Film Theory: Red Guardian Fought A FAKE Captain America! (Black Widow)

the stone demands a sacrifice in order to get the stone you must give up the thing you love yeah no i remember are you having difficulty deciding no no no it's just uh just you know i'm really thirsty you're thirsty okay you know what we're done here still thirsty jesus 10 years my life [Music] hello internet welcome to film theory where today i'm tossing you a little challenge hit the subscribe button before black widow hits the pavement it's called the sell your soul stone to the algorithm of course is this the greatest power in the universe after a delay of almost two whole years thanks to the pandemic marvel's black widow solo movie is finally in theaters and i gotta say it is not for the kiddos don't get me wrong as an adult thought it was totally fine i enjoyed a lot of it but between suffocating pigs played for laughs non-consensual hysterectomy jokes and a very real undertone of child trafficking it was um it was an intense way of hopping back into the big screen mcu okay it has a lot of pockets but i use them all the time and i made some of my own modifications i like your best god i knew it i knew you did it's so cool right oh never mind screw those hundreds of people dying in an avalanche these brainwashed killers are so hashtag relatable but in all seriousness i gotta say having the mcu this huge staple of movie going culture back in theaters really does feel like a symbol of things coming back into place kind of like a page being turned on the other hand you might be thinking well that's a nice sentiment matpat but how much of a film theory can you get out of black widow when it's a two-year-old movie and a prequel so we already know where all this is headed to which i say oh ye of little faith have you forgotten that we're still finding new theories in classics like wally heck the new shongxi trailer revealed that the abomination is back and we haven't seen that guy since the incredible hulk 13 years ago theory crafting never dies but yeah sure we do have to work our pre-cognitive muscles extra hard on this when considering the main character's future is uh passed before it even begins and thanks to all the release schedule shake-ups big easter egg teaser moments like the end credit reveal of contessa valentina weren't such a big deal since they'd already happened on the smaller screen these boots are not made for walking valentina allegra lafontaine no my dear theorists what i want to focus on today is something that flew under everyone else's radar a series of throwaway jokes from the movie that no one is really talking about but i suspect might be more than just one-liner gags in fact i think these little quippy jokey jokey moments might be setting up one of marvel's deadliest and most disgusting villains an evil version of captain america uh no no sorry not not that one it's a different one there's honestly a lot of them get ready to pull an abomination and wait another 13 years for this one to pay off but i think black widow without anyone realizing it set up the introduction of the villain you're gonna love to hate the disgustingly evil william burnside i tried to make it sound intimidating but burnside no it's not not not really not he's really bad also waiting 13 years for this one to pay off hope you wound up hitting that subscribe button earlier i'll see you all back here in 2034 to tell me how wrong i was anyway just to make sure that we're all on the same page black widow actually takes place in between civil war and infinity war in the overall timeline but it focuses on marvel's favorite metamoral of the 21st century found family you may have been your father boy but he wasn't your daddy so i am no more than another stolen relic you're my son i wanted only to protect you from the truth family back together again ah nothing says acceptable mother figure quite like the woman that forced you to be a sleeper agent for mother russia in your formative years before sending you off to be mutilated and brainwashed against your will into a soldier for the state using technology that she built but don't worry everything is forgiven because there's an emotional hand squeeze at the end i don't mind that i can't birth children anymore and that you brainwashed my sister against her will for multiple decades of her life it's good to see you again mom anyway while her surrogate mother was busy torturing pigs her surrogate dad alexei shostakov was out having the sort of adventures that i'm gonna be talking about today you see he wasn't just any former russian spy but rather a cold war era super soldier the soviet unions would have been answered to captain america the red guardian an over the hill otta shape ultimate dad bod superhero it still fits and while he's kind of clueless and largely obsessed with his own good old days he also keeps bringing up one story that caught my attention his fight against captain america god i have the nuclear code but there he is [Music] i grab hold of his shield face to face it's a test of strength anyway this shield you know i use it to my advantage i dig it i push him out the window now we know that this can't be true captain america aka steve rogers was frozen from 1945 until the early 21st century there was no way for him to be around at the end of the cold war when alexei would have been active as the red guardian and the movie actively calls him out on this fact what year was this i don't know 8384 captain america was still frozen in ice then why are you calling me a liar or something huh so on the surface it seems like a simple joke and a really clever efficient bit of screenwriting to get across what people who've never heard of this obscure marvel character need to know about him for the movie he was a super soldier he has the same basic powers as captain america and he tells obviously fake tall tales because he's that sort of guy they debunk it they move on except funny thing they keep going back to it did he talk to you about me you know trading more stuff oh what are you talking about captain america my great adversary in this theater of geopolitical conflict okay so there it is again which means something else is going on by the rules of screenwriting the captain america fight has been set up for us in the red guardians first scene we're then reminded of this story at the midpoint of the film which means that there's gonna be some sort of payoff right like maybe he meets captain america in some funny way or as part of his emotional journey he admits that he never fought captain america and even though everyone already knew that it's a big deal for him because he's been living in denial the whole time but no nothing ever comes of it is it maybe a weird easter egg reference to a 1983 or 84 era comic book where the two of them fought nope the two do fight once in avengers number 44 but it has nothing to do with that 80s reference which feels oddly specific could it be a reference to real-life history again not really i mean the soviet union boycotted the 1984 summer olympics where the russian state and 14 of its ally nations refused to participate in the olympic games in los angeles in response to the us having boycotted the 1980 games in moscow but again that's completely disconnected from anything in the movie so could it have just been a joke red guardian's actor david harbour doesn't really know in an interview with inverse harbour says quote i will say the stories are absolutely true 100 part of the fun thing about alexi is that i wasn't interested in reality he doesn't even know that he's lying in another interview with the rap he says quote again i don't know like i don't know and they won't let me tell you even if i did know but i don't so let's go back into mcu lore shall we let's see if this battle could have actually taken place based on everything we know for those who skipped it or those who just forgot the disney plus series falcon of the winter soldier told the story of how the government gave innocent people the super soldier serum and then tortured him to figure out how to make the serum work for more people one such victim was isaiah bradley who fought in the korean war a handful of us got shot up with different versions of that sorrow they sent us on missions for the next 30 years they experimented on me trying to figure out why the serum worked