Trevor Noah is taking the reins of The Daily Show, not the "reigns"

After I watch any movie, whether on Netflix or in the theater, I like to read the reviews it received or the think pieces it spawned, if it's a movie that has left or is leaving an impact on the zeitgeist. Since its release, Avengers: Age of Ultron has been the subject of many think pieces about either robot sci-fi; the ways innocent bystanders are portrayed in superhero movies; the fear that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will lead to the infantilization of cinema; the lack of female leads in MCU movies (which shows how badly the MCU--the film division, that is, not the TV division behind Agent Carter and A.K.A. Jessica Jones, both projects anchored by female leads and spearheaded by female showrunners--is lagging behind the progressiveness and diversity of current Marvel superheroine comic books like Ms. Marvel, the Marvel Now! revamp of X-Men, the gender-swapped Thor, Spider-Gwen, Silk and A-Force); feminism on social media; or the fact that people on social media really need to take a breath and siddown, relax, have a sandwich, drink a glass of milk, do some fuckin' thing, will ya?

Age of Ultron's connection to the last two items is due to female Marvel geeks' Twitter rants about their frustrations with the film and Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon's departure from Twitter after he encountered so much Twitter vitriol from a not-so-civil segment of those female geeks. I planned to watch this blockbuster that caused these lapsed Whedon fans to Hulk out on Twitter--and broke Whedon's spirit "a little bit" while he worked on it--about three or four weeks after its crowded opening weekend, which is when the crowds for these tentpole blockbusters usually dwindle completely, as does the possibility of having your morning or afternoon movie screening be ruined by an imbecile who brings his tablet to the theater and keeps switching on his tablet during the feature presentation (that, by the way, happened during Kingsman: The Secret Service). Trying not to click to any of the Age of Ultron think pieces during those three weeks before I saw the movie was quite a challenge. I was interested in what the writers of these pieces were talking about, but at the same time, these pieces gave away much of the movie, and I hadn't watched it yet. So it was a relief to finally be able to read them after watching Age of Ultron.

For Age of Ultron and other summer blockbusters, YOMYOMF likes to take several of their writers and have them give roundtable discussions of those blockbusters. I'm often interested in what YOMYOMF has to say in these discussions, even if it results in an inane moment like one of their writers giving director Bong Joon-ho's terrific Snowpiercer--a Chris Evans-led comic book adaptation that, as a movie, is superior to even any of the MCU comic book adaptations that either feature Evans or don't--only one out of four stars (actually, YOMYOMF uses bananas instead of stars for their movie rating system). So I went over to YOMYOMF's discussion of Age of Ultron, and the most interesting part of the discussion has to be the spelling of "take over the reins" as "take over the reigns." Yeah, that's not how you spell it.

It's a common mistake. "Reigns" and "reins" are both homonyms related to control and dominance, so they can be easily mixed up. I don't want to single out YOMYOMF because everyone does it. Even newspapers like the New York Observer misspell "reins" as "reigns" too, like when the Observer brought up South African stand-up comic Trevor Noah's controversial--and, of course, just like in the case of Age of Ultron, led-to-an-outcry-on-Twitter--promotion from Daily Show correspondent to Daily Show host.

It should be "Mr. Noah will officially take the reins on September 28," not "Mr. Noah will officially take the reigns on September 28." The reign of "reigns" over "reins" continues elsewhere.

Like Ann Peebles said, I can't stand the "reigns" against my window. Here's how I differentiate "reigns" from "reins" and avoid misspelling one or the other: yes, both words are related to control and dominance, but "reign," when used as a noun, means the time period when someone--or a team like the Golden State Warriors--is in charge or is dominant. "Rein," as a noun, means either a restraint, as in Tobey Maguire pulling on Seabiscuit's reins to slow the horse down, or a metaphorical steering wheel ("Mr. Noah will officially take the reins").

In verb form, to "reign" means to rule as a king or to conquer like one ("Marvel may currently reign supreme at the box office"), and to "rein" means to restrain, but unlike "reign," "rein" must always be accompanied by "in" or "back" (two such sentences are two of the above sentences with circled typos, which should be spelled as "It reined in character development!" and "The Wild Wild West reined itself in with Season 3"). Another difference between "reign" and "rein" when they're verbs is that "reign" is an intransitive verb, which means it doesn't take an object, while "rein" is more often a transitive verb, which means it needs an object ("character development," "itself"). Here's a fun way to remember how to differentiate "reign" from "rein": "reign" is the verb that prefers to be alone at the top, while "rein" is the verb that doesn't like being alone. It's the Al Green of verbs.

