I disagree, who is decide waht is cheesy and what is not? Superheroes by defination are cheesy. Really how is Cap sillier than say Superman? Plus the American public loves over the top, goofy, patriotism, its every where. Stuff like has been part of hollywood for years. The only real problem is people oversees may not like it.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's contradictions at the core of Captain America's origin that need to be addressed in some way to make Captain America not be silly. First, the idea that America's solution to the war is remarkably similar to the Nazi party's philosophy of eugenics. Second, the fact that the Super-Soldier program is basically taking steroids on PCP and pumping them into a human being to create a living weapon. Part of that ethical conflict can be explained with this naive 1940's perspective of "It's science!" but given the preeminence of steroids in our society, it's still something that needs to be addressed.
So you have Captain America as this scrawny private at the start of the war who gets pumped full of juice to become America's top weapon. You throw him into the crucible, and see how he goes from becoming a total ***** into being America's hard-*** hero soldier. You square him off against grotesque nazi genetic experiments, and in doing so, you create the central conflict. He sees the hypocrisy of the Super-Soldier program in that he sees this American perspective of, "We'll use drugs to make men better." and in it sees how similar the two sides of the battle really are. And then you close the arc at the very end of the war, with Captain America having to start some sort of apocalyptic last strike by Nazi extremists, even as Berlin and Germany have fallen to the Allies. On the eve of this climax, you have Cap pulled aside by the US military brass who are looking forward to the upcoming war they see with the Soviet Union. And they tell him about how they've already started recruiting high-ranking (now former) Nazi geneticists to perfect the Super-Soldier formula. They think the reason it worked so well in Captain America is something to do with his genetic structure, and their plans are to retroengineer the serum from his genetic structure to create a superman combat unit called the Invaders, who will be under the umbrella of a new counter-intelligence agency called S.H.I.E.L.D. (and ourchair did a good job of validating their post-WWII existence). And we get a look at Cap's face upon hearing this, and he's absolutely furious. And then we know how it all ends. Saving the world, Captain America rides a rocket into the ocean and the U.S. loses their chance to exploit the formula in him, until sixty years later, when they find him floating deep in the Arctic.
It touches the innate hypocrisies in the Captain America myth and also establishes the premise of a super-human arms race, which seems like it should be the heart of a distilled modern Avengers story. And while I don't feel like Cap can hold a franchise of his own, the historic Captain America story would open up the possibilities to spin out historical origin stories, in a similar way to how FOX is using the X-Men franchise to create a stable of mutant origin stories. If you give Bucky a cameo in the Captain America film, then you leave the possibility to do an espionage spy thriller with Winter Soldier at the height of the Cold War, something in the style of the Bourne Identity that details the Superhuman Cold War that has its origins in Captain America and reaches its pinnacle in the modern Avengers. Something similar could be done with Isaiah Bradley.
Plenty of comic book characters are silly at their core. But you have to address the silliness and find a way to address it in a serious context if you want to make these characters not silly.
Planet-Man said:
Another person I'd consider for the part is Travis Schultz, a.k.a. Keith Dudemeister from Scrubs.
I.... What......? I don't get any of your casting choices. TV comedy actors? That confuses me.
