Captain Planet to the Rescue

Ford was built on the belief that the world doesn't get to decide what you're capable of.

You do.

So, ask yourself, can you or can't you?

Can you load up a Ford F-150 and build your dream with sweat and steel?

Can you chase thrills and conquer curves in a Mustang?

Can you take a Bronco to where the map ends and adventure begins?

Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right.

Ready?

Set.

Ford.

In the summer of 1988, something was going on with the weather.

Around the world, scientists see a disturbing pattern.

Could today's developments create tomorrow's disasters?

40% of the U.S.

was facing a severe drought.

A wildfire in Yellowstone National Park burned 800,000 acres.

The second biggest hurricane in the history of the Atlantic hit the Gulf of Mexico.

Acid rain was searing forests.

A hole was growing in the ozone layer.

And then there was the temperature.

1988 will probably be the hottest year of all.

On top of all of this, regular Americans were learning, many for the first time, that we might be responsible for all of it.

The world is in danger.

Scientists are now warning that the danger is from man himself.

Back then, this phenomenon was not called climate change.

It was referred to as the greenhouse effect or global warming.

And though there were many who took it seriously, there were others, including the federal government, who did not.

Environmental issues.

Are they as serious and as frightening as the activists in these areas would like us to believe?

I think not.

In the past 25 years, it's warmed up by about four-tenths of a degrees centigrade.

Well, now that doesn't sound like very much heat.

I have not seen any evidence of a crisis due to human activity.

But there were some people who felt compelled to act immediately.

And so, shortly after that blistering summer, a plan was put into action.

It was a plan to alter the Earth's future, a plan to shape the mind of an entire generation, to help them halt global warming and other environmental catastrophes.

And that plan was a Saturday morning cartoon.

The power is yours!

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

In 1990, the animated environmental superhero, Captain Planet, swooped onto TV screens all over the world.

He was aimed at 3 to 12-year-olds, and he had the lofty goal of turning kids into environmental warriors.

In this episode, we're going to look at how Captain Planet came to be, what he aspired to do, and how much he really got done.

Captain Planet's mission was noble, but was it also naive?

How much of an impact can even the most well-meaning fictional superhero have on very real environmental disasters?

And can we entertain ourselves and our children into solving our hardest problems?

So, today on Dakota Ring,

what on earth did Captain Planet accomplish?

At Carls Jr., Latefords, get the bag.

Build your own bag after 8 p.m.

for $5.99.

Get a Cali Classic single, fries plus chicken stars.

Or get a spicy chicken sandwich, onion rings plus chicken stars.

This deal is stacked.

Don't hit the sack.

Hit the drive-thru.

Build your own bag.

Just $5.99.

Only a Girls Jr., you build it, you eat it.

Order your bag on the app and unlock even more Burgers Insides.

Available for a limited time at participating restaurants.

Tax not included.

Price may vary.

Not valid in the offer, discount or combo.

See ya for details.

Before Captain Planet was on TV, he was a twinkle in the eye of a major TV mogul.

Hi, I'm Ted Turner, and this is Cable News Network.

Ted Turner founded the Cable News Network, or CNN, in 1980.

He was also the founder of Turner Broadcasting System, or TBS, and Turner Network Television, or TNT.

He owned Atlanta's baseball and basketball teams, and his motto was early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.

Well, my father and my schools told me that, you know, you're living in America, you might as well make as much out of your life as you possibly can.

Do as much as you can.

I mean, that's all I've tried to do.

But unlike some of his fellow business bigwigs, Turner saw his operation as having a higher purpose beyond just making money.

I think there are many things that impact the destruction of the environment.

And I know that it's controversial, but the media just needs to keep this on the agenda.

I know with CNN, our news media, we run environmental stories virtually every day.

This was unusual for a media outlet in the 1980s, as was Turner's decision to dedicate an entire unit of his broadcasting operation to environmentalism.

All the scraps from this process used to end up in a landfill.

Now all of it's recycled.

That's the voice of Barbara Pyle, narrating one of the many environmental documentaries that aired on one of Turner's networks.

Pyle, a photo journalist by training and ardent environmentalist herself, was personally selected by Turner Turner to be the vice president of environmental policy at TBS.

Barbara had a bit of a Maverick reputation, and she was also very closely connected with Ted.