So on August 6, Jon Stewart will cause Daily Show fans' living rooms to get dusty when he vamooses his exhausted dad-bod out of Comedy Central and hands over the reins of his show to Noah, not the "reigns." Meanwhile, at the end of Age of Ultron, Danny Elfman temporarily takes over the musical reins from the film's other composer, Brian Tyler, and restates for the last time in the film his "New Avengers" theme, a straight-out-of-vintage-Elfman-circa-1990 update of Alan Silvestri's main theme from the first Avengers. Also at the end of Age of Ultron, Joss lets the Russo brothers take the reins of the Avengers movie franchise and is now probably giggling to himself the following: "They are gonna be so exhausted halfway through the making of Infinity War Part I."

Throwback Thursday: Captain America: The First Avenger

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

What I wrote about Captain America: The First Avenger here on the AFOS blog back in 2012:

I remember watching the Marvel Comics float during NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a kid and thinking, "This fake battle between the Marvel heroes and villains looks so cheesy, and the music from Back to the Future's not really helping."



That was back when the Marvel characters had a lousy track record on both the big and small screens, outside of animation. (Sure, The Incredible Hulk landed a few Emmy nominations back in the day and actually won one of them, but have you watched it lately? Its formulaic and Fugitive-inspired premise wears thin quickly, despite showrunner Kenneth Johnson's mostly serious treatment of the material and Bill Bixby's best efforts as the renamed-due-to-homophobia David Banner in standout episodes like "Dark Side," where both Banner and his Hulk self turn evil and pervy due to a serum experiment gone wrong.) In the years between the Marvel Thanksgiving Parade float and the breakout success of the first Blade movie, the first Marvel-inspired feature film that both the mainstream and the comics crowd liked, I thought, "Having the Marvel heroes run around and strike a pose to Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme was corny as hell, but wouldn't it be sweet if someday, someone like Silvestri wrote music for a Marvel character that was on a par with something like Silvestri's work for Back to the Future and Predator? Oh yeah, and a quality screenplay for that character would be dope too."

In 2011, both those things actually happened after Silvestri got recruited for a Marvel Studios project where screenwriting partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely skillfully brought to life one of Marvel's oldest properties--a character I never really cared for, even when one of my favorite comics authors, Ed Brubaker, gave him an ambitious relaunch in print.

The first things that would come to mind whenever I'd hear the name "Captain America" were Glenn Miller, LaSalles, bobby socks and Japanese internment camps. Even though a comic shop owner who knew I was a fan of the Brubaker titles Gotham Central and Sleeper insisted that Brubaker was doing a bang-up job and making Captain America more of an espionage comic than a superhero comic, I still couldn't get past issue 1 and see the appeal of this whitebread Boy Scout in the silly jingoistic costume, the star of the lame Thanksgiving Parade production number above. He was never as interesting to me as the prejudice-fighting X-Men, Spider-Man the angsty and quippy New Yorker or Spidey's West Coast counterparts, the younger and much more anti-establishment Runaways.

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Markus, McFeely, an uncredited Joss Whedon and director Joe Johnston, armed with the same sense of style he brought to The Rocketeer, all found ways to keep Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from coming off as antiquated and banal while still confining his character to a period setting. One of those ways was to say "Screw it" and embrace Steve's do-gooder nature, but to make that eagerness to do good relatable and appealing (with the help of a subdued performance by Evans, removing all traces of his one-note, probably-bathes-his-dick-in-Axe-body-spray Johnny Storm character from the Fantastic Four movies and his smarmy action movie star character from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). That's best embodied in the frail but courageous Steve's response when a scientist (a German-accented Stanley Tucci) asks him if he wants to kill Nazis: "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from."

The First Avenger supplies this guy who doesn't like bullies with two outstanding original marches. "Star Spangled Man," penned by Disney musical songsmiths Alan Menken and David Zippel, is an amusing fake '40s show tune that accompanies the newly buffed-up Steve when the military doesn't consider him experienced enough for combat, so they sideline him to performing at a USO tour as a war bonds-promoting mascot, clad in a costume as shabby-looking as the tights worn by the stuntman who played Captain America on the '80s Marvel float. The USO tour is a clever device that helps make Steve's offstage heroism pay off beautifully in the film's second act.

