The new Captain Planet and the Planeteers series...is bad.
I know it's only two issues in, and I'm going to give it a fair shake, at least until the end of the first arc here, but it's not looking good.
And look, let's not be unrealistic here. It's not entirely surprising that a reboot of Captain Planet would turn out bad. The original cartoon wasn't exactly Citizen Kane. It wasn't even Gargoyles. It was perhaps the most incredibly early-'90s series that could possibly have existed, down to a multicultural cast that looked like the Burger King Kids Club and an opening narration that had to be hastily redubbed after the fall of the Soviet Union. The series was Oops, All Very Special Episodes, which is honestly admirable to a degree, even if they approached every issue, from air pollution to The Troubles to AIDS with the exact same degree of didactic bluntness and simplistic liberal moralizing. If you'd asked me to lay money on which cartoons from this era were least likely to rate a revival in one form or another, Captain Planet, despite its popularity at the time and enduring legacy, would have landed somewhere between Wild West C.O.W. Boys of Moo Mesa and C.O.P.S. in my ranking.
Actually, it seems I was about right.
But also... now is precisely the right time for a Captain Planet revival. There's a lot about the show that didn't age well, but the core concept—that the world is in peril, and that the only real solution to that is for young people from around the world to band together and take on the polluters who are actively making things worse—is far more salient now than in 1990. At the time, the monstrous, one-dimensional villains clear-cutting forests for fun and polluting for profit seemed unrealistic, but now?
Now there is an entire subculture dedicated to damaging your expensive truck so that it will produce more smoke in ways that make it less efficient, and blowing that smoke at electric cars and bicyclists. Now, the world's richest man built an artificial intelligence that he turned into a Nazi and wants his eugenic progeny to live on Mars while the rest of us die on the hollowed-out husk of Earth. Now, the President of the United States is a doddering germophobic rapist who appointed a Secretary of Health and Human Services who does not believe in germ theory and is actively dismantling the federal apparatus dedicated to tracking and fighting disease. The EPA just released an order to "make gas cans great again" reversing nearly 20 years of regulations designed to reduce emissions and danger to children. The entire tech industry is currently dedicated to replacing the entire working and creative class with a pathological liar machine that runs on drained aquifers and uses more power than entire countries.
Verminous Skumm spreading panic about AIDS so he can take over the world seems entirely reasonable by comparison.
It would be so easy to do a new Captain Planet series, one that draws from the examples of Greta Thunberg, from the Water Protectors who stood against the Dakota Access Pipeline, from Little Miss Flint Mari Copeny who raised awareness about the Flint water crisis, and those are just the first three examples I could come up with off the top of my head. You could look to Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Greenpeace, and other similar organizations; I may not always agree with the actions those groups take, but they would be easy fodder for stories about modern Planeteers.
And that's without touching on issues of environmental justice, something any reasonable Captain Planet revival ought to be doing in the 21st century. One of the biggest problems with the original series is that its multicultural cast is a thin veneer pasted over a very white, liberal, America-centric view of the world. A Captain Planet who addresses how climate change hits the global south hardest, how communities that are already stressed by poverty and oppression become further marginalized as the temperatures and waters rise, how the capitalist drive for endless growth and cheap labor and resource extraction is ultimately the driving force behind all of this planetary degradation, is necessary to communicate concepts more complex than turning off the lights when you leave the room.
I take it back. It wouldn't be easy to do that Captain Planet series. It would require courage and research. It would likely require multiple writers and sensitivity readers. It would ruffle feathers. It would anger YouTubers.
But it would at least be easy to tell a story there, one that meets the moment, one that has a solid foundation, one that feels timely and relevant.
Instead, there's what David Pepose and Eman Casallos have chosen to do in Dynamite's Captain Planet and the Planeteers, which is to write a book that feels ashamed of every aspect of its source material. It's got all the hallmarks. Looten Plunder? That name's too silly, like "Victor Von Doom." Gotta change it, now he's "Lucian Plunder" and "Lootin'" is just what the protesters call him. While the original series was a goofy Saturday morning cartoon, this series is serious and grown-up and violent. The first issue kicks off with Plunder's paramilitary goons hunting Gaia with assault rifles from helicopters, and the second issue starts with her in restraints. Linka is a Pussy Riot-styled rocker who fights cops, and some fake cops kidnap Gi and Kwame when they arrive in New York City.
Oh, and don't you dare think about making all the old jokes about this Captain Planet series. Because Ma-Ti, he's not the useless kid who talks to animals anymore. No, he's a deadly eco-terrorist who threatens loggers with jaguars. And Captain Planet himself? Well, if you ever thought that his tight midriff top and briefs ensemble with a mullet was a threat to your masculinity, don't worry, this Captain Planet is butch as hell, with a beard and way more of that blue skin covered, so you can rest assured in your mostly unassaulted heterosexuality.
Everything about the aesthetics and execution of this book feels twenty years out of date, like it was printed in the same "what, were you expecting yellow spandex?" swaggering, irony-poisoned era that gave us Transformers with testicles and sex slave ThunderCats.
That feeling extends to the guiding politics of the series, which feel like some kind of Bush-era, South Park-tinted centrist cynicism. Kwame is a former soccer star whose career ended due to an injury, seeking to recapture his glory days. Linka is not just an anarchist punk rocker, but a child of immense privilege, whose activism is framed as petulant teenage rebellion against her wealthy father. Wheeler is a Union auto worker whose carelessness with his new power ring causes his plant to burn down, amidst layoffs and protests driven by green EV initiatives. And while they've added a smidge of additional diversity by making Gi textually queer, they've also turned Wheeler's womanizing dialogue up to eleven. The overall effect feels like sneering at the idea of people sincerely fighting for the environment; instead, they're mostly deeply flawed and compromised, much like the environmental protesters we're shown in a couple of occasions. Our villain doesn't provide much contrast. While Plunder is clearly bad, he's not bad in a realistic way. He wants Gaia's magic power for himself, and his goons have robotic exo-suits. The only time this comic feels genuine is when cops apprehend our two heroic immigrants for no reason at JFK International Airport, but even they turn out to be fake cops, presumably to give some plausible deniability to all those readers with blue line flags on their SUVs.
I don't think this cynical approach can work for Captain Planet. The original series was earnest to a fault, and I think the only way you can make Captain Planet work for a more grown-up, sophisticated audience is to lean right into that earnestness by having him tackle all the same problems that the original series tackled, and then some, but with added complexity and nuance. Not to demean our heroes or to humanize our villains, but to illustrate the realities of the world around them. There's no need for Wheeler to be sexist or for Ma-Ti to be violent, any more than there's need for Looten Plunder to be driven by something other than greed and lust for power. What's needed is a story that explores how the Looten Plunders of the world operate, and what a team of idealists could do if they were given the power to take them down. We can roll our eyes and suspend some disbelief when Superman says that it's not his place to step in and reverse climate change or dismantle capitalism. Captain Planet doesn't have an excuse.
Yesterday, a person with a high-powered rifle murdered an executive of Blackstone (among other people), an investment firm whose holdings have been involved in logging the Amazon rainforest, making children work in slaughterhouses, and collaborating with ICE, and that's just what's in the Wikipedia controversies section. Now, I'm not suggesting that Captain Planet and the Planeteers should be about five teens and a glittering Pride float dancer gleefully using elemental powers to Luigi their way through the Forbes billionaire list.
But that would be a better book than this one.
