Liberal-Pleasing Captain America Sermon Cut From 'The Avengers' Movie

April 16th, 2012 11:07 PM

In The New York Times, director Joss Whedon insisted he had to cut a scene from the forthcoming superhero movie The Avengers that would featured Captain America lamenting the “loss of health care and welfare” in America, but he decided to cut the scene because it interrupted the movie's narrative flow.

Conservative comic-book lovers would have surely blanched at Captain America mouthing the socialist talking points, just as they weren't happy with pre-release publicity on the first Captain America movie when "Avenger" director Joe Johnston declared that Steve Rogers, man behind the mask, would not be "this sort of jingoistic flag-waver."

Whedon said he couldn't keep his "poignant" scene of lamenting the loss of statist mojo:

One of the best scenes that I wrote was the beautiful and poignant scene between Steve and Peggy [Carter] that takes place in the present. And I was the one who was like, ‘Guys, we need to lose this.’ It was killing the rhythm of the thing. And we did have a lot of Cap, because he really was the in for me. I really do feel a sense of loss about what’s happening in our culture, loss of the idea of community, loss of health care and welfare and all sorts of things. I was spending a lot of time having him say it, and then I cut that.

At Think Progress, liberal culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg was bummed Captain America couldn't sell the spirit of Obamacare: “The timing and the platform would have been amazing, the purest representative of American power in the superhero pantheon standing in for Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in the biggest tentpole of the summer, a month and a half before the Supreme Court’s likely to issue its ruling that will determine the future of the Affordable Care Act. It also would have also created a political firestorm around the movie, something the cheerful blandness of Captain America was careful to avoid."