The other march, which is much less comedic than "Star Spangled Man," is provided by Silvestri, who, while writing the First Avenger score, found time to give a concert with the Video Game Orchestra at his alma mater, Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he told an interviewer from Berklee that Steve's humble quality was what particularly appealed to him about The First Avenger. Silvestri tapped into that quality throughout his First Avenger themes, which is a reason why they work so well.



Silvestri's suitably old-school First Avenger score is truly on a par with his work for the Back to the Future and Predator films. It's like the score that should have accompanied that cheesy Marvel float back in the '80s. (Like Steve during the USO montage, the vigorous end title rendition of the "Captain America March" got sidelined, specifically to bonus track status on the iTunes edition of the First Avenger soundtrack album, which frustrated consumers who already bought the end title theme-less First Avenger CD.)

Man, I would love to hear Cap's march in a live setting, but this will do.



What I think about The First Avenger in 2015:

It holds up. Hayley Atwell's breakout performance as Agent Carter is one of the highlights of The First Avenger, and I'm glad for the continual presence of Atwell's character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (this week's solid two-hour premiere of Atwell's Agent Carter miniseries on ABC makes me wish for Agent Carter to become a regular series, although I'd prefer it to be in the eight-episodes-per-season format that's closer to British TV, instead of the increasingly outdated and unwieldy 22-a-season format). But the Winter Soldier sequel, which drew inspiration from much of the acclaimed Brubaker revamp of the Captain America comics, is even more impressive than The First Avenger as a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, showing "some surprising depth in its depiction of an unchecked intelligence agency and a U.S. government that executes enemies without trial," as Jamelle Bouie wrote in Slate. Hail HYDRA fighta.

Selections from the Captain America: The First Avenger score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."

A playlist through space and time: The best of the AFOS block "Hall H" on Spotify

I named the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" after the huge-ass hall in the San Diego Convention Center, the home of San Diego Comic-Con, partly because at a total of 10 hours from 7am to 5pm Pacific on Saturday (and again on Sunday), the block is equally huge. "Hall H" is full of selections from scores to shows and films that are popular with the comic or anime con crowd, so it's all the fun and excitement of a comic or anime con, but without the horrifying smells.

So some British show celebrated the 50th anniversary of its premiere over the weekend. Inspector Spacetime didn't just prove that it hasn't shown any signs of aging even though it's a show that's so old Larry King discovered his first liver spot on the day it premiered. It also proved that even when the budget is at its lowest, the zippers on the Ocean Demon monster suits are at their most visible and the corridors that the Inspector and Constable Reggie are often seen running through are at their creakiest, it can still entertain, as long as there's plenty of charisma from whoever's portraying the Inspector and his associate and the storytelling is as impeccable as the Inspector's taste in bowler hats.

These days, Inspector Spacetime, or as it's known to people outside the Community universe, Doctor Who, looks much more spiffy and baller than it used to, and the interior of the time machine our favorite anti-authoritarian time traveler rides around in no longer looks like it's going to tip over if someone sneezed at the roundel-covered wall. The premise remains the same: an eccentric alien hops around space and time to protect the universe and a little planet he's come to love called Earth, and thanks to his bizarre alien physiology (he has two hearts instead of one), he regenerates into a completely different person whenever he dies. But now there's more of a focus on the humans he's befriended and how he's affected their lives, as well as a focus on the angst that makes him tick: guilt over the toughest decision he's ever made. That would be causing the destruction of his own native planet Gallifrey--he's responsible for killing off his own people, the Time Lords--to put an end to the off-screen Time War between them and the Daleks, one of the Doctor's biggest adversaries.

The PTSD from the Time War was added to the character by former showrunner Russell T. Davies, who revived Doctor Who 16 years after its cancellation by the BBC and modernized the show in ways that enhanced and improved it (the less said about Davies' love for farty alien jokes, the better), and not just in visual terms. Towards the end of Sylvester McCoy's late '80s run as the seventh Doctor, the show started to hint that the Doctor was less than saintly and could be as devious and shady as his enemies. Sure, in the past, he's been a cantankerous old man (the first Doctor) and an arrogant asshole (the sixth Doctor). But unless I'm mistaken because I haven't watched all the pre-Davies episodes, the show rarely raised questions about some of the Doctor's actions (I haven't seen all of them because--and longtime Doctor Who heads might disagree with me--I've found some of them to be too slow-paced for my tastes, even when I first caught some of the immensely popular Tom Baker episodes on PBS, and since all of them were shot on videotape, except one of my favorite old-school Doctor Who episodes, the shot-entirely-on-film "Spearhead from Space," they look like moldy '70s and '80s episodes of General Hospital).

