Thoughts on Captain Planet

I’ve been doing some thinking about Captain Planet. I think the only people who read this thing would probably be familiar with it, but nonetheless, the show revolves around five kids from different continents who have been given special rings by Gaia, Mother Earth, each with the powers of the various elements. Their job is to fight a collection of villains who are bent on destroying the Earth for no particular reason whatsoever. Inevitably, about twenty minutes into the episode, the Planeteers discover that they are unable to defeat their environmental foes on their own and combine their powers to call upon Captain Planet. Captain Planet, armed with all of the Planeteers’ powers and a heady passion for puns, overcomes the evildoer and returns things to normal.

Here’s the thing about the Planeteer rings. There are four elements, right? Fire, wind, water, earth. But we have five continents to cover, so they made up a “special” power and stuck the Latino kid with it. Heart. So let’s get this straight for a minute. Wheeler, the witty American kid from Brooklyn (he’s the only one that’s from an actual locale, by the way. The rest are from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, etc…No one has a specific home beyond that) can summon fire. You know he’s scoring with that bar trick. Linka, the commie, has wind. Not quite as cool, but still formidable. Kwame, later of The Apprentice fame, can reshape earth and Gi has the power to manipulate water. All of it totally way cool. But with one continent left over, they make up some two bit Cracker Jack ring with a heart on it and tell the South American Indian kid he has the power of compassion or some crap like that. What a ripoff. They could have at least given him the ability to fly or shoot laser beams from his eyes or something. The kid’s gonna have a rough enough life with that haircut.

And let’s not forget the villains. As I mentioned before, they have no objective in mind whatsoever beyond environmental destruction. Duke Nukem, for example, just really happens to like radiation and therefore tries to spread it around everywhere else. Hoggish Greedly just simply has a love for overconsumption. I tend this is how Turner and a lot of enviros tend to think of the interests that oppose them on this issue. They just happen to have a penchant for destruction without an end. The fact that many of the voices on the show come from Meg Ryan, Jeff Goldblum, etc. only solidifies my certainty on this point.

Anyway, the problem with the show goes much deeper than that. I realize that this was the brainchild of someone over at Turner Broadcasting to help indoctrinate children about saving the environment and the evil of anyone who wants to cut down a tree. But the show never made sense to me as a kid. Every episode, the Planeteers would discover a situation where a bad guy is gonna dump a ton of ink into the ocean or some crap like that, try to stop him, and ultimately fail. So they call on Captain Planet and he fixes things in about five minutes. So this begs the question: why not just call up Captain Planet in the first place? You know you’re going to have to do it in ten minutes anyway. You could save all of us some time. He can fix the environment and I can get on to watching other more important cartoons.