Other Reviews in this Series.
Directors: Elmer Clifton, John English
Writers: Royal K. Cole, Ronald Davidson, Basil Dickey, Jesse Duffy, Harry L. Fraser, Grant Nelson, Joseph F. Poland
Cast: Dick Purcell, Lorna Gray, Lionel Atwill
Runtime: 244 mins. (25 min. premier and fourteen 15 min. episodes)
1944
The first and most perplexing thing to note about the 1944 Captain America serial is that it has absolutely nothing to do with Captain America. When I learned about the serial's existence, I was fully anticipating a propaganda-heavy war story, especially considering the time in which it was made and released. Instead, we get the story of Grant Gardner, a District Attorney who occasionally dresses up in a red white and blue costume to fight bad guys. Sometimes he doesn't dress up though, and it's just Grant Gardner fighting them. Also, Captain America doesn't have a shield and just wastes people with his pistol. Seriously, Gardner and Captain America rack up quite an impressive body count over the course of this serial, a fact that none of the authorities seem at all concerned about.
To top it all off, Captain America doesn't seem to have any powers, and, hilariously, he just drives around in a regular car. Unsurprisingly, Timely Comics (to become Marvel Comics in the 1960s) was unhappy with Republic's blatant gutting of their character, but Republic's response was basically, "None of that stuff was in the sample pages you sent us, plus we're in production already." Film historians think Republic just pasted the Captain America likeness over a pre-existing project they had in the pipe. Thus Captain America's first onscreen appearance is aggressively non-canonical.
That doesn't make it bad, though. The serial follows Captain America's pursuit of mysterious criminal The Scarab over a 25-minute premier and fourteen 15-minute episodes. In classic cliffhanger serial fashion, each episode ends with Cap in grave danger, to be resolved in the next chapter. These serials are considered to be cinema, but structurally they're really more like proto-television.