Nick Boxer was thrilled to start working for Barbara at Turner in 1984.

I mean, I grew up in a progressive environmental thinking family.

We recycled.

My parents made me aware of environmental things, and it's always been a passion of mine.

Barbara specifically asked Nick to join her at what they started referring to as the Turner Environmental Division.

I came up with the name, if you look at the acronym, it's Ted.

That was my inside joke.

TED was a pet project of Ted Turner's, but corporate green initiatives were not yet common, and executives at Turner's own companies wondered why the CEO insisted on funding nature documentaries.

Something a vice president once said to Nick's face.

As I'm walking across the room, he says to to me, Nick, you are everything that is wrong with Turner.

And I was very taken aback and kind of stunned.

And he said, don't get me wrong, you do good work, but it is no business being on Turner Broadcasting.

To the executive's point, Barbara and Nick's department didn't bring in a lot of money.

Their documentaries about subjects like overpopulation and wildlife preservation and global warming didn't get high ratings.

But Ted Turner remained committed to trying to make a difference through television and eventually not just through eco films.

I'd always had an interest in cartoons.

When we ran them in the early days of TBS, they got good ratings.

This is Ted Turner reading from his autobiography.

Kids were attracted to cartoons, and I got the idea that we should make one that would teach them about the environment.

I thought it would make a lot of sense to reach children early and help them understand their role in taking care of our planet.

Ted said at one point, you know, today's children are the ones who are going to inherit the problems.

They're the ones who are going to have to save the planet.

So one day in 1989 at the CNN building in Atlanta, Ted pulled Nick's boss Barbara Pyle aside and told her he had a new assignment for the environmental division.

Barbara returned to her team with the details.

Ted wants to do an environmental show for children and he wants to call it Captain Planet.

That was the entire pitch.

We said to Barbara, well, so what is Captain Planet?

It was like nobody knew.

He was an environmental superhero, but that was pretty much it.

There had never been a kid show about the environment before.

Barbara and Nick did not make children's television to this point, but they could see the possibilities.

It was exciting because it was a chance to reach a whole different audience.

It was a chance to approach these issues in a different way.

And, you know, it was an opportunity to empower children.

So they dove in.

Barbara and Nick would be the show's co-creators.

And their first assignment was taking Ted Turner's two-word brief and turning it into a fully formed show with a premise and characters.

We started coming up with ideas, and I just started sitting on my own and writing stories.

Since the whole point was to show that kids can make a difference, they created a set of five teenaged characters called the Planeteers, a multicultural group of young heroes recruited by a figure named Gaia to fight for the planet.

And you brought us here to help you save Earth from being ruined?

Yes, that's about the size of it.

But when Nick started thinking about how the Planeteers would interact with the title character, he realized there was a problem.

In the traditional Superman story with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson, they would go out and get in trouble and the Superman would come and save And I said, we can't do that with the Planeteers because the whole idea is to empower children.

If they're constantly being rescued by Captain Planet, then how are we empowering children?

We're not.

Nick mulled it over and came up with a simple solution.

Get rid of Captain Planet.

I went to Barbara and said, I think we should make the show The Planeteers.

I feel like that would really empower kids and maybe Captain Planet is sort of problematic in that sense.

And she said, Ted created Captain Planet.

This is his thing.

It will not fly.

So Nick went back to the drawing board and he came up with a compromise.

There would be a Captain Planet, but the Planeteers wouldn't be powerless without him.

Instead, Captain Planet's power would be fueled by the kids' teamwork and their magic rings.

Each of them controls an element of nature: earth, fire, wind, and water.

And the fifth element was heart.

I can sense you all, hear your thoughts, feel your feelings.

While the other planeteers could create tornadoes or islands from scratch, it was heart that, according to Gaia herself, was the most important.

The planeteer who wielded it, Mati, from South America, used it to bring people together, communicate over long distances, provide the empathy and care real people need to fight for the environment.

Heart!

He may be little, but he is big in courage.

Armed with their magic rings and their heart, the Planeteers could fight baddies all by themselves.

But when the going got really tough, they'd put their fists together and conjure Captain Planet.

Aim your rings at the sun!

Let our powers combine!

Earth!

He was the power of teamwork, and that's why they use their rings to summon Captain Planet, but when they do that, they also give up the power of the ring.

