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In the early 1990 a group of environmentally conscientious animators tried to make a difference to how kids saw the world around them.
The premise was simple: the sprit of the earth Gaia (voiced by Whoopie Goldberg) gets 5 kids representative of 5 different ethnic groups who would unite and call upon an eco-system protecting superhero. Or as the opening credits put it "she gave 5 magic rings to 5 special young people" when the power of the rings combined they called Captain Planet.
Captain Planet himself was a sanctimonious freak with a green mullet. Despite his good intentions, the genius behind the show apparently forgot that kids always root for the bad guy. In 'Captain Planet', the bad guys were stupid, fat and useless but at least they did not lecture about how "the power is yours" and call their geek patrol 'the Planeteers'.
Since the Cold War was barely in its grave there was good-natured squabbling between the blonde Eastern European female (Linka, complete with broken English) and the red headed jock (Wheeler) who represented North America. The remaining "special" kids were Kwame from Africa with the power of earth, Gi from Asia with the power of water and Ma-ti from South America with the power of "heart".
At the time of the cartoons being aired I was unsure what gender Ma-ti was. On re-watching it over a decade later I remain uncertain, and presume he is homosexual, or maybe trans-gender male. This would appease pretty much any lobby group who decided to judge the cartoon. A look at the official Captain Planet website confirmed that Ma-ti was indeed male, but did not explain why Western Europe did not have a representative. (I suspect this was because at this time Western Europe was publicly critising the lack of any cohesive US environmental policy.)
The episode I was exposed to this week was called 'Dead sea', and it was about how drift nets are bad, m'kay. While I agree that drift nets are unnecessary and wasteful, the case against them is not well demonstrated by the cartoon. At last twice in the episode, landlocked Kwame laments "if only people would fish the right way" but at no point reveals what the right way is. In any case, Captain Planet just wipes up the nets and all is well, thus demonstrating to an enter generation of kids that it is ok to utterly destroy the planet as someone else will clean up after them.
Even ignoring the sanctimonious and propaganda filled nature of the series, the lack of continuity is pretty impressive. The basis of the plot in 'Dead sea' is that the kiddies are racing after the bad guy in a speedboat in order to get back their rings so Captain Planet can clear up the mess. Unfortunately the animation clearly shows that at least 3 of the Planeteers are still wearing their rings.
The point of this episode was to show that the Planeteers could actually do anything by themselves. So despite the fact that they called out Captain Planet 8 minutes into a 22-minute episode and then had to call him out again in order to take care of the bad guy, the audience were meant to marvel at the resourcefulness of the kids.
Somehow the makers of 'Captain Planet' managed to construct a show more sexually ambiguous than She-Ra and with villains more pathetic than 'Biker Mice from Mars' and espousing the morals present in 'He-man' and 'Thundercats' as watered-down liberal sound bites to help comfort the emotionally vunerable audience beyond the limits of Hagen Das.
