“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.
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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.”