the korean war lasted from 1950 to 1953 after the war were told that he was imprisoned and suffered through three decades of brutal testing before his death was faked and isaiah was freed under a new identity so it's unlikely that red guardian went up against isaiah specifically but with red guardians saying 1983 and 1984 the timing does line up for the government to have had other super soldier candidates running around being active at the same time so to recap we have steve rogers trapped in ice and the first round of super soldier experiments from the 50s completed with the test subjects all mostly dead but what isaiah's story tells us is that by the 80s it's highly likely that the government had a better version of the serum to use i mean consider this the government had one secret super soldier fighting in the korean war in the form of isaiah bradley why not have some others at later points in history as well and it could easily have been one of those who fought the red guardian the one thing that we do know about alexi is that well he's certainly big and kind of dumb and definitely a braggart he's also the most honest of black widow's team so if we allow that he's not simply making the whole thing up we have to allow for the possibility that he's telling the truth as far as he knows it he actually did fight not necessarily the captain america but a captain america and this i think is the key you see in april of 1984 there's that year again marvel released what if number 44. what if was a marvel anthology series published from 1977 to 2011 which it's basically what it said on the cover each issue told a single self-contained story imagining if famous events from the marvel comics continuity had happened differently in some way allowing writers to try out alternate takes on characters or just explore ideas and concepts that fans otherwise would never have a chance to see it's basically the same premise as the upcoming disney plus animated series of the same name but here's why it matters to red guardian's story you see what if number 44's big concept was what if captain america came back today as in what if steve rogers had stayed frozen rather than thawing in the mid-60s like he had in the official marvel continuity in the comics and the result of that what if was that the united states would transform into a fascist dictatorship where all dissent is crushed and minorities are forced to live in racially segregated ghettos all under the iron fist of captain america a guy who happens to look exactly like steve rogers you heard that right in what if number 44 if steve rogers stayed frozen a new steve rogers lookalike would rise and replace him taking on the role of captain america and this guy would be evil af his name william burnside again tried to make it sound a lot more intimidating than it actually is it is not that intimidating of a name what's even weirder though is that this guy was at one point in the comics an official actual captain america no what if's needed it gets a bit confusing so follow me on this one in the marvel comics canon just like it is in the movies steve rogers becomes captain america around 1941. he fights during world war ii and he's involved in a final mission where he becomes frozen only to be rediscovered in the modern world but his story didn't always go that way see the original captain america world war ii comics were actually written during world war ii when marvel was called timely and american superhero comics were at their peak popularity and originally the story didn't end with steve meeting a tragic fate he just kind of kept going after the war but without any nazis to fight publishers struggled to find ways to keep characters like cap relevant at one point even trying to market the series as a horror comic most infamously though was when the property jumped on the mccarthyism red scare bandwagon of the 1950s and rebranded steve rogers as captain america commie smasher it did not go over super well eventually superheroes vanished from store shelves for over a decade until the genre regained popularity in the 1960s when marvel decided they wanted to bring captain america back in the pages of the avengers except they wanted to sweep all that awkward and embarrassing post-war era cap under the rug so they took the chance to retcon his story by creating his new cooler and less problematic origin story a heroic soldier from world war ii who bravely fought nazis before winding up frozen in time except turned out that not everyone forgot about the commie smasher and those readers demanded an answer as to what happened to that version of captain america marvel's answer was a bit confusing someone who looked just like steve rogers who also had super soldier powers had been operating as captain america while steve was a human rocket pop in captain america number 153 marvel shocked its readers with the story of william burnside a scientist and historian in the 1950s who'd grown up obsessed with old school american patriotism and captain america specifically like in a psycho stalker sense not only did he try to develop his own bootleg super soldier serum he got plastic surgery and altered his vocal cords to look and sound just like steve rogers also he could beat the red menace of communism and minorities and liberals and anyone else he deemed a non-patriot seriously this guy is essentially john walker from falcon in the winter soldier cranked up to a thousand with the same serum ramping up his super strength also granting him the power of super bigotry worst power ever eventually he's defeated by the original cap but it leaves the real steve rogers shaken and disturbed to know that someone could have taken that kind of negative lesson from him and since then he's reappeared several times over the years as one of marvel's most increasingly dark and twisted bad guys at one point becoming the grand director which um if the uniform didn't give it away he's the leader of the marvel universe's kkk anyway the story was written by steve englehart which is also important since the mcu has been adapting parts of his 70s and 80s work a lot recently he wrote the original vision in the scarlet witch miniseries that partly inspired wandavision he was responsible for the epic avengers celestial madonna saga which created a bunch of lore for kang the conqueror and might have just ended up inspiring somoloki he co-created shongxi and he was also responsible for another famous captain america storyline called secret empire which was the first time steve rogers gave up the shield after becoming disillusioned by discovering us government corruption so one of several stories that contributed to falcon in the winter soldier so with all that in mind you see where this is going red guardian did indeed fight captain america in the 80s but not steve rogers not the captain america that we know instead he fought one of the offshoots of the isaiah bradley research william burnside a look-alike obsessed with steven with a toxic sense of patriotism the timeline of events in the mcu work the 1984 date lines up with that iconic what-if comic it falls in line with marvel's current obsession with the works of steve englehart but most importantly it's an interesting story that lets him continue exploring the same theme that made steve rogers compelling in the first place what happens when you ask a person to become a symbol not a perfect soldier but a good man so when will we see this fight actually happen will we ever see it happen i say yes either it's gonna appear in the new what if series in which case we only have a little while to wait or disney is waiting to see the public reaction to red guardian and the black widow movie to determine whether any of those characters should continue on to get their own series but regardless i don't see those lines as a one-off joke it's the sort of thing that marvel has historically done layer in something that they can pay off later down the line if they want or let it fall by the wayside so everyone forgets about it if consumer interest goes another way but considering how much the internet loved red guardian and how cool an evil doppelganger captain america story would be i wouldn't expect this one to just fade away but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cut [Music] you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 1,920,452

