The Dark Easter Egg You Probably Missed In Avengers Endgame
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a vast, glorious, and self-indulgent place, an obsessive onscreen "Where's Waldo?" of referential goings-on. Enthusiastic viewers have spent more than a decade Clockwork Oranging their eyes at the screen, trying to spot unseen Easter eggs, and Avengers: Endgame was, without doubt, stuffed to the gills with them. As the culmination of over ten years of fan-fueled nerdery, it sort of had to be. Now, superhero enthusiasts have spotted a new callback to the comics, seen on the front of one of Steve Rogers' shirts ... and aside from a suspicious-looking mole, it's the darkest thing ever attached to Chris Evans' pecs.
First, to recap: In Endgame, Steve Rogers travels back to the 1970s, searching for the Space Stone (and, perhaps, the most important Infinity Stone of all: friendship). Perusing a military base, Cap nabs himself a uniform and sets out for some time-hopping shenanigans. Now, if you're not about that Easter egg life, or if you realized by this point that there were still four more hours of movie left and your eyes sort of glazed over, you might not have noticed that Steve's walking around getup featured a prominent name tag reading "Roscoe."
That's where things get grim.
Keep being Cap? No, I don't think I will.
See, back in the old seventies Captain America comics, the big guy went through a sort of midlife crisis after watching a supervillain Richard Nixon shoot himself. Yes, comics are the best. Cap, Deciding that he could no longer stand as a symbol of a corrupt nation, did the only reasonable thing he could think of: He got a very disco new outfit, and changed his name to Nomad.
This left a Captain America-shaped hole in the Marvel lineup, and Falcon started auditioning new candidates. The position ended up going to one Roscoe Simons, an optimistic New Yorker with a love for them stars and stripes, boy howdy. Meanwhile, Rogers got to boogie his way through crime in a deep V-neck that would never make it to Marvel's Cinematic Universe, and the U.S. of A. got a new, exciting Captain. Everybody won ... until Red Skull figured out that the new Captain America was an imposter, anyway. Six months later, the evil villain crucified Roscoe to death.
Anyway, it's nice that Roscoe got his name on the screen, especially considering that one of the other applicants from the comics was named Russo. That would've come off as pretty self serving, even from the guys who, as pointed out the by the A.V. Club, shoehorned the Bluth family stair car into Captain America: Civil War.