So they give up their own personal power to create a collective power that's greater than themselves.

So they had the premise and the planeteers, but they had a lot of other details to figure out.

Many to do with Captain Planet himself.

He couldn't just be a normal superhero, punching bad guys.

That was actually a rule, just for the record.

Captain Planet was not allowed to punch anyone.

But this more peaceful crusader could solve the trickiest problems, fly through the air, basically do the impossible.

And of course, he had to look the part.

It was hard because we didn't really want Captain Planet to look like anyone.

It was supposed to be that he was made of like stone and ice, almost faceted.

The animation company drew up some potential character designs and sent over a stack of the final contenders for Barbara Pyle to deliver to Ted Turner himself.

We were actually in Central Park at the boat pond and there's a building over there and She went in to meet with him, and I was walking around outside.

She comes out and she says, okay, Ted picked the picture.

And she shows us, and it was a drawing of me.

Captain Planet doesn't look exactly like Nick.

He has blue skin and green hair, and he wears his underwear over his tights.

But there is a resemblance.

Everyone was like, that's you.

I was like, oh my God.

It was pretty crazy.

You do have a very strong jaw.

I can see it.

It was kind of flattering.

I wish they had given me residuals for that.

So Captain Planet had a look, but he still needed a voice.

The acting is key.

With cartoons, you know, they have to be over the top, ham it up and really be characters rather than people.

Marcia Goodman was the senior VP of talent at the animation company Making Captain Planet, and she was in charge of casting and directing the voice actors.

And my coworker got a call and the person said, hi, I'm Tom Cruise.

I'd like to do the voice of Captain Planet.

And she said, yeah, sure.

And she hung up.

And then he called back.

He said, no, this is really Tom Cruise.

I feel the need.

The need

for a speed.

Tom Cruise was shooting Days of Thunder, I believe, and he took a helicopter over from where they were filming to Universal Studios.

There were like four or five bus and Tom Cruise, and he agreed to do it.

Cruise recorded six episodes of Captain Planet, but then the realities of being Tom Cruise set in.

Tom Cruise was fine, but he just couldn't keep up with our schedule.

He had other priorities like being a movie star.

So the six episodes he'd done had to be re-taped, which meant Captain Planet still needed a voice.

Good afternoon, America, the world, planet Earth.

It's David Coburn, the voice of Captain Planet.

In 1990, David Coburn was a scrappy 21-year-old actor looking for his big break.

He'd had a few small roles, but he was constantly auditioning when he got called in to read for the part of Captain Planet.

I came into the audition at a studio in Burbank, California.

I had one scene to play in which Captain Planet gets covered in toxic goo, and the planeteers wash him off with some fresh water and he stands up and says thanks planeteers

and I shook myself off like a wet dog

thanks planeteers

that's what got me the job David was thrilled but he thought it was just a random gig I didn't know it was the lead in an environmental cartoon series created by Ted Turner to help save the world and teach kids about saving the planet I didn't know that at the time what was the moment you were like this is not just some other regular voice gig when they told me you're replacing Tom Cruise and you have six episodes to redo before you start recording with the rest of the cast, I was like, oh.

The rest of the cast by this point was pretty starry too.

Whoopi Goldberg agreed to voice Gaia.

LeVar Burton had signed on to play the West African planeteer Kwame.

Look at that thing.

It is dumping trash on that poor little town.

The idea was to enlist celebrities, especially for villains and guest characters.

We wanted it to be a big splash.

The villains all represented problems like pollution, radiation, and overconsumption.

And the big names kept coming.

They got Meg Ryan to play the evil Dr.

Blight.

Martin Sheen was the nefarious sly sludge.

Jeff Goldblum was verminous scum.

Some people just got no appreciation for film.

As you can tell by all the famous people signing on, Captain Planet had become something of a cause celeb.

People, or famous people anyway, were excited about it.

This opportunity to try and change the world with a cartoon.

It just needed one finishing touch.

A key element of any kids show.

Captain Planet, he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero.

The very 1990s theme song was also written by Nick Boxer.

One weekend, I'm sitting there and something came into my head and I started writing and I wrote, Captain Planet, he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero.

He's our powers magnified and he's fighting on the planet's side.

Yeah, and then it goes on and on.

You'll pay for this, Captain Planet!

