As iconic motorcycles go, "Captain America" checks all the boxes. In fact, Peter Fonda's chrome-plated ride in the 1969 flick Easy Rider might just be the best known two-wheeler ever. It's now being seen by a second generation of movie watchers. Made for a paltry $340,000, named by Time magazine as one of the 10 most important films of the 1960s, Easy Rider has to date grossed more than $50 million.

As the movie's star vehicle, Captain America set styling trends. Said Cycle World magazine about the bike's influence, "Easy Rider validated the chopper as countercultural icon, hell on wheels for the hippie generation. Captain America provided a calling card for young, alienated, rebellious gearheads, and almost overnight everything from Schwinns to Honda CB750s sprouted improbably drawn out front ends and sacrilegious star-spangled paint schemes."

Too bad the Captain never got to read his reviews. Even before the movie's premier, gun-toting thieves broke into the bike's storage area and made off with it. Within hours, no doubt, what was soon to be one of the world's most famous motorcycles had been hacked into its various components and scattered about the chopper underground, sold off cheap.

Gone but not forgotten, Captain America has inspired many replicas over the years. Few, though, approach the almost archeological attention to detail displayed on this motorcycle. Hundreds of hours of videotape were played and replayed, movie posters pored over, studio 8 x 10s examined. Forensics-level research led to minute details being just right, like the correct-year seat studs sourced from a particular model of Chevrolet. Credit for that kind of bleary-eyed diligence goes to the man who commissioned the project, the late Otis Chandler, media magnate and prolific car-and-motorcycle collector. Numbering more than 130 machines, the thrust of Chandler's collection was important American motorcycles, and while most moto-connoisseurs would never consider acquiring a chopper, Chandler realized the historical importance on non-stock customs, especially Captain America and its partner on the silver screen, Dennis Hopper's "Billy Bike."

Chandler's recreation gave Captain America a strong second act when he loaned the bike to the Guggenheim Museum for its landmark "The Art of the Motorcycle" exhibition, which in the summer of 1998 opened in New York City to rave reviews and record-setting attendance figures. The chopper quickly became one of the show's featured motorcycles and was portrayed in press materials, posters, calendars and other souvenirs. It traveled with the exhibit for the next four years, going to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in northern Spain and the Guggenheim Las Vegas. The Captain America replica and Chandler's Billy Bike clone were obtained by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation after the show's opening, and are now being offered to benefit the Foundation.

If, indeed, the original Captain America is one of the world's most famous motorcycles, then here is its most famous recreation.

Without reserve