One of the most interesting tidbits in Black Widow, the long-awaited standalone movie for Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, was the Red Guardian’s assertion that he faced off with Captain America back in his prime. The Red Guardian, played by Stranger Things’ David Harbour, was active in the ’80s, when Natasha was a child, before being imprisoned in a remote Russian gulag sometime between then and the MCU’s present. Yet he claims in the movie that he and Captain America operated as contemporaries, rivals in the geopolitical conflicts of the era.
Whether his stories have any truth to them is up for debate. On one hand, it’s easy to assume he’s just being a blowhard, simply due to how the character generally behaves. On the other, it’s strange that he would earnestly …