This Captain America figure
from the Hasbro booth at Comic Con gives you a good idea of what the
outfit looks like. Photo by
Kellvin Chavez.

Whoever

came up with the announcement trailer for Captain

America: The First Avenger that

played at the end of Comic Con this year should get a big fat raise.
Perfectly
structured, the teaser created anticipation, truly teased
audiences
and then paid off with a quick, spectacular shot. Too bad it
was a
quick, spectacular shot of a Captain America costume that looked a

little… weird.

The teaser opened

with a camera panning across the scratched yet shiny surface of Cap’s
shield.
Playing against the shield was footage from WWII, while FDR
spoke
on the soundtrack, talking about Pearl Harbor and the challenge
ahead.
In many ways the shield itself would have been a great teaser,
but
then it cut to a shot of the silhouette of Captain America, standing

in what looked like a warehouse. The crowd went nuts. And then another
flash,
this time of Cap in an action pose, flinging the shield right at
the
screen. 


It was thrilling.

But that costume… Part of the problem was the silhouette. Without
wings
or ears, Cap’s head looked like a musketball. But there was
something
harder to pin down that felt off about the rest of the get-up.
Some
people compared it to a Halloween costume, and it did have a
phony,
padded feel to it, like it was stuffed full of cotton to give it
some
depth. Seeing Chris Evans on stage for the panel, majorly bulked
up,
it was obvious that no padding would be needed.

The footage that
was
shown allayed some of my concerns. Cap was nowhere to be seen, but
the
Red Skull – pre-skulling – was up to his villainous ways, smashing
into
an ancient crypt to get his hands on a Cosmic Cube. Hugo Weaving
told
the Comic Con crowd that he partially based his accent in the film
on
Werner Herzog, and that was easy to hear. The scene we saw was
interesting,
and as Russ Fischer from Slashfilm noted it had a Hellboy vibe.
If you were hoping for a
straight military Captain

America – a la the opening issue of The Ultimates –

you might be disappointed, as the movie looks to be going right into
occult
Nazi territory. The kind of two-fisted WWII adventure tales that I

grew up with, so it gets me pretty damn excited. 

You have to give it to Marvel – Captain

America has been filming for just over a week
and
they managed to bring the director, the lead and the villain from
England
to San Diego and to have a completed scene in tow. This is a
lesson
that the folks behind Green

Lantern should have known – you must get
something
special together for Comic Con. The Captain

America teaser and footage was something special.