How do you take an often maligned (and deservedly so) pro-econut cartoon and make it worse? You try to give it a hipper opening. And you fail miserably.
Captain Planet and the Planetteers found a way to take cool powers and a half-way decent premise and mess it up with the other half. It’s not so much the pro-ecology theme that bugs people, since even people who believe we’re destroying the planet with SUVs and hairspray look at this cartoon and cry in pain. It was a combination of letting the message be more important than the story rather than using the story to send the message. The result was so bad that I could take an entire article going through it. And if I can make myself sit through the series, I may just do that. In the meantime, I’ll let the Nostalgia Critic have the fun.
The original intro was already pretty bad. It’s just LeVar Burton (who played team leader Kwamie) giving the backstory. When Ted Turner bought Hanna-Barbera, he took the series away from DiC animation and gave us The New Adventures of Captain Planet. It actually had better animation, but the writing only slightly improved. So it was still pretty bad. (This is where the AIDS and gang episodes the Critic mentioned came from.) The “new” intro is the same speech from the DiC show, only with Captain Planet himself providing the narration. It’s just as boring, so they decided to spice things up.
They did not succeed.
No, all we got was the worse rap in animation ever!
The original didn’t have the “Pop-Up Video” bit. Sadly, the rest of it was actually the new intro. And you anime fans complain about the 4Kids One Piece intro? I’d rather listen to that than this piece of music-killing nightmare.
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