#4 – Captain America the Musical

If you read Marvel Comics in the 80s you might recognize this ad:

The musical was announced in 1985, with a debut set for 1986. The above ad ran in just about every single Marvel Comic in 1985 – meaning if you were like me and you obsessively bought every Secret Wars II crossover, you saw it about a thousand times.

The show was to be written by Mel Mandel and Norman Sachs, a duo whose only other credit that I can find is My Old Friends, a musical about a bunch of old folks living at a retirement home. It fell apart at some point long before it ever got anywhere, although BroadwayWorld.com has this song listing:

Captain America
Nobody Asked Me to Lead a Parade This Year
A Beautiful Girl
If I Could Fall in Love
Matter of Principle
Both Ways
Number One
Ruthless
Marvin Mittleman
For All the Wrong Reasons
Fly the Flag
The First Presidential
He’s My Hero
If You’re a Dreamer

I’ve spent the better part of the weekend trying to find any hint of these songs on the internet, but they seem to not exist. Mandel and Sachs seem to have actually written something…

The most intriguing part is just what the hell Cap’s little ‘special friend’ would have done in the show. Would Bucky have been a girl? Or something less… savory? It’s more likely that the casting call was simply a publicity ploy.

It turns out that Cap wasn’t the only Marvel hero to knocking on the stage door in the 80s; rumor has it that there was a Thor musical in development for a while.