You start to hear the sounds of the morning, the wind rustling the leaves, the chirping of the birds and that’s when you realize what day it is–Saturday! Cartoons! All week long you’ve been starved of cartoons, and now it is your time to feast! You throw off the covers, shove your feet in your slippers and sprint downstairs!
Grab that big bowl of C-3POs, adjust the antennae and plop down on the floor for your weekly dose of animated fun!
This is “Analog Agent Benjamin” coming at you this week with…. Captain Planet and the Planeteers
This is one of those shows that I loved as a kid, but now hate as an adult.
The show had a group of teenagers with super powered rings that could summon a Super Hero called Captain Planet. The show also had an important environmental message at the end about recycling, saving endangered wild life, and stopping pollution.
When I was a kid I thought this was a cool cartoon, but that all changed one day when an environmental lecturer from L.A. came to my small farming town school. He came to the class room and started showing an episode of Captain Planet where it showed one of the villains using a crop dusting helicopter to poison crops. After the episode was over, he gave a lecture on how crop dusters were poisoning crops and that farmers should use lady bugs & venus fly traps to kill unwanted bugs on their crops (which anyone can tell you is total BS). The thing is, my Mom & Dad were crop dusters, and I and ever kid in my class was shock to hear this. For the whole school day, just about every kid in my class gave me the evil eye. When I got back home from school I asked my Mom if we were the bad guys. When she asked what I was talking about, I told her what happened at school that day, and she hit the roof. She then called my Dad at work and told him what happened, and then they both called every farmer & crop duster they knew in town and everyone had a few “choice” words they wanted to say to the principal of my school and the environmental lecturer the next day. After that day, I lost any respect I had for that show.
Remember Kids, the Power is Yours… to turn off the TV when this show is on.
Now, did anyone here think it was lame that the main super hero of the series would lose his powers if he ever got dirty?
crop dusting isn’t evil, and most pesticides are safe enough to use these days. Certainly people who are just doing their jobs do not fall under the category of “evil”.
The thing is – I still remember some extinsions that were caused by the old-school pesticides like DDT, and some problems with stuff that wasn’t exactly healthy for human consumption. I’d like to see a children’s show that actually bothers to tell all sides of a story…
The way you tell it- that lecturer doesn’t sound very good, but again – what do you expect from people talking (or talking down) to kids.
Captain Planet was an entertaining show, with a lot of other flaws and a lot of nonsense. I remember I used to love it, but can’t bring myself to watch it now that I’ve learned a bit more about the world. You can criticize it over everything from bad story-telling, simplified ideas and general low quality, but you need to remember that most people don’t have a clue about any of those subjects. They wouldn’t know the difference between a dangerous poison that seeps into the drinking water and something that is easily decomposable and barely lasts long enough to do its job.
As for biological extermination – still in development, unfortunately, but there’s several interesting leads out there and it would be nice if more people would learn about it and be interested enough to continue the research.
In short – that school presentation sounds very unbalanced. Time to get over it.
PS – check out some of the links in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Environmental_impact
I hated it then too (and I was already a teen)!
HEART IS NOT AN ELEMENT
Then again neither are the other four things anyway. It’d have been a lot more awesome if the planeteers had 106 members and they were all like ‘I am Sodium!’ ‘I am Chlorine!’ ‘BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED, I AM CAPTAIN TABLE SALT’
haha! The Periodic Chart-teers!
Hated that show. If I saw it coming on the channel got switched immediately! Way too preachy, corny, and one sided in it’s stories about the environment.