Cultural Crossovers #5: Captain America

You know how this works at this point…

• Ooh, glowy cube. Wonder if it’s an actual tesseract inside?
• Yeah, you can see where Tony got it from.
• And this, gentlesophs, is what we call estxijir.
• Ooh, we like her.
• The culture that makes a point of the importance of spiritual values to the sentinel daressef is nodding along with Dr. Erskine here. They are, as it were, the hardest and most vital part.
• So, on the topic of qualities one wins wars with… and hell, this civilization doesn’t even have vector stacks.
• Impressive results. Now someone get him a steak dinner.
• Even more impressive for someone presumably still suffering from ‘shell dysmorphia.
• And that’s what happens to you when you Obstructive Naysay a supervillain.
• And the audience gives a standing ovation to the local taste in musical propaganda, despite the waste of fighting talent. The idealist school always plays well.
• The Red Skull, incidentally, makes a superb villain for this audience, even without knowing the local politics. It’s not at all hard to read in him the Renegade-perverting-technology-and-awesome-to-ill-ends archetype that all their best villains are made of.
• Now that’s how you pull off a rescue!
• Nicely unspoken, Colonel.
• Vibranium, huh? For once we’re going to try hard to just roll with the impossibilium.
• Got to give it to the old Crimson Cranium, the Valkyrie‘s a really nice ship. On the other hand, HYDRA have a ridiculous salute and a slogan that by rights should kill morale.
• Manned bombs? Seriously? Are they trying to grow more heads?
• And that’s why you should take great care when playing with paleotechnological artifacts.
• It’s not that the Imperial audience can’t appreciate a heroic sacrifice, but at some point, I think, someone needs to explain to them why we have so many of them in our media, being generally in favor of Taking a Third Option themselves, which their media reflects.
• Seriously, SHIELD? Lies do not become you.
• (Although this, along with differences in how the us.gov has been portrayed here and in the previous movies, is really playing into a “lesser sons of greater sires” vibe in their eyes.)

So, overall, yes – would work very well. Some cultural translation required, partly because the background does rather depend on having The War in your history, which this audience does not. Also, explaining why everyone seems to have a single-sex army given how much ass Agent Carter kicks right there on screen.

(And why you might not need to explain the concept of bullying, you might have to explain to the less cosmopolitan members of the audience why society at large doesn’t stomp on it with the vigor which they would expect.)