So from Ted Turner's original pitch, just those two words, Captain Planet and nothing else, Nick and Barbara had created a whole set of characters and a way they worked together.

They'd given them voices and a theme song.

And in September of 1990, they gave them a premiere party.

Kids need to know about what's happening in the environment because, you know, they're the future of tomorrow.

Mayan Bialik from Blossom was there.

Really, it was a who's who of then-child stars.

Danica McKellar from The Wonder Years and Jodie Sweden from Full House were there too.

Well, I think that the idea of making a cartoon about saving the planet is really good.

I think that the planet is really important and we should start to clean it up and try to make it a better place.

At the party, Ted Turner got up on stage and addressed the crowd.

Thank you everyone for being here tonight.

He made clear how grand and grandiose his expectations were for the series.

Hopefully this program will make a big difference.

If it doesn't,

there isn't much future for the species because most of the experts say if we don't change things, the planet will be pretty well uninhabitable in another 30 or 40 years.

So let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that Captain Planet and the Planeteers can save the planet.

Thank you very much.

These are extraordinary expectations to put on a kids' cartoon, especially one kids hadn't even seen yet.

Would Captain Planet be able to live up to them once it blasted into living living rooms?

Stay tuned, Planeteers.

I'll be right back.

Join Vanguard for a moment of meditation.

Take a deep breath.

Picture yourself reaching your financial goals.

Feel that freedom.

Visit vanguard.com slash investinginyou to learn more.

All investing is subject to risk.

Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs.

That's why you need Shopify.

They'll help you create a convenient, unified command center for whatever your business throws at you, whether you sell online, in store, or both.

You can sell the way you want, attract the customers you need, and keep them coming back.

Turn those what-ifs into why-nots with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash specialoffer.

That's shopify.com slash specialoffer.

Captain Planet and the Planeteers premiered on Saturday morning, September 15th, 1990.

In the debut episode, the Planeteers have to confront a terrible oil spill, inspired by the real Exxon Valdez catastrophe.

It is horrible.

The whole coastline is being destroyed.

Those poor animals, we must help them.

The Planeteers call on Captain Planet to clean up the oil, which he does by creating a whirlpool that sucks it into the seafloor, and then he seals it all up with a giant rock.

This is not the most sophisticated or plausible of solutions, and that gets directly at the difficulty of making Captain Planet.

The show needed to inform a new generation about pressing environmental problems.

Everything from strip mining to deforestation to nuclear waste, while also being a fun cartoon.

How do you tell a story for children that addresses these issues and is compelling and fits what animation is.

Nick Boxer, the co-creator of Captain Planet again.

Animation works very well for straight entertainment, you know, Roadrunner, Coyote,

just hijinks, sight gags, things like that, you know, or very simple morality plays.

Captain Planet had to be informative without being boring, detailed, without being scary, accurate, but also wrapped up in just 22 minutes.

It was really incredibly challenging and kind of fraught with all sorts of unforeseen perils.

You can see how they tried to thread this needle in an episode called Greenhouse Planet.

It begins with the planeteers watching the news.

They see the president, who sounds an awful lot like then-President George H.W.

Bush, giving a speech about the opening of a new power plant.

One they watch start to spew pollution into the atmosphere.

We have just made the hugest oil find in history, and burning this low-cost oil will be a big help to our troubled economy.

But what about the carbon dioxide that will release?

It acts like an invisible blanket heating up the whole planet.

It's a real and serious problem, but it needed to be lightened with some hijinks.

The oil the president is talking about is being turned into rocket fuel.

And when the planeteers go looking for him at the power plant, they inadvertently get shot into outer space on a rocket.

Mr.

President, can you hear me?

Mission control cannot turn you around.

Sir, please respond.

Stuck on this spaceship heading to Venus, the planeteers lobby the stubborn president about the dangers of greenhouse gases with a final push from Captain Planet himself.

Heard all this before about the too much carbon dioxide thing.

Mr.

President, if you see what you're risking, maybe you'll change your mind.

Captain Planet offers a vision of a world wracked by climate change with terrifying post-apocalyptic imagery of mutant animals and roving bands of feral people.

For humans, it would mean farmland turned to deserts, the collapse of entire economies, hunger on an unimaginable scale.

But it probably won't be that bad.

Maybe.

