4 Things Captain America Would Want to Know About That Aren't on His List

Ever since the 1960's a pivotal aspect of Captain America has been his displacement in time.  His popularity had waned and he had disappeared from the comic book pages until Stan Lee had the idea to revive him and add his name to the roster of the Avengers.  That was just over two decades after his debut in 1941.  In the timeline of the movies Captain Steve Rogers was in a cryogenic slumber for almost seventy years.  Obviously there's a lot more for him to catch up on.  In Winter Soldier he is shown keeping a notebook of people's suggestions for him to look into.  They're things like the moon landing and Star Wars, major cultural and social touchstones that everyone should at least be aware of in order to exist in the modern world.  However, they're not necessarily things Steve would have a personal interest in.  Since Civil War has left Steve untied to the Avengers he's going to have more available Steve time that he could use to look into some things Steve would want to know instead of what he needs to know.

A Tribe Called Quest

One item on Cap's list is "Nirvana (band)" which I'm pretty sure is Tony Stark's idea of a joke.  I love Nirvana but it has to be a tough pill to swallow without a lot more context than Steve has got.  Grunge was a big deal because it was rougher around the edges than the previous era of manufactured pop and glamish hair metal.  That's why it's called "grunge."  When Steve fell in the ice it was still the swing age.  You can't go straight from "In a Sentimental Mood" to "Rape Me."  He would be much better off with a different kind of 90's music.   Enter A Tribe Called Quest who, along with De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers, formed the Native Tongues.  The Native Tongues were a collective of idealistically and stylistically compatible hip hop artists who pioneered the use of jazz samples in hip hop.  Think Kendrick Lamar but when Kendrick Lamar was an infant (much like I was).  On one hand, Native Tongues mostly drew from later jazz from fifteen to twenty years after Cap's nap started but on the other hand, it's still got to be more familiar than anything from In Utero.  If there's any chance of Steve wrapping his head around hip hop and modern music it should probably start with Midnight Marauders.

 High Noon

When Cap went under Westerns were on the rise but still a little way from their peak.  John Wayne's breakthrough film Stagecoach was only a few years old, marking the beginning of his historic collaborations with director John Ford.  There's no way Steve Rogers wouldn't be drawn to the cowboy pictures with their frequent themes of honor, duty, and individualism.  (Although, he would probably be wary of their often horribly offensive portrayals of Native Americans.)  Among the fantastic Westerns that Steve missed out on the one that would probably resonate the most is High Noon.  The 1952 Fred Zinnemann directed movie stars Gary Cooper as Will Kane, a marshal facing the looming threat of a showdown with a notorious outlaw he put in prison when his train arrives at noon.  He goes around town seeking help from anyone who can give it but the people are all too afraid of Frank Miller and his gang.  Kane succeeds in the end with a little help from an unlikely source but his faith in people is shaken.  It's a movie about doing the right thing even if you have to do it alone and no one wants you to do it in the first place, exactly the kind of thing that Steve Rogers does repeatedly throughout all three of his movies.

All in the Family

Generally, there are two ways people see Captain America.  He represents either the best or the worst of the United States.  Usually it's the best; he's kind and compassionate, but strong and quick to use that strength to fight tooth and nail for his ideals.  Then there's the version of Captain America who does a horrible job of adjusting to the modern world and says awful jingoistic things like "Surrender?  You think this letter on my head stands for 'France?'"  (It stands for "America" by the way.)  In All in the Family those two archetypes live side by side, in the same house, in the forms of Michael "Meathead" Stivic and Archie Bunker.  By watching All in the Family Steve could see the best and the worst of himself while learning about the social landscape of the 1970's, including many issues that are still shockingly relevant.  Not that Michael Stivic is perfect.  He's wrong sometimes and, less often, Archie is right.  I trust Steve Rogers to read between the lines and have a few laughs along the way.

Steroid Use in Professional Baseball

There's no version of Steve Rogers who doesn't love baseball.  He was a boy during the 20's and 30's when baseball was far and away America's favorite pastime.  What's more, he was in New York the whole time, during the heyday of the Yankees with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, et cetera.  At the end of First Avenger an old game is playing on the radio when he wakes up from his uber-nap to help him ease into life in the 21st century but he realizes immediately that something is wrong because he was at that game and remembers it well enough to recognize the color commentary.  So how would he feel about a massive ethics scandal in his beloved sport?  Bear in mind that Cap himself is basically the result of really good steroids.  Obviously, there's a difference between a scrawny weakling volunteering for experiments to better serve his country and athletes putting muscle on top of muscle to beef up their stats, but it would still seem a bit hypocritical for him to argue against performance enhancing drugs when he owes them for everything good in his life.  Either way, if the whole situation brings him down I'm sure he'd get a kick out of The Sandlot.