The Marvel Super Heroes · Season 1 · Episode 11
The Revenge of Captain America / The Trap is Sprung / So Dies a Villain
Synopsis
Captain America spars with a gymful of boxers and cannot lose himself in the fight. Bucky Barnes is on his mind. When Rick Jones tries on Bucky's old uniform, the sight of it tears the wound open. Steve Rogers has sworn off partners since the day Bucky died, and he lays that death at his own feet. One name keeps the grief from ever closing. Baron Zemo, the man who caused it, is still out there. Far away in the Amazon, Zemo is finished hiding. He wants gold to buy killers, and he wants Captain America dead. His agent in New York already has the perfect bait picked out: the boy.
The agent lures Captain America and Rick to a city park. An ambush breaks from the trees. Cap holds still while a dozen guns cover Rick, unwilling to gamble the boy's life. The mercenaries haul Rick south to Zemo's jungle empire. Cap goes after them. Zemo hurls everything he has at the sky above his fortress: fighter planes, missiles, artillery. Each trap fails. On the way down, Cap's own razor shield saws through his parachute straps, and he rides it into the ground to survive the fall. He turns Zemo's Vibra gun on the fortress and frees Rick. Zemo levels a disintegrator gun for the kill. Cap tilts his shield and catches the sun full in the villain's eyes. Blinded, Zemo staggers off the edge to his death. Bucky is avenged, and the long hunt is over.
Reality Designation
This story takes place outside the main Marvel continuity: 600026
Reality numbers are Marvel's official designations.
Where a universe has no official number we follow the Marvel Database and use its Temporary Reality Number (TRN-1092). Where there is neither — official or temporary — at the time we watch it, we assign a Snark Industries number of our own (SI-001).
Characters in the Episode
Hunts the man responsible for Bucky's death; walks into Zemo's jungle trap to save Rick and ends the vendetta.
Cap's young friend; kidnapped as bait, then works Zemo's captured weapons in the final fight.
Emerges from Amazon exile to buy an army of gold-hungry mercenaries and finish Captain America for good.
Zemo’s monocled agent; baits the park ambush, then fakes a confession to lure Cap south.
In-Universe Date
Contemporary setting. Bucky is dead at this point and Rick is stepping in... Zemo dies, but he's in later episodes.
This is one we'll be circling back to when we get better clarifications from future episodes.
Comic Roots
Where the episode's people and places come from on the page.
The three chapters adapt "Now, By My Hand, Shall Die a Villain!" from The Avengers #15 (April 1965) by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. On the page it is a full ensemble story, with the rest of the team and an Enchantress-and-Executioner subplot running alongside. The cartoon throws all of that overboard and keeps a single thread: Captain America, Rick Jones, and Baron Zemo in the Amazon. Zemo dies the same way in both tellings, blinded by sunlight bounced off Cap's shield and then killed by his own weaponry. In the comic his wild shot triggers an avalanche that buries him.
Baron Heinrich Zemo debuts in The Avengers #6 (July 1964), another Lee and Kirby creation, the Nazi scientist behind the 1945 drone-plane sabotage that appeared to kill Bucky and dropped Cap into the freezing Atlantic. His famous ruined face comes from Adhesive X, a compound of his own that fused his hood to his skin so it could never come off.
Rick Jones first appears in The Incredible Hulk #1 (May 1962), created by Lee and Kirby as the Hulk's original teenage sidekick. By the mid-1960s the comics had folded him into Captain America's orbit, where he pulled on a Bucky costume and tried to become the partner Cap kept refusing to accept. The opening beat lifts that dynamic straight off the page.
Recommended Reading
Where to go next if the episode left you wanting more.
Captain America thawed from the ice and mourning Bucky
Baron Zemo's debut and the first Masters of Evil, where the WWII grudge and the glued-on hood begin.
The direct source: Zemo's last stand in the Amazon and the death this chapter is named for.
The Snark File
Easter eggs, callbacks and technical tidbits.
Reused Assets
Listen for the narrator's line about the mercenaries coming "from out of their well-hidden outposts in the jungle" with "the promise of gold in their minds." It is delivered word for word twice, once early and once at the finale. Between that and the multiple re-used shots in this episode (even when it makes no sense) are great little tells of how thrifty this production was with both footage and script.