Or maybe it'll be worse.

It was always a balancing act.

The idea wasn't to scare kids, but it was to say these are real problems and you should be aware of them in a way that's not traumatizing, but makes you care about them.

And one way to make messy, complicated, real environmental issues less traumatizing is to solve them.

We were really trying to push boundaries.

And how do you deal with these kind of problems without showing the consequences of the problems?

You had 20 minutes to tell a whole story and resolve it.

Most of these problems obviously can't be resolved in 20 minutes, let alone a year or two years.

So, for example, in the episode about greenhouse gas emissions, the planeteers finally convinced the president to shut that power plant down.

So, Kwan, tell me more about this solar stuff and that wind power thing.

Read my lips, Mr.

President.

They work.

This happens in episode after episode.

A blunt conversation about everything from AIDS to landmines to overpopulation gets wrapped up in a bug.

That's what this town needs.

A statue to remind them to reduce toxic emissions before they create their own smog monster.

This overall approach, surprisingly granular and realistic about environmental dangers, but with a happy ending, had appeal.

Within a month of its premiere, Captain Planet was syndicated on 180 stations in the United States and 60 others worldwide.

And the response was positive.

Captain Planet was heralded as a superhero for the 90s and praised by educators and kids too.

I like it because it encourages people to save the environment.

If you could download Trees in the World, some people will be dead.

It's not like a perfect 10, but it's still not so bad that it's way below zero.

Are you going to watch it?

Uh-huh, most of the time.

Overall, I mean, it got a very good reception.

We were number one in syndication.

We got a couple of Emmy nominations.

There was even Captain Planet merchandise, though in nothing like the volume of shows like Transformers and He-Man, which had been created by toy companies explicitly to hawk product.

You're doing a show that says don't have overconsumption.

So we created a lot of guidelines as to how you could merchandise the product.

So we said you can't make one-time use product.

So you couldn't make sort of birthday party stuff that was Captain Planet, that was throwaway.

You could make a costume that was cloth, but you couldn't have paper plates.

Things had to have recycled material.

You had to use reduced amount of packaging material.

Maybe inevitably for a show about such big, complicated topics, it did have its critics too.

Nick says internally at Turner, the show's standards about merchandise raised some of the same misgivings there'd been about the environmental division and its nature documentaries.

The company just couldn't cash in.

Other, more overt critiques came from environmentalists themselves who found the show too simplistic.

And then there was the business community, whether Exxon Valdez's PR team complaining about the oil spill episode or individuals taking issue with the villain's corporate bent.

Another fine haul for my factory.

From tail to tusk, I'll turn those elephants into profit.

Trunks of it.

Even more largely, conservatives accused the show of having an agenda, saying that it was, quote, a propaganda tool aimed at indoctrinating America's youth.

Indoctrination is a fraught word, but the fact is, the show did have an agenda.

Its stated purpose was to impart wisdom and guidance to the next generation in the hopes they'd take action on environmental crises.

And certainly in the short term, it seemed to be working, at least on the people working on the show itself.

When I got the show, I used to smoke cigarettes, and I'd throw my cigarette butts out the window while I was driving.

That's David Coburn again, the voice of Captain Planet.

I didn't sort my trash.

I never had a low-energy light bulb.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, was a huge consumer.

But when Captain Planet got famous, it really wasn't the time to be throwing cigarette butts out your window.

I'd drive home from work sometimes, and the kids on my street called me Captain Planet.

I had to change.

How did the kids on your street know you were Captain Planet?

They told him.

David was proud of being Captain Planet, as were many of the people involved.

We had a lot of talent who worked, I think, extra hard because this was this great opportunity to be able to do something, you know, doing well while doing good.

It was difficult to tell at the time, though, how much good the show was doing with the target audience, children.

Nick describes it as a kind of bubble in that regard.

They didn't know how kids were being affected by, say, their episode about landmines, in which one child dies and another has a limb blown off, or how the one about overpopulation, in which an entire civilization of rats crumbles and dies, was sinking in with six-year-olds.

They didn't even know how effective the call to actions at the end of each episode were.

Where we'd give something for children to do, you know, recycling, volunteering for park cleanups, turning the lights off in the house.

Do not dump chlorine bleach, solvents, and other toxic materials down your drain.

And keep things like motor oil and batteries out of your trash.

