Marvel's Captain America Almost Got An Animated Television Series In The '90s

Captain America is one of the pillars of Marvel Comics. Retroactively, he's one of the first superheroes of the Marvel Comics shared universe, and since the 2010s, he's been elevated into a full-blown pop cultural icon thanks to Chris Evans' portrayal in the "Captain America" movies.

But Evans was not the first silver screen Captain America. There was a 1944 "Captain America" film serial starring Dick Purcell, two 1979 "Captain America" TV films starring Reb Brown, and a pretty disastrous 1990 "Captain America" film. If that one had been a hit, maybe Cap wouldn't have been one of the few main Marvel heroes not to get a cartoon series in the 1990s.

As it stands, Captain America has never had a solo cartoon series. Yup, you read that right. Oh sure, Cap has appeared in many cartoons. He was one of the rotating stars of the 1966 cartoon "The Marvel Superheroes," which added rough movement and voiceover to many Marvel Comics of the time. (Nowadays, we might call these motion comics.) In the '90s, Cap guest-starred on "X-Men," "Spider-Man," and "The Avengers: United They Stand." Come the 2010s, Captain America was also part of the main cast in both the canceled-too-soon "Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes" and its successor series, "Avengers Assemble."

To this day, there has never been an ongoing cartoon that's primarily about "Captain America" — but there almost was. In 1983, writer Jason Brewer wrote up a pitch for a "Captain America" cartoon to Sunbow Entertainment (a frequent partner of Marvel on animated shows). In this version, Cap was a secret agent answerable only to the President of the United States. That idea went nowhere.

By the 1990s, Marvel had teamed up with Saban Entertainment to produce cartoons like the popular "X-Men" animated series and the short-lived but underrated "Silver Surfer" cartoon. The companies also considered making another Marvel series: "Captain America."

"Captain America" was being developed by cartoon veteran Will Meugniot, his wife Jo, and storyboard artist Dave Simons. The series would've been set during World War II, as you can see from the one part of the project that was completed: a one-minute promotional video.

The trailer depicts a version of Captain America's origin, where scrawny Steve Rogers becomes a muscular paragon thanks to the super-soldier serum. But is this Steve Rogers? According to most reporting about the show, this Captain America's real name was Tommy Tompkins. "Steve Rogers" was an alias the Army gave him as a cover. Puzzling choice, but sure!

The animation style of the promo resembles the 1999 cartoon "Spider-Man Unlimited" (that Saban and Meugniot worked on), with shading and proportions to suggest a comic brought to life. Appearing in the trailer are Cap's sidekick Bucky and at least some of the Howling Commandos, plus their foes the Red Skull and Baron Wolfgang von Strucker.

One of the show's writers would've been Steve Englehart, the defining "Captain America" comic writer who had Cap fight President Richard Nixon in 1974. Englehart has publicly shared the synopsis of an episode he wrote, "Skullhenge," about the Red Skull trying to rearrange the Stonehenge formation in England into a giant swastika.

The choice to set "Captain America" in World War II makes sense. Cap was created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in 1940, months before the U.S. entered the war. Kirby and Simon drew an American flag-wearing hero punching out the Führer. Captain America has also struggled when taken out of a war setting; in those cases, he can sometimes feel like just another superhero. The best modern "Captain America" writers, like Englehart, use that discomfort to contrast Cap, the idealized Greatest Generation warrior, with the reality of America, but I digress.

But there's a problem with the WWII setting. According to Englehart, the show wouldn't have been allowed to call the bad guys "Nazis." Apparently that was too charged for a kids show. This is not without precedent. The 1990s "X-Men" sanitized Magneto being a Holocaust survivor, depicting him instead as just a generic refugee. The sequel series "X-Men '97," aimed at the same but now older audience, had to rectify Magneto's origin. Even "Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes" (which debuted in 2010) depicts the Allies fighting HYDRA and only HYDRA during WWII.

There's been rumors over the years that this issue is what kept the show from getting off the ground, but comic historian Brian Cronin disputes that. Englehart and Cronin both attribute the cancellation of "Captain America" to money problems that Marvel was facing at the time; they'd filed for bankruptcy in 1996, experiencing a hard crash to the earlier '90s comic boom. The effects of those financial struggles is shown in how this era of Marvel cartoons abruptly ended. By 1998, "X-Men" and "Spider-Man" were over and "Silver Surfer" and "Spider-Man Unlimited" ended after only 13 episodes. "Captain America" never got one episode.

These days, Marvel fans can debate which canceled '90s/early aughts cartoon they'd rather have seen more: Meugniot's "Captain America" or Mike Mignola's "Thor."