Captain Planet and the Planeteers/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anvilicious: The entire point of the show's existence!
  • Complete Monster: Verminous Skumm. He has intentionally caused sickness and famine, indirectly killed Linka's cousin with drugs, and even harassed a kid with AIDS simply because he's an easy target. He even supplied two nuclear bombs to rival factions in Northern Ireland. He's also, physically, a monster, making this literal.
    • Zarm is even worse; He generally tries to start wars and hatred between humans in his episodes, from world-destroying nuclear battles to neighborly rivalries, is in charge of the other Eco-Villains in the episodes where they all are together, effectively making him the Big Bad of the show, and even is revealed to be behind every dictator in human history in the episode Scorched Earth.
    • The Fuhrer a.k.a fu-man-chu Hitler qualifies, being the leader of the Third Reich and all. He is so evil that his mere look can weaken Captain Planet, who said that there is so much hate inside The Fuhrer
  • Critical Research Failure: Captain Planet is damaged by crude oil, a completely natural material, yet is also healed by lava and magma, both far more dangerous than crude oil. Strangely, Hoggish Greedly calls the crude oil he fires "toxic waste", but it's a storyboard error as he fired a thick, shiny glop at Captain Planet, just like oil, as opposed to the colorful glop the show represents as toxic waste.
  • Designated Protagonist Syndrome: Captain Planet's not interesting on his own, and the kids don't seem that interesting either, the closest that actually does come to being interesting is Wheeler, and even then...
  • Ear Worm: CAPTAIN PLANET, HE'S OUR HERO, GONNA TAKE POLLUTION DOWN TO ZERO.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Wheeler, precisely because he actually got to be a flawed Anti-Hero instead of a perfect hero like the others.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Dr. Blight, at least until you see the acid burn on her face that her hair covers.
    • Looten Plunder, from the fact he is most normal-looking male villain and is physically attractive.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: The infamous Wheeler's birthday episode provides a quite literal example.
  • Faux Symbolism: Ma-Ti punches out Hitler!
  • Fridge Logic: Take into consideration that Gaia had to clean up every single mess humanity made they would become weak and too compliant. It's one thing to teach kids to try and fix the mess humans have made of Earth so that their future isn't a disaster, but when the world has got people like Dr. Blight, Verminous Skumm, Duke Nukem, and Zarm screwing things up for their own personal agenda or just for the hell of it, it's only natural she'd give them the tools necessary to deal with threats that are too big to be handled by just recycling and conserving energy.
  • Funny Moments: In one episode, Captain Planet is sent to jail. No, seriously, he is.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Australian kids love Captain Planet totally unironically, and even the snarking over the silliness is more loving than nasty.
  • Growing the Beard: By seasons 5 and 6, the animation and narration become less error-prone and much more fluid and clean. To compensate, perhaps, the season six opening gets changed into a cheesy rap song.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Another teenager with a Noo Yawk accent who just happens to be named Joey Wheeler and is taken to be an idiot, several years before Yu-Gi-Oh!.
    • Also, his element is fire. Fire is traditionally linked to agitated feelings, such as being hot blooded or being angry. A specific type of anger is called rage. Wheeler is from Brooklyn. So what the show is trying to say is that Joey Wheeler, from Brooklyn, has Rage.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Looten Plunder, on one occasion, actually won.
  • Memetic Mutation:

Looten Plunder: "You'll pay for this, CAPTAIN PLANET!"

    • You go onto a forum and shout "EARTH!", then there is a good chance that the next four posts will be the other elements, followed by the rest of the summoning sequence. Whenever someone isn't intentionally going to pull a Combo Breaker, that is.
  • Memetic Sex Goddesses: Linka and Gi, so very much.
  • Moment of Awesome: The end of the episode "Teers in the Hood" with the images of civil rights leaders being one the most powerful and serious moments in a kids' cartoon even to this day.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Zarm crosses this in every other appearance or so. Two words come to mind: Scorched Earth.
    • Verminous Skumm crosses this a lot of times. Two most infamous examples are "Mind Polution" and "A Formula for Hate". In the former he was peddling mind-affecting drugs to teenagers and it resulted in death of Linka's cousin and in the latter he harrased HIV positive teenager and spread lies about AIDS simply to take over the world.
  • Narm Charm: The show practically runs on it.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Sometimes, Gaia shows the potential effects of what an Eco-Villain is doing to the environment on her Crystal Computer to the Planeteers. When the topics of nuclear meltdowns, war, and animal experimentation are shown, the Planeteers get to see some pretty crude things. Episodes like "Planeteers Under Glass", "A Good Bomb Is Hard to Find", and "101 Mutations" deal with such issues. The episode "Old Ma River" also had a short but still unsettling scene where Wheeler and Lita explore a dark, run-down sewage treatment plant.
    • In the episode where Blight, Greedly, Nukem and Scumm took over a TV station in order to broadcast eco-unfriendly programming, one of their children's cartoons had a dog's skull being opened up, and having radiator fluid being poured into it!
    • One episode dealt with poachers. The writers did not beat around the bush about it. The Planeteers come across the mutilated carcass of a panther that was skinned and its body left to rot, and one girl is shown a box containing severed gorilla hands to be used as an ash tray.