Recycling, park cleanups, not dumping bleach and batteries.

These are all individual actions and they're helpful.

But the show was aiming for something bigger.

and longer term.

It was trying to plant a seed, and it tried for six seasons and 113 episodes.

And then on May 11th, 1996, kids tuned in for an episode about the evils of puppy mills and saw what would be the final episode of Captain Planet.

Can you tell me how it came to an end?

Kind of more with a whimper than a bang.

By this point, there were more than enough episodes for syndication.

The series was getting expensive, and Turner broadcasting was being sold.

A lot of its environmental programming got scaled back, and so they quietly declined to renew Captain Planet.

Overall, I mean, there was a certain sense over the years of accomplishment, but I felt a little let down

in TV terms to last for more than a hundred episodes, as Captain Planet did, represents an unqualified success for a cartoon.

But Captain Planet was never just a a cartoon, it was a cartoon with a mission.

The seed it had planted, it was supposed to grow.

According to co-creator Nick Boxer, Ted Turner always wanted it to be an agent of change.

At one point, he said, if one child is changed by this, it'll have been worth it.

When we come back, we're going to jump forward in time to see if the show succeeded and what that success actually looks like.

Do not lose heart!

The planeteers will return.

Tito's handmade vodka is America's favorite vodka for a reason.

From the first legal distillery in Texas, Tito's is six times distilled till it's just right and naturally gluten-free, making it a high-quality spirit that mixes with just about anything.

From the smoothest martinis to the best Bloody Mary's.

Tito's is known for giving back, teaming up with nonprofits to serve its communities and do good for dogs.

Make your next cocktail of Tito's.

Distilled and bottled by Fifth Generation Inc., Austin, Texas.

40% alcohol by volume.

Savor responsibly.

Attention, all small biz owners.

At the UPS store, you can count on us to handle your packages with care.

With our certified packing experts, your packages are properly packed and protected.

And with our pack and ship guarantee, when we pack it and ship it, we guarantee it.

Because your items arrive safe or you'll be reimbursed.

Visit the ups store.com slash guarantee for full details.

Most locations are independently owned.

Product services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary.

See Center for Details.

The UPS store.

Be unstoppable.

Come into your local store today.

Ilak Diaz grew up in the Philippines in the late 1970s and early 80s under the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

This was during martial law.

And in martial law, they canceled all these cartoons that had a narrative of rebels winning against, you know, the oppressor.

That included Ilak's favorite cartoon, Voltes 5, a Japanese anime series that featured robots rising up against a dictatorship.

When the Philippines' own dictator fled in 1986, cartoons came back to the country in a big way.

In 1987, Hanna-Barbara started an operation in the Philippines making cartoons.

They began to animate many classic properties right there in Manila.

Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo, the Flintstones.

Ilak watched them all.

And when Ted Turner acquired Hanna-Barbera, Captain Planet started being made in the Philippines too.

Lucian Monitor is getting strong signals.

Let us go down for a closer look.

It was unlike anything Ilak had seen before.

You know, in the Philippines, we're used to having somebody fly in, right?

Superman would come to save the day and very American stories.

And suddenly, here was this story where everyone could be a planeteer.

Yes, we've got some slut and ooze to clean up.

Watch her!

Oh no, not again!

I said, oh my gosh, you know, brown heroes.

We never see brown heroes.

And so this was from a narrative of being saved or being the recipient of help

into something where we could finally be heroes.

It's like Ilak was eavesdropping on what the Captain Planet creative team had been trying to do, receiving all the messages the show intended.

I mean, I really felt that each one of us can be part of the change.

I really believed in my role of one day becoming Captain Planet Philippines.

His whole life, Ilak spent time in nature, hiking, exploring, swimming.

He went to college hoping to do something that helped people.

And then climbing mountains in the Philippines, he had an epiphany in a remote village.

One of the things that I realized as I was traveling was the lack of power, of access to electricity.

Every few weeks, rural villagers in the mountains of the Philippines would have to hike down to the city, buy huge drums of kerosene, and then bring them back up to use as fuel.

It was dangerous, expensive, and toxic.

So Ilak came up with a solution.

I started teaching them how to build solar lights by hand, simple things that they can repair instead of having it break down every two years.

Ilak went on to found an organization called Leader of Light, which has brought solar light to 30 countries so far.

