With Captain America: The Winter Soldier now having introduced the very cool Falcon, it bears mentioning that the original comic book version of Falc didn't have military training, nor did he get his "wings" until much later. But that doesn't mean the Falcon and Cap didn't become fast friends when they met, or that Falc went into action without knowing how to fight. On the contrary, he learned from the best--even if, at the time, he didn't know it.
You'll need to train hard to be able to answer this
Marvel Trivia Question
How did Captain America and the Falcon meet?
The meeting of this famous pair took place during the time when Cap was a victim of the Red Skull's possession of the Cosmic Cube. The Skull had switched bodies with Cap, and transported him to the island of the Exiles--a group of former allies of the Skull who now wished vengeance on him. It was the Skull's plan for the Exiles to mistake Cap for himself, and thus hunt him down and bring about his death.
But when "Cap" and the Exiles battle, he's helped by a falcon which attacks the Exiles and gives him a chance to fend them off and escape. And soon he meets Sam Wilson, who had become a prisoner on the island and was making hit-and-run attacks on the Exiles as well as organizing the other occupants of the island to band together against them. Cap is able to remove the Skull mask and then get Sam's story:
But Cap realizes that Sam needs more of an advantage in order to make any headway against the Exiles--and so he makes a proposal to him which would end up making the two of them quite a team:
And so Cap begins training the newly-costumed Falcon in hand-to-hand combat, finding him to be a quick study:
Finally, the Falcon is ready to go into action, and he and "Cap" make their first attack as a team.
With the villagers' help, the two are able to send the Exiles fleeing. Unfortunately, the Red Skull (as Cap) has been monitoring the battle, and decides to personally deal with the two, retrieving them from the island and transporting them to a castle in the German alps. There, the Skull decides to switch bodies again with Cap, and Falcon gets quite the surprise:
And, fighting hard against near-impossible odds, Cap and the Falcon do just that. The Skull is forced to flee--and a new hero prepares to take his place in the Marvel universe.
4 comments:
What weirded me out about this storyline, is, if the Red Skull actually physically switched bodies with Cap, then we're seeing the Red Skull's actual face here for the first time.
And I know, Cap sorta rubbed mud or clay on his face to disguise himself from the Exiles, but c'mon. That's Johann Schmidt!
The original Red Skull. Second-in-line after Hitler.
Apparently, he was a good-lookin' guy.
Another thing that I wondered about was, when they first switched bodies, it didn't occur to Cap to take Red Skull mask off right away, before going to the Avengers and Sharon Carter for help. The results were disastrous. He didn't even seem to realize he was WEARING a mask till after the Skull used the cube to transport him to that island.
I know it's a comic book, but c'mon!
Anon, I agree, it was hard to buy the whole clay-on-the-face thing to disguise his features, however proficient Cap became at it during the war. The only reason I can imagine Stan Lee tried to make that fly is to keep the features of the Skull's real face under wraps for future stories. There were certainly times I didn't envy Lee for when he had to come up with a plausible explanation for something that any sane person wouldn't normally swallow. Now I know how soap opera writers feel. :)
As for discarding the mask, Cap actually chided himself for just the reasons you mention, with a simple "it never occurred to me" scene. I guess even guys who are trained to think on their feet stumble every now and then.
On another goofy note, there was an episode of Justice League Unlimited, the animated series, where Lex Luthor switches minds with the Flash. Lex, while inhabiting Flash's body, walks into the restroom on the JLA satellite, says "now I'll learn the Flash's secret identity," and pulls off his mask. Then he looks at the mirror for a couple seconds, and says, dejectedly, "I have no idea who this is."
Cap coulda walked into with no mask on, and instead of attacking him, they would've looked at him and said, "here comes some dude in a green jumpsuit. Could be the janitor. No reason to attack."
Excellent point, though I suppose Cap was playing it safe just in case one of the Exiles had at some point seen the Skull without his mask. You can never be too careful with the Exiles.
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