Restoring Albert Pyun's Captain America — a lost hero returns

Captain America is back from a decades-long slumber to right the wrongs of the past and show us all the true meaning of heroism. The original 1990 release was largely derided as a farcical waste of money, but director Albert Pyun had something far more ambitious in mind. Now, thanks to the work of Wisconsin's self proclaimed Albert Pyun Historian (his words) Kenn Williams, that vision is brought to life. It’s rare to see a movie whose story and production build such resonant themes. The Crow featured tragic deaths in the story and on set. Lost in La Mancha depicted a mad dreamer on a quest to see his vision through, both for Terry Gilliam and Don Quixote himself. Now after over 30 years on ice, Pyun’s skills and Steve Rogers get to break out of the ice and deliver a work of impressive emotional force.

On the Nature and Importance of Edits

I’ve never seen a better example of the difference that editing can make for a film. I’ve done a lot of writing on fan films, so forgive me while I take this opportunity to explain why I haven’t done the same for fan edits of films: they’re all held back by their limitations as fan works in ways that movies built from the ground up aren’t. When making a fan edit, you’re limited exclusively to footage available to you, and maybe some deleted scenes. You can accomplish a lot with those, but you can’t change what’s in the can. 

None of the edits of the Prequel Trilogy, for example, can make up for politics missing from the 1st movie, or bad dialogue all the way through. Dune Redux adds in deleted footage and new context via quotes. It’s the best version of the movie and fills out a lot of the problems, but can’t help Lynch’s disdain for the corporatized process of making the movie. The Crow: City of Angels extended workprint is rougher, combining cut dialogue and scenes over production stills to fix what was hacked to pieces in the editing process. It’s a much stronger movie, and one I can almost recommend, but you have to be willing to read dialogue over production photos to get the full experience.

Pyun’s is a different story, built from the ground up with different goals. It uses different footage and music, and presents a genuinely distinct idea of what this movie could be. Even the footage that is shared between the films has different context and weight. This new cut is its own, better, thing.

The Film Itself - A legend too good to stay dead

There’s a fantastic history behind this uncovering, but I need to dig into the movie itself before I discuss it. While the original cut was bland and silly, Pyun’s edition is an entirely different film. I’m not exaggerating, this goes above and beyond the many cuts of Blade Runner or Aliens which add some scenes to fill things out. 

In this case, the 1990 and 2024 versions are basically entirely different films, with different tones, scenes, emotional beats, and progression. The lengths might be comparable, with around 14 more minutes in this version, but that doesn’t capture how dramatic the differences are. Those differences are too great for me to put them together in a list, but I can tell you that this has a different beginning and ending, along with a lot of the middle. The Pyun cut removes or reorganizes many scenes from the first version. The first third of the film is totally different, as is the order of events for the rest of the film. As an example, below are the first 5 minutes, to compare against the original cut.

Where the original was a fairly straightforward playthrough of events, Pyun’s is a more deliberate and careful journey through Roger’s emotional state as he comes out of the ice. At first he’s disoriented, flashes of events erupting in front of him. They get more context and tragedy as he tries to piece his life together and find out that he’s too late to start trying. At just under 2 hours, this version may be missing a tiny bit of connective tissue for some scenes, but it’s held together enough by the emotional progression that it doesn’t really matter. 

This Captain America has so much to say about the experience of the veteran. He comes home having missed so much, finding out how his life moved on without him. Entire wars have passed him by. Entire wars have been forgotten. One of his best friends died in Korea, in a conflict America doesn’t even seem to care about. The conflicts that remain have none of the moral certainty of America fighting the Nazis, all tied together in politics and money and conspiracies between those legitimately in power. 

He returns to find that America isn’t what was promised, and what remains sees him as irrelevant, all while it ignores the needs of veterans like him. The evils he tried to fight were alive and well all along without him. In righting that evil he finds purpose and a way to move on. There may be similarities to Winter Soldier, but without Marvel’s feckless bombast the emotions are given room to breathe. If you’re even passably interested in superhero media, you owe it to yourself and Albert Pyun to give this cut a shot.

Kenn Williams and the Great Work of Film Preservation

All of this begs the question: how could such a thing be so forgotten for so long? To answer that question, I spoke with Kenn Williams of Yippee Ki Yay Mother Video, where the Blu-rays are available now. He and Albert met in film school, and he reached out to check on Cynthia, Albert’s wife, after his recent passing. As it happened, Cynthia still had multiple cuts of his many films, but not the knowledge of what to do with them.

Captain America started as 4 film cans, what they would later find to be a complete work print. Pyun spent years telling interested people how different the version was, but never finalized or transferred the movie. That changed when Kenn realized what she had, and in the short time since June 2024 he has prepared and released the cut. 35 millimeter film, if well preserved, looks fantastic, and the resulting product was a 2k scan with mild damage. If anything, the slight video features help, adding a distant, dreamlike quality to the movie. Much credit goes to William Lu, who handled the transfer process itself, something that could not have been easy with decades-old film reels. Below is his video on the process of working on that restoration.

Pyun was never properly appreciated during his career, but that is soon to change. He retained the rights to as much as he could, and Cynthia holds on to other director’s cuts that may soon see the light of day. This is only the beginning. Other filmmakers in similar positions have been in contact, and you can expect news soon on director’s cuts from talented but overlooked filmmakers. What Vinegar Syndrome is doing for horror and Arrow Film for cult cinema, Yippee Ki Yay Mother Video may soon do for action. With an opening salvo this impressive, I’m sure to be along for the next few rides.