January 18, 1979: I was six years old and in pure comic book mania, as Superman had come out, there was a DC ski stunt show at Sea World, The Incredible Hulk was on CBS, the Captain America TV movie would be airing the very next day and there had already been a few Spider-Man TV movies. It was an amazing time to be a kid and get free superhero stuff sent over the airwaves and often, we’d have no idea what we were about to get other than what TV Guide told us.

The Justice League of America were all showing up on my TV! And not just Batman and Robin, played by Adam West and Burt Ward, but the deep cut heroes I loved, like Hawkman (Bill Nuckols, Wally from Supertrain), Captain Marvel (Garrett Craig, the third man to play the man who says “Shazam!” in the 70s after Jackson Bostwick and John Davey), Huntress (Barbara Joyce) and Black Canary (Danuta Wesley, who took over as the Tea Time Matinee Lady on The Tonight Show after the death of Carol Wayne), plus more well-known ones like Flash (Rod Haase, Candy Stripe Nurses, If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!! and the sequel Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?) and Green Lantern (Howard Murphy, the gardener in Young Lady Chatterley II, which would become another important memory in my young life for different reasons).

A party for the retirement of Scarlet Cyclone (William Schallert from Inner Space and In the Heat of the Night) when the Legion of Doom spoils everyone’s fun by announcing they’ve hidden a bomb, so everyone must get de-powered, split into smaller teams and save the day. If that seems like a Gardner Fox story, it’s not a bad thing. The bad guys are Riddler (Frank Gorshin, who else?), Weather Wizard (Jeff Altman, who a year after this would star in one of the most baffling TV shows in broadcast history, The Pink Lady and Jeff), Sinestro (comedian Charlie Callas), Mordru (yes, a Legion of Superheroes villain! He’s played by Gabriel Dell, doubling down on oddball kids shows, as he had just been the voice of Boba Fett on The Star Wars Holiday Special), Doctor Sivana (Howard Morris, whose voice was all over the cartoons I grew up on), Giganta and Solomon Grundy (Mickey Morton, who was also in the aforementioned Star Wars nightmare, playing Chewbacca’s wife Malla).

While the show looked cheap and kind of silly, I was six. So I was beyond excited because there was another episode the very next week.

The next week is why I grew up to be the cynical person who will go on at length about why I hate Wed Craven or how no good slasher has been made with minor exceptions after 1984. All my pain came from this show, in which the adventure format was ditched to instead present a celebrity superhero roast of the superheroes hosted by Ed McMahon.

Now, I love celebrity seventies roasts.

I love Ed McMahon.

But I had been laughed at — and would be laughed at my entire life — for knowing too much about comic books.

Now, even comic books were abandoning me to the void of ennui. Yes, I was the kind of six year old that often asked for an Anacin because I claimed life was giving me a migraine.

Anyways…

New characters were added, including stand-up comic black hero Ghetto Man (Brad Sanders), Captain Marvel’s Aunt Minerva (Ruth Buzzi), Hawkman’s mother (Pat Carroll, the voice of Ursula in The Little Mermaid) and superhero reporter Rhoda Rooter (June Gable, Estelle on Friends) who lets the world know that Giganta (early trans actor Aleshia Brevard, who played one of the female creatures in Bigfoot) was marrying The Atom (Alfie Wise, who was Batman in Cannonball Run).

If it sounds horrible, well — it was. And it still is.

I mean, didn’t the producers realize that Captain Marvel lived on Earth-S, I wondered? Yet even I knew that this was above Wonder Woman, who had her own show, and Superman, who at one point eclipsed Batman, who bided his time and worked with the right directors obviously.

In his book Back to the Batcave, Adam West said that he regretted doing these shows. They couldn’t even get his Batman costume right.

But hey! Gary Owens showed up!

Airing on November 23 and 24, 1979 — the same nights that Salem’s Lot was also on CBS — with the new creative team of director Iván Nagy (perhaps better known as the boyfriend of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss) and Wilton Schiller (who produced the last season of The Fugitive and wrote this with his wife, former casting agent Patricia Payne).

According to star Reb Brown, Captain America wore a helmet in these movies because the California Highway Patrol — you know, CHiPs — said that he must have a helmet to ride a motorcycle on the freeway.

At least he gets to hang-glide this time. And get a decent villain, as Christopher Lee plays General Miguel, who is using an aging formula to hold Portland hostage. Cap has Connie Selleca on his side as a scientist, but this pitch for a series — the second if you count the other TV movie that aired four months before — didn’t get the ratings needed, what with those expensive stunts.

I kind of love reading reviews making light of Steve Rogers being a painter in these movies. That’s totally the character from the comics, one of the few things that made it into this film.

On Friday night, January 19, 1979, a seven-year-old me sat down to watch this and promptly lost his mind.

There was supposedly a directive from CBS to not follow the comics exactly, which makes no sense, because the comics sell the show which sell the comics, but for some reason, no one figured that out yet.

So that’s how this version of Captain America is a legacy hero, even if they get the part about Steve Rogers being a commercial artist right. He’s almost killed by some spies who are trying to get the F.L.A.G. serum that his father invented and gave to himself to become the first Captain America. But all Steve wants to do is roam in his cool van because it’s 1979 and this Earth-CBS version of Cap is Nomad before he’s Cap.

He ends up being saved by the aforementioned F.L.A.G. formula, gets super-strength, a special motorcycle, a clear shield, a motocross-centric costume and the actual job of being the Sentinel of Liberty.

According to star Reb Brown at Comic-Con, CBS planned crossing over his character with Spider-Man (Nicholas Hammond) and the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno/Bill Bixby). Seven-year-old me loves that.

Writer Don Ingalls once worked on the LAPD magazine The Beat, as well as scripting The Initiation of Sarah. Director Rod Holcomb has worked on all sorts of episodic TV, including The Six Million Dollar Man and The Greatest American Hero.

The reviews I’ve seen for this online are a mix of “look how far we’ve come” and “the idea of Captain America is capitalist nonsense.” First, this show is just fine. It’s strange to compare low budget TV movies made forty years ago to glossy multimillion films on so many levels. And Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created Captain America to represent the best of this country and what it could be, a character that two Jewish men created to make a stand for America entering World War II, that protest groups came to their offices to try and find them, that became a character of a man lost out of time and with no country, even fighting the Secret Empire the whole way to the White House, exposing Nixon as a supervillain — who killed himself off-panel! — and then traveled the nation as the aforementioned man with no country called Nomad. And this was no millenial story for social media clout. This was in 1974.