The Power is Yours: Why '90s Retro Might Ultimately be a Good Thing

Just on a lark, I started watching the first season of Captain Planet and the Planeteers last week. It turns out that the passage of time has inadvertently made the show much more depressing and alarmist than it was when it aired in the early ‘90s. Yes, the show was heavy-handed and unabashedly cheesy, so much so that even Martin Sheen, Meg Ryan, Tim Curry, and LeVar Burton, among others, could not diminish said cheesiness. However, the show was aimed at kids (that’s right. I still watch kids’ cartoons. Deal with it), so the heavy-handedness is understandable, although their understanding (or lack thereof) of computers is not. The bigger topic here, though, is the fact that the show was overwhelmingly right about what we, as a society and a species, should be concerned about in regards to the environment.

Take the episode Population Bomb (also, you’re welcome for the links to full episodes). Again, it was a heavy-handed message about sustainability and overpopulation, deriving from the “Tragedy of the Commons”. The thing about the episode is that it warned about not having large families when the Earth already has almost six billion people on it. That was in 1991. Now, according to the Population Reference Bureau, the human race is approaching eight billion people, with no sign of the increase slowing down. Oh, and that counter is in real-time.

How about the episode I linked to earlier, Polluting by Computer. While the computer stuff is, indeed, ridiculous (and of course Linka’s a hacker; if you were under 30 and knew anything about computers in the early ‘90s, you got that label by default), the main concern isn’t the computers so much as it is the notion of someone destroying American national parks for profit. Surely, that’s just hyperbole, right? Of course it is, because it wasn’t a private citizen who forced his/her way into the parks to, say, drill for oil. It was the U.S. Government. The same U.S. Government which was ready to radically alter the landscape of these “nature preserves” in order to encourage and accommodate snowmobiles, ATVs and dirt-bikes. Or there’s the Canadian Government, which decided it was just easier to pull out of the Kyoto Accord rather than try to adhere to it, and then blamed it on the previous administration.

My point is that, while laughing at Captain Planet’s mullet, campy earnestness, and early ‘90s ridiculousness is all well and good, the show actually remains surprisingly relevant. Further, we as a society lost something we had in the early ‘90s. Remember when it was cool to care about the environment and to encourage kids to do the same? The Swamp Thing cartoon that saw a (very) short run in 1991 was all about how Swamp Thing was protecting the environment from evil polluters. The Toxic Avenger was transformed from a chance to be as lewd as possible while riffing on old Saturday morning serials to a group of Toxic Crusaders fighting the polluting ways of the evil Dr. Killemoff... while being as lewd as possible. Does anyone else remember that Sonic the Hedgehog’s original goal was to stop Dr. Robotnik from destroying the environment and enslaving animals? Sonic’s cartoon (the ABC one, at any rate) got even more explicit about the environmental message. Even G.I. Joe got into the act with the Eco Warriors line of toys and cartoons. Oh, and let’s not forget Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. Yes, I’m mostly talking about media focused on kids, but it needs to be kept in mind that the ideals that a society holds highest are the ones that same society wants to make sure are passed onto kids at an early age. Then, for some reason, the drive for environmentalism seemed to fade away, or “fad away”, I guess, and was practically gone by the 2000s (a fact that the entirety of The Simpsons Movie riffs on).

I don’t think the situation is all doom and gloom, however. Yeah, the Funny or Die/Don Cheadle Captain Planet is making fun of the source material, but the reason it exists in the first place is because the people who were kids when the show aired are adults now and remember the show. On top of that, with the ‘90s starting to be the “cool retro” decade, all of that media is suddenly coming back into fashion. That’s why the first season of Captain Planet and the Planeteers, as well as the Eco Warriors episodes of G.I. Joe and the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons, recently got DVD releases (the Captain Planet release makes sure to adhere to the ideals of the show, as the case is 100% recycled material, and the DVDs are likewise 60% recycled plastics). My point is that, with the ‘90s being retro cool, maybe, just maybe, environmentalism will see a resurgence amongst youth, as well as with the people who were youths during the ‘90s. At the very least, I can say that Captain Planet never gave up the fight for the environment, and that gives me hope and is inspiring in and of itself.