On a general note, what does a senior developer/manager expects from a fresh out of college junior developer?
Should a fresher play dumb and make his superiors feel even more superior or should he play bold, and display his superpowers in front of senior devs/managers?
What should he ultimately do to be respected more?

respected ... That word can mean many things.

In my opinion, you should be able to work on your own and be able to manage / coordinate your work by yourself.

If you're talking about being bold and having superpowers, I'm afraid to say that's disrespectful.

After all, you're an employee like anyone else and not special. ;) *broad hint*

Prepare questions, find solutions, make an appointment, do not waste your or other people's time, be on schedule.

If you have problems / questions / things you don't like, talk about them in a 1:1 meeting - don't be shy, noone can read your mind, so speak up.

Be able to handle stress, but again - say if you feel overwhelmed.

Expect that others might not have the time to help you all the time, so instead of procrastinating plan ahead to make sure that you can not only work on one task, but have a backlog.

If you really dunno what to do, ask for work. If everyone's completely overworked, seeing one procrastinating away is... Shit. :)

Which brings me to the TLDR: Respect is simply thinking ahead and trying to treat everyone like yourself - no matter if you like them or not.

It's annoying when a fresher thinks he's the hottest shit because then you first need to waste time on putting him into place before you can proceed to get him to do anything useful.

On the other hand, dumb freshers are also annoying because it's highly doubtful whether you'll ever get them to do anything useful except maybe cooking coffee.

Earn your respect by getting shit done properly.