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Barbara Pyle based many of the Planeteers on real-life environmental activists active in the 1980s and 1990s. Heart-power Planeteer Ma-Ti was based on real-life activist Paulinho Paiakan, left, a leader of the Kayapo people in Brazil’s Amazon Basin. Wind-power Planeteer Linka was loosely inspired by German Green Party co-founder Petra Kelly, RIGHT, seen here in 1983. Photos by Scott Wallace / Getty Images, Gaby SOMMER / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
As for the unifying character, the name had come from famously eco-conscious media mogul Ted Turner, who hired Pyle in 1980 to make critical global issues more fun and entertaining. “Captain Planet!” he allegedly exclaimed to Pyle. When she asked who that was, he responded, “That’s your problem.”
“On some level, we had lost faith that adults were really paying attention to the problem,” Boxer recalled. “So, we said, let’s go to the kids, in an entertaining way.”
Pyle liked the idea of a kids’ show to get the big takeaways from landmark reports, like the Global 2000 Report to the President, across to a wider audience, but she didn’t think the world needed another beefy superhero. She started working on the project with Boxer, who suggested they make sure Captain Planet would only make an appearance after the Planeteers had identified the problem and come up with their own plan. Instead of a brawny savior, they pushed to make Captain fun-loving, lean, and dependent on others — a metaphor for teamwork.
Some people didn’t get it. Boxer remembers having lunch with a high-ranking TV executive and being told: “I don’t like Captain Planet. I don’t believe in it. And I don’t think any cartoon should have a message.”
Boxer was unphased. “I told him, ‘Everything has a message. The question is whether the message is intended or not. At least we know what we are trying to say.’”
Almost 31 years have gone by since Captain Planet first hit the airwaves and both a lot and too little has changed. We ‘90s kids who watched the show are all grown up now, able to vote and act and weigh our own decisions against their impact on the very real climate crisis still in progress. The power is ours, for real this time.
The weight of that realization is something I now grapple with. Sure, I still recycle and turn off lights, but now I’m keenly aware that individual actions simply aren’t enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Rather than viewing that purely as motivation to do more, I’ve become disillusioned, compromising, anxious. In other words, I grew up.
And I’m hardly alone: Back in 1990, TIME magazine dubbed my generation the “ecokids,” calling us, “the best hope for the cause of preservation.” The article quoted several earnest youngsters who vowed to keep fighting for the planet come what may. In 2019, TIME staff writer Olivia B. Waxman tracked down many of the same sources to ask how they felt about that pledge as adults. While some had carved out careers in the environmental movement and felt the cause had made progress, others had become jaded and given up hope.
Pyle, on the other hand, has become even more unrelenting in her optimism. Over the years, she learned of groups of real-life planeteers — her name for the generation of adults who grew up watching Captain Planet — who had organically begun organizing around local environmental issues. In 1997, she used the proceeds from the Sasakawa Prize to create the Barbara Pyle Foundation to support those efforts, building a more cohesive network of environmentally motivated millennials. The network is currently working on an urgent messaging campaign for the upcoming COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow to convince world leaders to take action. “It’s been 25 years already,” Pyle said. “We don’t have another 25 years.”
If Captain Planet were like any other superhero, now would be a really great time for a reboot. Climate scientists are warning that we have to act immediately to avoid planet-altering tipping points; the latest U.N. climate report hints that it may already be too late to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; and anti-science sentiments are perpetuating the spread of a deadly global virus. We’ve identified the enemy and know generally how to defeat it, but we’ve so far failed to make that plan a reality.
There have been several attempts to make a Captain Planet movie, but the efforts always seem to stall out. Pyle says that may be due to outside writers’ misunderstanding of the show’s mythology. “I’ve heard, ‘He’s going to be an alcoholic and the Planeteers are going to find him somewhere in some old Irish bar in New York.’ Now, what is wrong with that premise? Captain Planet doesn’t exist without the Planeteers. He’s just a reflection of who we are.”
Boxer says he’s encouraged that pop culture is still talking about — and parodying — the show more than two decades since it left the air. But if he were to write new episodes for the show today, with so much uncertainty about our ability to act in the scientifically allotted time frame, he’s torn about how they would end.
“The jury is still out on what’s going to happen,” he said. “I think you’d have to go with ‘to be continued.’”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-story/.
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