Keywords: black widow, captain america, red guardian, red guardian vs captain america, captain america vs red guardian, red guardian scene, red guardian vs cap, did red guardian fight cap, red guardian captain america, did red guardian fight captain americas, red guardian vs taskmaster, red guardian fight scene, red guardian arm wrestling, marvel, marvel theory, disney+, film theorists, film theory, matpat, film theory marvel, avengers, black widow trailer, black widow movie

Id: yx3Y-xel4Ek

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021

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Good theory Mat Pat! I do have a different opinion though. I think making Isaiah and Steve irrelevant was making a hint towards another Captain America, but I don't think he was from that timeline. When Steve goes and returns the stones at the end of Avengers: Endgame, instead of coming back to his timeline, he goes to another and stays with Peggy. Lots of confusion has come up to why/how Cap came back to his timeline, instead of staying in his timeline with Peggy. But I don't think he did. Say our timeline's Steve Rogers is Cap-A. When Cap-A goes to another timeline, that timeline will have had a Cap-B in it. But when that Cap-B returns the stones maybe he goes to a Cap-C timeline and so on and so forth in a loop, with one Captain America coming into our timeline, so the old Cap at the end of Avengers: Endgame is not our timeline's Steve Rogers, but another's. People have been on and off on why Captain America would let things like 9/11, the Vietnam War, and such happen if he knew about them from his timeline, and I think it's because he knew that they would end up good in the end, but maybe Alexi getting the nuclear codes was too much of an obstacle for Steve to look over, causing him to suit up one last time and fight Alexi to save the world without anyone knowing, concealing the fact he was from another timeline or he was out of the ice.