away.
These characters have to be relatable.
They have to have a heart to them.
That means that the stories have so much more weight.
Cap is so morally sound
that when you throw a conflict his way,
how he reacts is so telling and colorful
because he's such a consistent character.
Cap is rock solid. He's always pointing north.
He represents what America should be.
The spirit of the possible of the American dream.
What better hero to live vicariously through
than Captain America?
And I think as long as we can keep him
as that kind of a beacon,
he's gonna be a character that people always want to watch.
People can relate to it, and at the same time,
can dream about what they could become.
If you believe in something
and you go about it in a way that will help others,
then you truly are a hero.
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