Doctor Who was cancelled before it could further explore the dark side of McCoy's Doctor, but when Davies brought the show back and introduced the backstory of the Time War (which took place off-camera during the interval between the 1996 Doctor Who TV-movie starring Paul McGann and the show's 2005 return), he picked up on that dark side. He and several other writers, including current showrunner Steven Moffat, made the character of the Doctor more relatable, imperfect and human, even when the Davies seasons reimagined him as a cross between a thinking person's superhero, a god with a mischievous streak and a rock star who's charming to both women and gay guys (Billie Piper's lovestruck Rose Tyler was clearly a surrogate--some haters will say she was a Mary Sue--for the openly gay Davies; some probably consider John Barrowman's Captain Jack Harkness to be more of a surrogate, but Captain Jack is the dashing gay action hero Davies wishes he could be but isn't).

"The Day of the Doctor," last Saturday night's satisfying 50th anniversary episode, revisits the previously unseen tough decision that's haunted the Doctor since the first season of the Davies/Moffat era and finally gives us glimpses of that much-discussed Time War. To the show's fans, Moffat has been as polarizing a showrunner as Davies was in the last few episodes of his reign--Moffat haters think Moffat's writing on Doctor Who is overly convoluted, repetitive, misogynist and possibly racist and they're not so fond of his rather dickish response to their opinion that the Doctor doesn't have to always regenerate into a white guy--but Moffat has excelled at making us feel the giddiness the Doctor experiences whenever he achieves the impossible, whether it's during the climax of "The Doctor Dances" or during Matt Smith's current run as the 11th Doctor (which will come to a close in next month's Christmas episode, in which the 11th Doctor dies and regenerates into a profanity-free Peter Capaldi).

The quintessential moment of Moffat's take on the Doctor as "the mad man with a box" is that funny and clever scene in "A Christmas Carol" where the Doctor demonstrates to Michael Gambon's skeptical, Scrooge-like miser character that he's going to change his past and make himself appear on screen in the childhood home movie Gambon's watching, right after he leaves the room--and a few seconds later, thanks to the magic of the TARDIS, there he is, up on screen with Gambon's younger self. The Doctor is always rewriting history, and in "The Day of the Doctor," with the help of his current sidekick Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), his most recent self (David Tennant), the War Doctor (John Hurt), the "forgotten" past incarnation who obliterated both his own race and the Daleks, and a mysterious figure only the War Doctor can see and who looks an awful lot like Rose (the three Doctors wind up meeting each other for reasons too convoluted to explain here), the Doctor figures out how to rewrite history to fix his biggest mistake, and it's a moment as exhilarating as that home movie scene in "A Christmas Carol." It exemplifies why Doctor Who remains appealing to viewers all over the world (and why the BBC, which is now remorseful about the 1989 cancellation, has gone all-out for the franchise's 50th anniversary by bringing "The Day of the Doctor" to theaters in 3-D and producing An Adventure in Space and Time, a TV-movie that flashes back to Doctor Who's unusual and humble beginnings as TV that originally wasn't designed to scare or thrill kids but to educate them): the three Doctors' solution is--to borrow the words of longtime fan Craig Ferguson when he sang about why he loves the show--the ultimate triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

Selections from Murray Gold's epic score music for the third, fifth and sixth seasons of modern Doctor Who are featured during "Hall H," and they kick off the following sampler of tracks from "Hall H" that are found on Spotify. The complete sampler tracklist is at the very bottom of this post.

(Photo source: Greendale A.V. Club)

The fictional Inspector Spacetime, the Doctor Who counterpart we've seen bits and pieces of on Community (some of Ludwig Göransson's Community score cues are in rotation during "Hall H" but aren't part of the above sampler), is so popular with Community fans that's it's been made into a web series. It's even been cosplayed at cons.

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: !Blog)

This is the end

Because today is the last day ever, I ain't going out like no sucka. Go ahead and cry in the shower. Meanwhile, I'm posting 30 of my favorite original score cues or songs on Spotify that accompany the end credits of feature films. None of them are re-recordings (I love me some Spotify, but it's befouled by the stench of terrible re-recordings of film and TV music). All of them are the originals.

