- cross-posted to:
- television@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- television@lemmit.online
why would anyone bother with this, it didn’t work
telling kids to stop corpos doing mass pollution doesn’t work, especially if you build out your entire society and the largest military empires that have ever existed around fossil fuel corpos doing mass pollution
I kinda want to see a version of this where five new kids find those rings, and Captain Planet shows up today and is just horrified by his own failure. Like, no cartoony villains to fight or fixable toxic spills. Just capitalism and apathy and depression. And that’s when things get violent.
Like for instance, maybe the first thing the Planeteers do is visit the floating island of trash. They use water and wind powers to try to scoop up the trash, but it’s too big and too diffuse to gather and remove. Even when they do gather it up, they don’t know what to do with it all. They can’t burn it without making air pollution, and the Earth kid doesn’t want to bury it.
And while they are debating what to do, two more barges show up and dump more trash into the ocean, and the water kid just breaks down and ugly cries. Heart consoles her, and they decide to work together and it summons Captain Planet for the first time in 30 years, and he shows up all 90s and shiny with the mullet and the optimism, and we get to watch him slowly realize that he’s as powerless as the kids were.
They try to stop the barges, but they come from everywhere. They try to speak with world leaders, but it’s people like Trump and Putin the leaders from Don’t Look Up. The Planeteers try to appeal to the masses, but they are called “woke” and communist, and told that they are exaggerating the problem to make themselves important.
So they disperse and decide to just do what they can in their own communities, but the grind wears them down, and Heart becomes radicalized. He reaches the conclusion that disinformation is the true problem, and oligarchs are the true villains. He realizes his heart powers can kill, and he transitions to anti-hero and then villain. The Planeteers need to forge a new Heart ring so that they can summon Captain Planet to stop Anti-Heart. But when Cap shows up, he agrees that oligarchs are the problem. Cap says he doesn’t think murder is the solution, but he’s as powerless to stop world violence as he is to stop world pollution. Captain Planet gives a speech about how humanity needs to change from within or we’re all doomed. We don’t, and the doom washes over us.
Roll credits.
Post-credit stinger of a hermit crab alone on a beach moving from a small plastic piece of garbage into a larger plastic piece of garbage. One of the elemental rings lies discarded as well as kids play on the polluted beach in the background. Maybe one of them will pick it up, or maybe it’s too late for them to save themselves from us.
i like this but it’s lacking in ultraviolence against oligarchs. have heart use his powers to raise up a terrorist sect named the Guillotine Crew
I feel like maybe it could be a mystery movie. Like maybe the new generation is brought together by Ma-Ti, who helps them forge new rings, and the whole time oligarchs are being burned beyond recognition. So Ma-Ti is telling them about how Wheeler was radicalized and started murdering people, and the Planeteers fell one by one, and their rings were destroyed in the fire. Sort of like that first episode of Invincible. So an adult Ma-Ti gathers young eco conscious kids to be the new Planeteers and forge new rings, and they do.
Then you realize Ma-Ti was the real villain the whole time. He killed the other Planeteers when they stood against him, but Wheeler managed to destroy the other rings. And he’s been guiding the young kids to become radicalized and violent like he is, so he keeps pushing them into unwinnable situations.
And in the end, he wins and Captain Planet sees Ma-ti was right the whole time. CaptainPlanet and the Planeteers become benevolent dictators, enforcing global environmental regulations at the point of a spear. Many oligarchs end up as mulch for pollinator gardens.
The original show actually had an episode similar to this. The kids had done a lot of work but the problem didn’t seem to be getting any smaller, and they were starting to feel demoralized. Then the villains stepped in to offer a devil’s bargain: A set of gloves which were individually much more powerful than any of the rings but could only be worn if the rings were removed.
No rings means no Captain Planet, but now each of the kids was as strong as he is. They didn’t need him anymore. They didn’t even need each other anymore. And they definitely didn’t need to keep cleaning up pollution when they could just destroy the factories instead. It wasn’t long before they split up and began engaging in eco-terrorism throughout their respective territories, creating lots of chaos for the villains to capitalize on.
I forget exactly how the episode ended. I think the heart kid refused the glove and went on a journey to get the band back together, and something happened where they needed to summon Captain Planet and they were forced to give up the gloves. There was probably some message about how violence looks like an easy solution but it just makes things worse, and progress isn’t always obvious, and if we all just work together we’ll get there eventually.
But then there was another episode where a bunch of scientists created a simulation of Earth to predict how the environment would turn out and it all ended in nuclear war, total ecological collapse, and mass extinction with nothing more optimistic than a “Maybe we’ll figure it out before it’s too late. Maybe.”
Man, I watched the show, but I don’t remember those episodes.
Money. “Look at us, we have newstalgia on netflix”
Starring Don Cheadle?
My god, that would be great.
The group is already multiracial but somehow they will fuck up the casting.
So the same Netflix that has started using environment-poisoning AI to make visual effects “cheaper” is now making a Captain Planet reboot.
I’ll be surprised if this even manages to be watchable. “Good” seems out of the question.