#environmental message

So this really sounds rather typical for your environmental movie; the animals are the cute, precocious little good guys and the humans are the big, evil demons who always fuck up the Earth, yeah? That’s what it sounds like from my summary; hell, even the IMDB summary makes it sound like a “Nature good, man bad” story. But here’s the thing; it actually shows the whole time that, while some humans are dumb and yeah, we fuck up the environment, there will always be people taking responsibility and trying to fix the problems. The man who crashes the chemical truck at the beginning? His first thought upon getting out of the truck is to go and get some help because of the gas leak. And at the end, you see humans cleaning up waste, clearing the toxic fumes up, and freeing one of the main characters from a trap. This is actually a much more nuanced look at humans than films like FernGully had, and this really does help set this movie apart. The movie also is, surprisingly, unflinchingly harsh. The little girl who they went on the quest to save? At the end of the film, we discover her parents, who we saw earlier slumped over in their home, gas surrounding them, are dead. You indeed saw the corpses of a small child’s parents in a family film.

So, this must mean the movie is pretty good, huh? Well, uh… Kind of. While it does have the positives above as well as some really great animation, the characters are a big flaw. None of the main characters are particularly memorable or interesting, and that’s a big problem. A lot of the movie feels like filler too, which is not what an adventure to save the life of a friend so feel like. I mean, sure, we get a cool scene with a scarred owl, and s solid gospel-esque musical number from Ben Vereen, things just seem to happen. And this would probably be fine - random encounter adventure plots are fine if the characters are interesting, look at The Land Before Time – but the characters here are just so boring, bland, and cookie cutter that there’s very little investment you can put in them.

So, is this yet another guilty pleasure or should it be avoided? Well, I’d say it’s worth checking out as sort of a contrast to FernGully; FernGully definitely has more interesting characters, better songs, and Tim Curry and Robin Williams hamming it up at every opportunity, so I definitely recommend it more as an entertaining movie, but Once Upon a Forest is much more simple and nuanced in its environmental message. If you’re looking for a pleasant film to teach kids the importance of trying to help make the Earth a better place, this one’s harmless enough.

It certainly isn’t an awful film, and it’s not hard to see why it has garnered a bit of a cult following. I wouldn’t say I’m a part of the cult, but I can still appreciate it in a lot of ways. It’s worth seeing for yourself, so if you can find this somewhere, give it a watch; I dug it out of the bargain bin at Wal-Mart so there’s a good place to start looking. 

Okay, honesty time: as much as it’s easy to snark at this show for the terrible morals it sometimes espoused (they did two episodes on population control, and the morals there are some of the most botched morals you will ever see), this show did generally speaking have its heart in the right place and it really did deliver some solid messages. For instance, there was an episode centered around AIDS, something that wasn’t really a thing people were educated about at the time the show came out thanks to everyone’s favorite senile moron Ronald Reagan and his mess of an administration. The episode’s moral, that people with the disease are just normal people in need of help and not freaks to be shunned, is frankly an important one, especially for the time period. This isn’t the only tough subject the show tackled; it tackled a lot of gritty issues like this that other animated shows of the time wouldn’t dare go near. There’s episodes on drug dealing, four on gang violence, hell people even actually die in some episodes! And there a re plenty of solid environmental issues along with social ones. For every poorly-handled message, there’s always a couple of really well-done or ballsy messages to make up for it.

The diversity of our heroes is also a nice touch. We got the Eastern European Linka, the Southeast Asian Gi, the African Kwame, the South American Ma-Ti, and the American from New York, Joey Wheeler (No, not that one)… the fact they’re from all around the world really does kinda drive home the series’ point that we all gotta contribute to make the world a better place. They aren’t too shabby as characters, either; sure, they can be corny and cliché, but none of them are too unenjoyable or anything.   And then we come to our final hero, Captain Planet himself, and I just gotta say it: I love this fucking doofus. Every line of dialogue is the cheesiest pun you can imagine to suit the situation, his style is so obnoxiously, goofily 90s, and he’s just an absolute blast. It helps he has a really pleasant and heroic voice and that despite his numerous weaknesses and the sheer cheese factor of the character, he is pretty cool.

Now we have the villains! No superhero show is complete without a robust rogues gallery, and boy oh boy do we have a rogues gallery here! Let me just list off some of the villains we have here, along with their celebrity VA: Hoggish Greedly (Ed Asner), a pig-man who is the embodiment of overconsumption of natural resources; Looten Plunder (played by James Coburn, who you’ll likely know as Waternoose from Monsters, Inc.), an evil poacher and corrupt businessman; Sly Sludge (Martin Sheen), a lazy waste disposal specialist who is the living embodiment of careless, thoughtless waste disposal; Verminous Skumm (Uh, Jeff, uh, Jeff Goldblum), an evil rat man who seems to do evil for shits and giggles; Dr. Blight (Meg Ryan), a wicked scientist with an evil computer sidekick named MAL who was played by Tim Curry (Not the first time he’s played a villain who is not eco-friendly as you may recall); Zarm (Sting, of The Police fame), an evil former guardian spirit of Earth who now murders planets; and Duke Nukem (no, not THAT one), a radioactive mutant. It should be noted a lot of these celebs were replaced with more typical VAs in later seasons; for example, Maurice LaMarche took over Skumm and Nukem, Mary Kay Bergman took over Blight, stuff like that. Zarm’s third VA was Malcolm McDowell, which is cool as hell, and Asner stayed the whole series, so it wasn’t all around that things changed, and I believe Tim Curry was actually a replacement VA. So yes, this rogues gallery has great voice actors all around, whether they be big celebs or famous professional voice actors, they’re all hilariously hammy and cheesy, and they all do what needs to be done to impede the Planeteers and drive the plot along. As absolutely stereotypical, cartoonish, and blatantly evil as all these people are in looks and name, you’d be hard pressed not to have picked a favorite after a few episodes.

This is some of the goofiest, dopiest, most anvilicious animation you could ever hope to see, but goddamn if I don’t love every dopey minute of it. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s the Earth Day marathons I watched on Boomerang, who knows, but I have a soft spot in my heart for this show that will never die. I’ll be the first to admit this show is cheesy and silly, but you know, it did a lot of things other cartoons didn’t dare do, talked about shit no one else wanted to talk about. Yeah, it fucked up sometimes, but you have to give it credit for trying to be more serious than other cartoons of its kind. Call it a guilty pleasure, call it so bad it’s good, but you can never call Captain Planet unwatchably bad.