Happy Earth Day!
I’m running this image just to tick off Alan Kistler.
He asked me for input on eco-aware comics characters. I mentioned Captain Planet. His response was… charged:
HE SUCKED!
He was not a character!
He was a literal Deus Ex Machina.
These kids have powers, and there are five of them, yet despite this, they eventually get too scared and figure screw it, we’ll call up the non-entity with the green mullet who will take care of it for us.
To see the list that he finally came up with, go to MTV’s Splash Page here.
And if you’d like to see more of Captain Planet, you can see episodes here.
I wish I could hate you to death.
Okay, here's what I'm wondering now, given Alan's list and one of the comments on the site: Why, in so many cases, does someone have to DIE to create a superhero with a connection to nature (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, the Elementals)?
No one died exactly for Animal Man to get powers. He was seriously injured and then rebuilt with powers.With Swamp Thing, the death was a retcon. Originally, Swamp Thing was said to be a scientist who had been mutated. Thus, part of his whole mission in life was to one day find a cure. But when Alan Moore came onto the title, he felt that this was a false premise because the readers were well aware that if he were ever cured then the comic would end and that wasn't going to happen. What's more, he felt that there were enough super-heroes who were based on the same idea of being a normal human who was now locked in a monstrous body. Therefore, he shocked readers with the revelation that Alec Holland had died and that the Swamp Thing had been born with some of his memories but was not, in fact, him, he was a plant elemental who had never been a human being. Moore took it a step further then explaining that all plant elementals were born after a human being died in fire.When The Elementals was created, they just took this idea from Swamp Thing and said that all four of their warriors were reborn warriors who had died while encountering that particular element.So I wouldn't say it's EVERY time. Just two prime examples, one of which took the idea from the first one.
Your timeline is off. Alan Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson" was in Saga Of The Swamp Thing #21, cover dated February 1984. The Elementals first appeared in Justice Machine Annual #1 from Texas Comics, which came out in 1983. And I know Bill had the Elementals in the works long before that, with early elements showing up in a Villains and Vigilantes supplement back in 1982. (Christ, I playtested that game… I'm oooooold.)Bill's rule in Elementals was that you had to die to get superpowers, because they were all supernatural in nature– vampires, etc.
Five relatively ordinary people in a superteam who rely on a powerful blue-skinned hero to swoop in and get the job done?It's pretty obvious that Captain Planet and the Planeteers was ripped off by Alan Moore's Watchmen. As I recall it was Dave Gibbons who decided that Doctor Manhattan would not have a green mullet.
I think Captian Planet and the Planteers was a good show not a great show mind you and it did try to have some thought provoking episodes, which more than I can say for most of the current crap called cartoons now of days.
In all seriousness, Capt. Planet had decent messages and a not-bad premise. I just enjoy making fun of the fact that he was such a deus ex machina AND had a mullet.
I'm not only person who's noticed they lifted the power set from The Forever People, right?There was exactly one joke on Captain Planet. Jeff Goldblum, appearing as Verminous Scumm (that was their big selling point – they had Big Stars do voices of bad guys on the show – once. After the character reappeared they got new voices.) when entreating the Planeteers to leave his evil poisonous smog bank, yelled, "Hey! you! get off of my cloud!"You need to find the Robot Chicken Captain Planet episodes.And, need I mention that when Earth Day was founded, people were worried about the coming Ice Age caused by global COOLING?
An Ice Age and Global Warming are not mutually exclusive events, even if that may seem intuitively wrong. A lot of strange things are likely to happen because of Climatic Chaos. But as the word "chaos" implies, it will be hard to predict exactly what will happen and where.
In fact, what i hear is the most plausible scenario says that global warming *triggers* Ice Ages – global warming increases the Earth's albedo by increasing overall cloud cover, which in turn leads to the cooling process that triggers the Ice Age. (There's a flywheel effect that carries us past the peaks and swings the cycle in the other direction.)
Now that brings back some memories! But yeah, that cartoon sucked… it just… well… wasn't that good. And I was precisely the age they were aiming at. I had no idea Robot Chicken did a Captain Planet though. That's definitely worth looking for!
What ticked me off was the fact that, for those of us with no lives in the Eighties, it was perfectly obvious that Captain Planet was a blatant, gelded ripoff of the Marvel New U title [i]Psi-Force[/i]! I mean, you've got five teenagers, from varied backgrounds, with powers, and when they concentrate, they can merge their powers to create a new being that combines them all. Sound familiar? Captain Planet was just a low-rent Psi-Hawk, man…