Captain Planet and the Planeteers - Tree of Life

Since I've decided recently that I hate both my eyes and the people following this, I'm going to watch another episode of Captain Planet.

Well okay, the real reason is that I realize that the last episode I did just lacked that Captain Planet spirit to it. Oh, sure, it had deforestation (Ted Turner's favorite thing to cry about) and some jerkoff who loves the dying coughs of all the animals he runs over with his giant bulldozer of evil, but mostly it was about Skumm and his sick little rat fetish than anything pollution-themed.

I think the main problem was that it had Verminous Skumm. Sir Skumm always got the short end of the stick when it came to episodes. It's like the writers knew that crime and disease are in that grey area of "Is it really an environmental issue?" so he ended up getting weird episodes like an episode where he steals an artifact from a museum (because the theft of archaeological finds is exactly what I picture when I think Captain Planet) or that really embarrassing AIDS episode where Skumm is kind of a dick to this one HIV-positive kid for no reason.

So just to be fair, I'm covering a Captain Planet that's more in your face with its environmentalism. For starters, this episode has Dr. Blight in it, and man does she love the smell and feel of freshly cut wood from a rare, endangered forest. She's also voiced by Meg Ryan, which means that there are gentlemen (and the occasional lady, I won't discriminate) who watched this episode and now have the deep, penetrating shame that is being turned on by a Captain Planet cartoon.

Should you decide to stick around, this is the episode that James Cameron watched and decided "Hey, you know what this needs? Cat people from outer space!". This is...

Tree of Life

Captain Planet and the Planeteers - Skumm Lord

So guys, it turns out they're making a live-action Captain Planet movie. My brain's still trying to decide if this is merely just a bad idea or if this is a so bad it's good kind of an idea. What's even sadder is that a small part of me, the horrid part of me that remembers watching this show as a kid, wants to actually see this train wreck unfold on screen at least once. Mostly because I want to see how modern CGI would render out Captain Planet's mullet.

So to celebrate bad ideas with big budgets, I'm going to do a Captain Planet episode. Pray for my soul, gentle readers because this will be painful.

The perfect test to see if someone lived in the 90's; if they flinch
when they see these faces, then they grew up in that era.

Choosing a Captain Planet episode is sort of like a grim game of Russian Roulette. Sometimes you'll pick an episode that has something you can laugh at, or sometimes you'll pick an episode that's just barbarous preaching and "save the planet!" for about 20 minutes. There are episodes that everyone can relate to, like the illegal dumping of garbage into the ocean, and there are episodes that skew a little too far into the far left to be comfortable, like the episode that says that people who have more than two kids are killing the environment. It's rather telling that I know a couple people in my college that couldn't see this show as a kid because their parents thought it was liberal propaganda, it's THAT bad.

Luckily there's one such episode that I can deprive some form of enjoyment out of because of a couple things. For one, the environmentalism takes a back seat in this episode (or at least as far as it could get to the backseat, seeing as this is Captain Planet) and becomes more like a science fiction horror mixed in with some sort of medical drama than anything. Another, it's got Jeff Goldblum as a giant rat. Yes, this is a Verminous Skumm episode and this was back when DIC Entertainment could afford Jeff Goldblum to voice for their cartoon. Maybe they should've saved some of that money for some of their other shows, especially considering how cheaply animated the Super Mario Bros. Super Show was.

My friends, I'm going to show you an episode of Captain Planet where everyone in Brazil turns into hideous rat creatures. I'm going to show you...

Skumm Lord