Why is Captain Planet so hated?

I joked for a LONG time that Cartoon Network kept Captain Planet at the 5:30 time slot for at least 7 years to tell you that if you're still up GO TO BED, if you just got up GO BACK TO BED.

The series might hold a record for holding that time slot uninterrupted for so long.
 
People looking to "improve" Captain Planet are missing the point of the show. The show was MEANT to be cheesy, heavy handed and preachy. They never set out to make a show that could be enjoyed strictly for the quality of the writing or animation (though it did have some nice action FX actually).

If you want a "good" Captain Planet, you might as well just make an entirely new show altogether. But I guess it's fun to speculate how to take an inconsequential show and make it "better".
 
I actually realized that halfway through dabbling with potential scripts. The show's whole point is to be horrid and preachy because that's the only way Ted saw to get his message across. Not to mention the whole point of the show seemed like parents would force their kids to watch it. I mean, it was placed right before WCW Saturday Night as opposed to a Saturday morning slot, and for better or for worse, WCW was more or less family viewing as opposed to strictly kidvid of SatAM. (How many families watched the Monday Night Wars? Quite a few)

Captain Planet was a show your parents were supposed to make you watch because they thought it was good for you.:sweat:
 
I agree with every single thing you said. Especially the part about the closing/end credits song and animation (which was the best part of the entire series, IMO).
 
This show seemed like the greatest thing ever when I was five (didn't see it until '92). The first seasons had choppy animation, that improved in later seasons, though by that time, I had moved on. The show was preachy, corny, and the villians, now that I think about it, were stupid. Their plans were usually
Step 1: Get rid of the Planeteers
Step 2: Pollute the world
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit! (Never mind that the eco-villains would suffer ill effects from their polluting ways, but hey, it's a cartoon, right?)

Anyway...that end credits song has stuck with me all these years, probably the only thing that's held up.
 
No way. If I was already up that late I had to stay up and watch Two Stupid Dogs. That show is the absolute best when the first rays of sun are beaming in and you're loopy from being up all night.
 
A good point to be made here is generally speaking the plot involved one of the various villians INTENDING to go OUT OF THEIR WAY to pollute the world.

That wasn't grounded in reality or believable (unless you're super green hippie). It wasn't like they were scheming in destroyed the environment out of neglect like many corporations have been known to. The plot was "How can we make money AND destroy the ecosystem".

It was really too thick >.>

On another note, I still find it hard to believe LeVar Burton and Whoppie Goldberg were voices in that show.
 
I have been unfortunate enough to read an op-ed article by someone who thinks that recycling bins are shrines of a foreign religion (he sees environmentalism as a religion) and that the freedom to pollute is a fundamental American right. So yeah, the kind of villain portrayed in Captain Planet really does exist. Still, though, introducing children to this kind of fringe movement through a cartoon only gives it credibility. In this way, I am sure the show has made many anti-environmentalists.

Also, the simplicity and repetition of the plot mean that it probably would have worked better in an 11-minute format.
 
Indeed. It's fun. I love taking apart bad shows and trying to figure out how you could make them "better" without ending up with either a parody or something completely unrecognizable.
 
Meh, even when I was younger I never liked Captain Planet. I always found the show to be be extremely dull. It just wasn't a show that ever caught my interest and I would find myself trying to avoid watching it.

Looking back on it now, I can see that my feelings haven't improved over time. If anything they've worsened due to the fact that I can see the obvious formula is severely apparent to me. The show hasn't aged well as far as animation goes. The characters are bland - aside from their core personalities there's nothing that stands out. That wouldn't be a problem were they actually entertaining to watch, but the only one that even comes close to that would be Wheeler. Captain Planet himself is uninteresting and has throws around some terrible puns. The villains have nothing to them but to be evil for the sake of being evil.

I never look for anything close to deep in an '80s/early '90s children's action show, but CP doesn't even live up to my low standards. It's just not interesting.

The morals of the show (mainly anti-pollution/anti-corporation) are so heavy-handed and in-your-face that you wonder what the episode is even for. I swear in most of these I'll have learned the lesson it's trying to get across before we're even halfway there. The show would probably have done better if it'd gone a more subtle route (of course, how does one exactly be subtle when the hero is named "Captain Planet").

If anything, the ending theme is good.
 
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