Captain Planet didn't have a heart, he was clearly a celestial being. The just gave that dumb kid a plastic ring and told him to yell "Heart" every now and then as part of an agreement with the local government. Useless.
From Jumptheshark.com
Captain Planet jumped the shark from day one. This show has the honor of being the absolute worst animated series ever created and represents everything I despise about the majority of American animation. The moronic, preachy, simple-minded, liberal stories regularly had me rolling on the floor laughing. And the unintended (at least I hope they were unintended) messages of intolerance and oversimplification that were presented on the show very likely, at best, destroyed many a child's interest in doing anything to help save the earth's environment. At worst, it transformed them into a bunch of juvenile delinquents. You know what the cause of all environmental problems was on Captain Planet? It wasn't the result of thousands of years of human activity, involving billions of individuals. Nope. It was all the result of the conscious efforts of just a few individuals with names like Doctor Pollution and Princess Sludge. These people ran big, multinational corporations that did nothing but pollute the environment. I'm sure that really did a lot to prepare kids for real world environmental problems. I mean, we could build a new hydroelectric dam on the river so that we wouldn't have to burn so much coal to get our electricity. But that would jeopardize existing animal and plant life on that part of the river. Compounding the disparity between the actual show and reality were the end of show suggestions about what kids could really do to help the environment. The kids in the show always got to do cool stuff like travel around the world, fly, and go scuba diving. But when it came time to tell the viewing audience what they could do to help, it was always lame stuff like turn off the lights or recycle cans. It was also pretty hilarious to note that the bad guys were always, in some way, unattractive people. They were either disfigured or overweight or both. Yeah that's a good message. As others have noted, this show always had that nice little
"feel guilty you horrible American" vibe going on, since the only kid who ever needed to be educated or enlightened was the white American boy. It's not like the black boy, or the Asian girl, or the Hispanic... um... something could ever be wrong about anything.
And finally, the most blatant example of stupidity on this show was that solar powered flying car they had. It's like, they're trying to save the planet and fight pollution, and they've got this great solar powered technology, BUT THEY WON'T SHARE IT WITH ANYONE!
THEY COULD ALMOST COMPLETELY ELIMINATE ALL AIR POLLUTION IF THEY WOULD ONLY SHARE THEIR SUPER ADVANCED SOLAR POWERED TECHNOLOGY WITH EVERYONE, BUT THEY WON'T DO IT!! Stupid, stupid show.