And he knows exactly who he credits for his career.

It starts with this role model that I would see every day on our TV.

Every day, do what you can to clean up our planet.

Then you can be a hero too.

The power is ours.

Ilak is not the only person who attests to being changed by Captain Planet.

To all the 90s kids that grew up with Captain Planet, we're going to talk about this show.

Zinniels will tell you that 90% of us care about the planet because of this show.

Captain Planet seems a hero on the table.

These are just some TikTok testimonials to the cartoon.

It's still lingering in the public consciousness, or the millennial consciousness anyway.

Nick Boxer, the series co-creator and the inspiration for Captain Planet's very face, has heard first-hand stories of the show's influence many times over.

You know, 25 years later, I'd be in a grocery store and I'm wearing a Captain Planet t-shirt and someone would say to me, where did you get that?

That was my favorite show when I was growing up.

And I can't help then but say, yeah, actually, that was my show.

And they're like, oh my God, when I was a kid, that got me to grow up recycling.

It made me think of the world in an environmental way that was so formative for me

the show was formative for nick too but when i asked him about it it wasn't quite in the way i expected did the show change your thinking in any way about the environment yeah it did it made me less optimistic

Nick Boxer is proud of Captain Planet.

He's proud when he meets the grown-ups who he helped inspire as kids.

But he and we know more than we did back in the early 1990s.

Captain Planet may have done what it set out to do, to get kids to care about the planet, but it's been nowhere near enough.

I just feel like Captain Planet, like anything else, is just a drop in the bucket, and it takes a lot of drops to fill that bucket.

My question is, can we generate enough drops?

The tough truth is that those kids who grew up watching Captain Planet and who were changed by it, my generation, have also lived through and contributed to the largest greenhouse gas emissions in the history of humankind.

And here we are, adults ourselves now, still hoping like the adults that came before us, that the next generation will be able to do something about it.

I don't think that the kids of today will have the time to solve the problem.

We adjust

until we can't adjust anymore.

It's because Nick cares about kids and cares about the earth that he and his wife decided not to have children of their own.

You know, we love children.

She's a school teacher and we sort of thought we would have kids.

But there's also, I think, a part of me that because of what I did, said, how do I bring a child into this world that I can't see a great future for?

The whole Captain Planet project has some of the same flaws as a Captain Planet episode.

I was all supposed to wrap up with a a too easy, happy ending.

The ills of the world redressed not by some cartoon characters, but by a cartoon series.

Captain Planet is a bittersweet artifact from a different time, one more hopeful, but also naive and full of hubris.

When you could imagine that a kid's cartoon could save the world, or that the widespread dissemination of facts would result in widespread agreement about what to do with them, when empowering the next generation felt like a purely inspired notion, not like kicking the can down the road, asking kids to do what their grown-ups would not.

Children still need to be inspired.

They still need to be engaged and given knowledge and direction about how to help the wounded world they're inheriting.

But if Captain Planet accomplished what it meant to, If the seed the show planted really bloomed, the former children, now adults who watched it back in the 1990s, have an obligation to keep pinning their hopes for a different future on no one but themselves.

I mean, I just don't understand

how people can look at the world and not see what we're doing to our planet.

How they cannot see what they're doing to themselves.

Watching TV is easy.

It's everything else that's hard.

We have to pass on something more useful and inspiring inspiring than just reruns.

By your Decoder Rings combined, I am Captain Planet.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was reported and produced by Olivia Breilly.

It was edited by Evan Evan Chung.

Decodering is produced by me, Evan, Katie Shepard, and Max Friedman.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

Thank you to Eugene Linden, Dr.

Juliet Rooney Varga, Mary DeMacher, Claire Reynolds, and Kelly Jones.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

And if you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering and every other Slate podcast without any ads.

You also get unlimited access to Slate's website.

Member support is crucial to our work, so please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

See you in two weeks.

The power is yours.

Yo, this is important, man.

My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're pacebreakers, the ones with all the pockets.

Well, I just got back from vacation and I think I left them in my hotel room.

And dude, I need to replace these shorts.

I wear them like every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me.

Could you send me the link to where you got them?

Thanks, bro.

Talk soon.

Looking for your newest go-to's?

Shop Lululemon's bestsellers now at Lululemon.com.