J.D. Salinger And The Unseen Captain America Movie

J.D. Salinger has died.  He was 91. While his lengthy obituary is front page news in The New York Times, I suppose it's both complimentary and belittling that it might be fairly summarized in five words. "Catcher in the Rye.  Recluse."  You can read it HERE.  I didn't realize until I did the math just now that he was only 32 years old when Catcher in the Rye was first published in 1951. And then he lived another 60 years, seemingly perpetually uncomfortable in its long shadow.


On a very tangential note, few people probably know that his son Matthew, who is now 50 years old himself, actually starred in a 1990 movie adaptation of the comic book super hero Captain America. Despite being promoted in advance as an upcoming summer blockbuster, the movie was never released theatrically in the United States (nor on DVD), allegedly because it was deemed irredeemably bad in test screenings. But I happened to catch it a few years ago on television when I lived in Hong Kong.  And you know what, it wasn't all that terrible.  I have embedded below the original trailer for the film.  If you watch it, you'll also get a feel for how cheesy  most super hero films were prior to the Batman, Spider-Man and X-Men films of the last decade.