The last playlist ever kicks off with the summer of 2012's best end title theme (Alan Silvestri's "The Avengers," from an art-house film called Anna Karenina), followed by perhaps my all-time favorite original end title theme (Willie Hutch's "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," from a Dean Jones family film called The Mack). Tron: Legacy and Superman: The Movie both had end credits that ran so long they had two or three end title themes instead of one. Most of the end title themes below can be heard on AFOS, but some of them aren't in rotation because I simply don't have them in my library (Silvestri's Who Framed Roger Rabbit score is an album I always wanted to have, but I was never able to nab the score because it went out of print again before I could do so). The playlist concludes with Earl Rose's end title theme from a fascinating doc that aired on PBS in 2012: Johnny Carson: King of Late Night.

Too bad Adele's theme for Skyfall isn't featured in the film's end credits (it's also not on Spotify). I wanted to include "Skyfall" in the playlist because its Jim Morrison-esque opening lyric happens to be "This is the end," which is also the name of this playlist. In another interesting tidbit, "Skyfall" is simultaneously one of the most emotional songs to open a Bond film (the song is written from the point of view of M and is one big spoiler, and no wonder Daniel Craig cried when he first heard it--without giving too much away, it must have brought him back emotionally to the scene the song is basically about) and one of the most wry (an apocalyptic song about mortality is ironically the theme for a film that's all about revitalizing the 50-year-old Bond film franchise and keeping it going, and Adele and her producing partner Paul Epworth seemed to have written "Skyfall" so that it could also be interpreted as a tune about the 2012 apocalypse).

Goodbye, cruel world!

"This Is the End" tracklist
1. Alan Silvestri, "The Avengers," Marvel's The Avengers
2. Willie Hutch, "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," The Mack
3. Curtis Mayfield, "Superfly," Superfly
4. k.d. lang, "Surrender," Tomorrow Never Dies
5. Daft Punk, "TRON Legacy (End Titles)," Tron: Legacy
6. Daft Punk, "Solar Sailer," Tron: Legacy
7. Radiohead, "Exit Music (For a Film)," Romeo + Juliet
8. Dominic Cooper, "Jail-bait Jody," Tamara Drewe
9. Alan Silvestri, "End Title," Who Framed Roger Rabbit
10. John Williams, "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," The Empire Strikes Back
11. Alan Silvestri, "Captain America March," Captain America: The First Avenger
12. Prince, "Scandalous," Batman
13. Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Face to Face," Batman Returns
14. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "A Watchful Guardian," The Dark Knight
15. John Williams, "Finale and End Title March," Superman: The Movie
16. John Williams, "Love Theme from Superman," Superman: The Movie
17. Michael Giacchino, "The Incredits," The Incredibles
18. Michael Giacchino, "Up with End Credits," Up
19. Jerry Goldsmith, "End Credits," Star Trek: First Contact
20. Danny Elfman, "End Credits," Sleepy Hollow
21. Bruce Broughton, "End Credits," The Rescuers Down Under
22. Gladys Knight & the Pips, "Make Yours a Happy Home," Claudine
23. Mader, "Rhumba (End Credits)," The Wedding Banquet
24. Michael Giacchino, "End Creditouilles," Ratatouille
25. John Carpenter, "The Fog End Credits," The Fog
26. David Shire, "Finale and End Credits," The Conversation
27. John Williams, "Finale & End Credits," Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
28. Earl Rose, "End Credits," Johnny Carson: King of Late Night
2014 additions
29. Alexandre Desplat, "The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe, Part 7: After the Storm," Moonrise Kingdom
30. Alexandre Desplat, "Traditional Arrangement: 'Moonshine,'" The Grand Budapest Hotel
31. Michael Giacchino, "To Boldly Go," Star Trek
32. Michael Giacchino, "End Credits," Star Trek
33. M83 featuring Susanne Sundfør, "Oblivion," Oblivion
34. Ramin Djawadi featuring Tom Morello, "Pacific Rim," Pacific Rim
35. Blake Perlman featuring RZA, "Drift," Pacific Rim
36. Brian Tyler, "Can You Dig It (Iron Man 3 Main Titles)," Iron Man Three
37. Brian Tyler, "Legacy," Thor: The Dark World

BONUS TRACK: "Summer in America," DJ Blue & Chubb Rock's rousing original song from the end credits of the hilarious cult classic Wet Hot American Summer.

