Which they then contradict by having the shield audibly ring anytime it’s hit or brushed up against. Make up your minds, movie dudes: it absorbs all vibrations or it’s a gong. I don’t think it can be both.
Oh, and I was yet another person bothered by the underdevelopment of the Commandos. Were they at least identifiable by name to fans of the comic books? Because the only development we got of them in the movie is that they’re loyal to the Captain, and they like to get drunk.
Yeah, that irritated the crap out of me. As soon as they said that it absorbed all vibrations, I immediately started listening for it to ring like a gong- didn’t take more than a few seconds. Someone clearly didn’t understand the link between vibration and sound. I realize they had to have some sort of “metallic” sound, but I think a muffled “thunk” would’ve done the job.
Otherwise, though, I really enjoyed the movie.
The only reason the “Howling Commandos” were identifiable was due to the recognizability of Dum Dum Dugan. Besides him and Gabe Jones (aka the black guy), the membership of the Howling Commandos bore little resemblence to the comics.
The movie’s incarnation is a squadron handpicked by Cap from the cross-section of Allied soldiers who were Hydra’s prisoners. These include:
Bucky: who was recruited to be Captain America’s partner in the comics.
James Montgomery Falsworth: (aka the British guy), who was a superhero called Union Jack in the comics.
Jim Morita: (aka the Asian guy) who appeared briefly in the comics, though was never a member of the Commandos per se.
Jacques Dernier: (aka the French guy) who appeared briefly in the comics, though was never a member of the Commandos per se.
The comics incarnation, they were a squad of Army Rangers led by Nick Fury. In addition to Dum Dum Dugan and Gabe Jones, the members swapped out by the movie include:
Percival Pinkerton: a British soldier, incorporated onto the team to replace…
Jonathan Juniper: Ivy League youngster killed in battle early in the series. The kid’s death haunted Nick Fury for some time.
Eric Koenig: Anti-German defector
Izzy Cohen: Jewish-American soldier, adept with mechanics
Dino Manelli: Italian-American soldier modeled after Dean Martin, he was the multilingual character in the comics.
Rebel Ralston: Southern-born American soldier who introduced the Howling Commando’s signature “Wa-Hoo!” battle cry.
All said, while the these characters had interesting backgrounds, they’re not so recognizable or popular that it’s a big problem to leave them out. To echo a point already made several times in this thread, the main problem is that the characters the movie did select, were barely introduced and then ignored.
Whoops…
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Eric Koenig: Anti-Nazi German defector
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I figured that’s what you meant. Otherwise he would have had a hard time serving under Eisenhower. Thanks for the informative post., I read Nick Fury and the Howling Commandos all the time as a kid, but can’t remember a thing about them.
This is where I have to give George Lucas credit: had this been his movie, they’d have developed not only some sound effect that instantly seemed perfect and inevitable, it would be an internet meme by now for shutting someone up.
There is only one proper sound effect for Captain America’s shield. (Comic panel, not an audio.)
I showed that to the whole bar. Got a free shot from the bartender.
I was happy to see the Howling Commandos at all, and given the limitations of the medium, I think they did a fine job with having them in there. Contrast with the Warriors Three in Thor or Happy Hogan in Iron Man - they’re background characters, we don’t get to learn much about them. I’m okay with that.
Compare with Steve Rogers - all that we know about him is that:
- He’s from Brooklyn
- He got beat up in that alley, and that one, and in that parking lot
- He tried to enlist multiple times
- He’s an artist (from the scene with Agent Carter and the monkey drawing)
We don’t know his parents’ names, how old he is, where he went to school, what level of school he completed, or much of anything. And that’s okay - we don’t need to know those things, because they’re not important to the movie. They could have decided to make a different movie, one that had us learning about the backgrounds of the Howling Commandoes and what skills each of them brings to the table, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed that movie as much.
Yep. I liked the movie they chose to make and I am not going to bother nitpicking things that would probably have detracted from it.
Like character development? 
And the reality is you get something less than two hours to tell a story - this one runs a little over - 125 minutes. You add previews and time to turn over the theater and you have to turn in over for twice in an evening - maybe three times. So you make trades - do you want to see more Howling Commandos? Are you willing to give up the Peggy Carter romance for it? You want to see more Red Skull bad guy development? Are we going to lose the scene where Cap takes out the Nazi spy when he first gets his powers in order to fit that in?
Your goal is to spend not much more than two hours getting an audience who probably isn’t terribly familiar with Steve Rogers/Captain America familiar enough with his story so that when you dump him 70 years into the future for the Avengers, you understand who this guy is in relation to Tony Stark or Thor. And make a movie that is entertaining as a stand alone film. You think something only takes two or three minutes - but those two or three minutes quickly add up and end up on the cutting room floor.
(ETA: And make the film showable in Germany, with their anti Nazi laws…which isn’t always an easy task for a movie set in WWII).
I realize I’m neither the target audience nor your typical action movie viewer, but you could lose maybe 50% of the running time for action sequences and devote that time to plot and character development and I’d be one happy camper. Action sequences go on so long these days that I’m basically getting bored by the end of them - “Oh, God, another car chase? More fighting? Sheesh.”
No, see, that ringing is an additional feature added to the shield. See, it’s like how people wouldn’t buy silent vacuum cleaners for the longest time, because they thought they didn’t work. If Cap had a shield that just sort of went " " when he hit a nazi with it, it would drive him crazy. He’d waste time hitting the guy over and over just to make sure his shield is working.
Character BACKGROUND isn’t the same as character development.
Yeah, and that would have alienated about 75% of those who WERE the target audience.
Everyone keeps saying this, but when I lived in Germany in 1993, I personally rented videotapes of all three Indiana Jones movies — and none of them were censored at all. Yes, even Adolf Hitler’s cameo appearance in Last Crusade was in there. The box didn’t even have a big red label, WARNING: NAZIS! 
Maybe the laws have gotten stronger or they are enforced now? Here is the wiki on the relevant law… Strafgesetzbuch section 86a - Wikipedia
(It looks like the law was strengthened sometime in the past decade).
It does, at the bottom of the label, after monosodium glutamate.