    • Most episodes with Verminous Scumm, whether he was trying to conquer cities with his rat army, or giving out drugs that warp people's minds causing them to go insane, and end up with fatal consequences.
  • So Bad It's Good: To some.
    • "If It's Doomsday, This Must Be Belfast" is likely to be enjoyed by anyone from Belfast or who grew up during the troubles. It's epic failures in research, ridiculous stereotypes, bad accents and over-the-top message are a joy to behold.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: While the dialogue in "'Teers in the Hood" couldn't be taken seriously, the images of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders is very powerful.
    • Also, the HIV episode "A Formula for Hate". Not even remotely subtle, and it might come off as hammy in parts, but the message that HIV patients aren't horrible monsters who brought their fate on themselves, that they won't give you The AIDS just through touch, and that despite their condition they're still human beings who need support and love? In the early 1990s, that was an anvil that needed to be dropped, and hard.
    • Not to mention the drug-abuse episode "Mind Pollution", where Verminous Scumm hands out drugs to everyone causing them to go insane and causing Linka's cousin to jump off a window from the second story of a building (he survives his injuries, though, before eventually succumbing to his fatal overdose of Bliss), which show the possible effects certain real life drugs can have on a person.
    • And in the episode "If It's Doomsday, This Must Be Belfast", where it shows that long-standing conflicts do not have a clear cut good guy or bad guy, nor an easy, quick solution.
  • Squick: Sly Sludge is often pretty disgusting, as in the episode "An Inside Job", where he is seen happily smelling the fumes coming from a sewage pressure control valve while he tries to drown the Planeteers in waste. In "Kwame's Crisis", Sly even buries an entire town in garbage. Because the citizens of the town have lost all hope for trying to even be clean, they simply throw their trash wherever they wish, so in one scene, we get to see a woman open up a baby's diaper and toss it away, visibly showing the urine inside. "Old Ma River" also had no problems showing characters going through areas full of raw sewage, nor did it have any problems with depicting emaciated equine corpses, one of which was a vulture-covered cow carcass floating around in the Ganges River. Linka ends up getting battered by the cow's corpse, making her, Kwame, Gi and Ma-Ti sick, when they save her.
  • Tear Jerker: In the episode "Mind Pollution", thanks to Verminous Scumm handing out drugs called "Bliss" to everyone, Linka's cousin Boris goes crazy, jumps out of the window of the second story of a building, survives his injuries and ODs on the whole bottle of Bliss that was given to him before he dies of a fatal overdose.
    • "A Formula For Hate" episode qualifies too. A young high school basketball player Todd Andrews finds out that he is HIV positive, this of course makes him concerned and depressed. Then Verminous Skumm uses this as means to take over the world: by lying by townspeople about AIDS and spreading lies about it. He becomes victim of bullies, his own best friend rejects him, he lies to his girlfriend to protect her and she thinks that he dumped her and later townspeople attack him, his mom and their living place and his little brother was beaten. In the end of episode, with the help from couch, everyone accepts him and feel guilty about their treatment towards him and there is An Aesop that HIV positive people are not monsters and need care and support. However despite the fact that everyone accepted Todd, episode's ending is Bittersweet Ending at best, because Todd will not have a chance to marry his girlfriend and have kids because if he does his children will get HIV and at some point he will get AIDS and eventually will die.
  • They Just Didn't Care: Wait, why is Hitler wearing a fu-man-chu?
    • This was almost certainly done because the show may have been banned in some countries -- primarily Germany -- if Hitler and company looked too much like the real thing (the show doesn't explicitly state who they are).
  • Unfortunate Implications: Hey, have we mentioned how the show characterizes Wheeler? Also, the way the show portrays the United States in some episodes is rather... off.
    • Jeff Goldblum as Skumm, anyone? A Jewish actor being portrayed as a giant rat; one of the more common propaganda techniques of the Nazis was to compare the Jews to rats. Just an eensy bit insensitive.
      • Don't forget that his primary modus operandi also typically involved poisons, pestilence, and disease... other things Nazis accused the Jews of, heightening the rat comparison.
    • "Rich people are evil! Except for, you know... the one that made this show. He's alright. Trust Ted Turner, he has your best interests at heart. Him and those like him. Just don't trust other rich people! ... Yeah."
    • The show's characterization of clean/environmentally friendly technology as something easy and lacking in drawbacks that the world only isn't using because of the greedy evil stupid people in charge. While the show is likely not solely responsible for the proliferation of this viewpoint, it certainly helped popularize it. Let's just say that a lot of "clean" technologies are not as easy, effective, and environmentally-friendly as the show would have you believe, nor are all the technologies it decries as evil and destructive as bad as they're portrayed.
    • The endorsement of enforced population control. Or really the show's endorsement of a lot of the "it's for your own good" semi-to-completely fascist policies favored by socialist countries, communist countries, and Ted Turner.
  • What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: The infamous AIDS episode's portrayal of the subject matter in a show aimed at children. They even mention sex and sharing needles! On a show! For Kids!
    • Not to mention the Drugs Are Bad episode, where Linka's cousin becomes addicted to said drugs, gets Linka addicted as well, then throws himself through a window and dies, either from the blood loss of cutting open his arms on the glass or from overdosing, it's never really made clear.
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