Kinda surprised there hasn’t been a Captain Planet reboot by now, but that was Ted Turner’s baby, who knows where the rights are
Does anyone remember that episode where someone offered them the gloves that gave them super-strong powers, so Water could like wipe a refinery out with a fucking tsunami, only they had to remove their rings and couldn’t summon Captain Planet? And Heart - who alone had refused - and his monkey had to win them back with the power of friendship?right now i’m thinking about like environmentalism in 90s cartoons cuz i just watched the jetsons movie and the entire agonizingly slow plot hinges on spacely sprockets building this plant on some other species’ home and george jetson eventually having to force him to stop and it just makes me think about fucking captain planet. now that was the real shit. the fucking half assed “you should sort your recycling and maybe compost, also cut plastic rings” was saved for the PSAs at the end but the episodes of themselves were just “this dickhead greedy fuck is destroying the ozone layer, let’s go beat the shit out of them with our magic rings and our superpowered man we summon from them”
What even was that supposed to be? A warning against eco-terrorism?
Anyway I remember thinking they were idiots and I would take the gloves if they wouldn’t. 2 even! I decided Heart/Fire was the best build.
(Previous Captain Planet insights: 1, 2)Amazon Trail, Second Voyage of the Mimi, Captain Planet - there was this kind of mini-boom in specifically Central/Southern American edutainment product around 1990. I wonder how much of that was young idealistic creatives finally getting a chance to produce these ideas they came up with as Sandalistas.
Oh man of course all the hits on that are designer-print sandals.