Once again, radical environmentalism and population control have joined forces to battle against the world’s most notorious offender: Mankind. The perpetrator of this sly attack will not come as a surprise to frequent Review readers (he is a regular offender of right reason on the topic of population) but both his medium and his target audience may. Parents and grandparents beware: Ted Turner is out to pollute the minds of your children. He wants to fix in their young, impressionable minds the idea that the world is overpopulated and that they have an obligation to do something to fix this “problem.” How is he carrying out his evil plan? Through the use of cartoons of course!
With the self-stated aim of educating youngsters in the importance of “environmental responsibility,” Mr. Turner introduced Captain Planet and the Planeteers to the world in 1989. The show was a huge hit with kids, who were hearing the same kinds of things in school. Defeat the earth’s ecological enemies! Clean up the environment! Tread lightly on Terra!
No serious person objects to conservation. Some of the things that Captain Planet and crew were teaching kids were positive. All of us do have a responsibility to be good stewards of the land that we hold privately and in common, for example. Proper disposal of waste is important for protecting the public health. Resources should not be wantonly destroyed. But the positive aspects of the show’s message were soon poisoned by the injection of anti-people propaganda. (There were also elements of neo-paganism, such as the character Gaia, the spirit of the earth.)
The show has aired some blatantly misanthropic pieces in its six-year history. The first was a show creatively entitled “Population Bomb” (Wonder who thought that one up?) One of the Planeteers, a street-smart teenaged boy from New York named Wheeler, was “marooned on a strange island inhabited by a race of humanoid mice who are destroying their environment by overpopulation and overconsumption.” The message of “procreate and die” was about as subtle as a thermonuclear blast.
The show returned to the same theme a few episodes later, with an attack on large families entitled “Send in the Clones.” This episode features Kwame, a teenaged boy from Africa with an environmentalist bent, befriending a young girl named Leela whose parents “keep having kids, hoping for another son.” According to the episode summary on the Captain Planet website, “they get their wish when Looten Plunder and Dr. Blight [two of the series eco-villains], looking for cheap labor, turn their Cloning Ray on Leela’s brother Woo, who doubles in number each time he eats. Soon Vico numbers in the millions and, along with an accidentally cloned locust swarm, threatens the island’s food supply, until Captain Planet converts Blight’s device into a Decloning Ray.” The suggestion is clear: The only way to stave off ecological disaster is to get rid of the supernumeraries.
Another episode with population control overtones was called “Numbers Game.” In it, Wheeler and fellow Planeteer Linka, a brilliant blonde bombshell from Eastern Europe with whom he flirts in every show, get married. Babies begin coming and soon Wheeler “feels like the old woman in the shoe, with a dozen hungry children, and another one in the oven.” Wheeler is further disheartened when he discovers that Gaia’s home, Hope Island (the “uncharted, unpolluted tropical isle far from civilization”), has been destroyed by a “mega-mall.” Gaia suggests to a repentant Wheeler that the ideal family has only one or two children. Hunger and poverty only afflict large families, runs the subliminal message.
Nothing like a poisonous dose of overpopulation propaganda with a litter of environmental destruction and a trash can full of urban sprawl rubbish thrown in to pollute your children’s minds under the guise of promoting environmental awareness. Nice try, Mr. Turner, but not all of us are fooled.