March Madness March of the Day: "Captain America March" from Captain America: The First Avenger by Alan Silvestri

I remember watching the Marvel Comics float during NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as a kid and thinking, "This fake battle between the Marvel heroes and villains looks so cheesy, and the music from Back to the Future's not really helping."



That was back when the Marvel characters had a lousy track record on both the big and small screens, outside of animation. (Sure, The Incredible Hulk landed a few Emmy nominations back in the day and actually won one of them, but have you watched it lately? Its formulaic and Fugitive-inspired premise wears thin quickly, despite showrunner Kenneth Johnson's mostly serious treatment of the material and Bill Bixby's best efforts as the renamed-due-to-homophobia David Banner in standout episodes like "Dark Side," where both Banner and his Hulk self turn evil and pervy due to a serum experiment gone wrong.) In the years between the Marvel Thanksgiving Parade float and the breakout success of the first Blade movie, the first Marvel-inspired feature film that both the mainstream and the comics crowd liked, I thought, "Having the Marvel heroes run around and strike a pose to Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme was corny as hell, but wouldn't it be sweet if someday, someone like Silvestri wrote music for a Marvel character that was on a par with something like Silvestri's work for Back to the Future and Predator? Oh yeah, and a quality screenplay for that character would be dope too."

In 2011, both those things actually happened after Silvestri got recruited for a Marvel Studios project where screenwriting partners Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely skillfully brought to life one of Marvel's oldest properties--a character I never really cared for, even when one of my favorite comics authors, Ed Brubaker, gave him an ambitious relaunch in print.

The first things that would come to mind whenever I'd hear the name "Captain America" were Glenn Miller, LaSalles, bobby socks and Japanese internment camps. Even though a comic shop owner who knew I was a fan of the Brubaker titles Gotham Central and Sleeper insisted that Brubaker was doing a bang-up job and making Captain America more of an espionage comic than a superhero comic, I still couldn't get past issue 1 and see the appeal of this whitebread Boy Scout in the silly jingoistic costume, the star of the lame Thanksgiving Parade production number above. He was never as interesting to me as the prejudice-fighting X-Men, Spider-Man the angsty and quippy New Yorker or Spidey's West Coast counterparts, the younger and much more anti-establishment Runaways.

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Markus, McFeely, an uncredited Joss Whedon and director Joe Johnston, armed with the same sense of style he brought to The Rocketeer, all found ways to keep Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from coming off as antiquated and banal while still confining his character to a period setting. One of those ways was to say "Screw it" and embrace Steve's do-gooder nature, but to make that eagerness to do good relatable and appealing (with the help of a subdued performance by Evans, removing all traces of his one-note, probably-bathes-his-dick-in-Axe-body-spray Johnny Storm character from the Fantastic Four movies and his smarmy action movie star character from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). That's best embodied in the frail but courageous Steve's response when a scientist (a German-accented Stanley Tucci) asks him if he wants to kill Nazis: "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from."

The First Avenger supplies this guy who doesn't like bullies with two outstanding original marches. "Star Spangled Man," penned by Disney musical songsmiths Alan Menken and David Zippel, is an amusing fake '40s show tune that accompanies the newly buffed-up Steve when the military doesn't consider him experienced enough for combat, so they sideline him to performing at a USO tour as a war bonds-promoting mascot, clad in a costume as shabby-looking as the tights worn by the stuntman who played Captain America on the '80s Marvel float. The USO tour is a clever device that helps make Steve's offstage heroism pay off beautifully in the film's second act.

The other march, which is much less comedic than "Star Spangled Man," is provided by Silvestri, who, while writing the First Avenger score, found time to give a concert with the Video Game Orchestra at his alma mater, Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he told an interviewer from Berklee that Steve's humble quality was what particularly appealed to him about The First Avenger. Silvestri tapped into that quality throughout his First Avenger themes, which is a reason why they work so well.



Silvestri's suitably old-school First Avenger score is truly on a par with his work for the Back to the Future and Predator films. It's like the score that should have accompanied that cheesy Marvel float back in the '80s. (Like Steve during the USO montage, the vigorous end title rendition of the "Captain America March" got sidelined, specifically to bonus track status on the iTunes edition of the First Avenger soundtrack album, which frustrated consumers who already bought the end title theme-less First Avenger CD.)

Man, I would love to hear Cap's march in a live setting, but this will do.