This is why people hate playing Laser Tag with Captain Planet.
Captain Planet And The Planeteers #5
Marvel (February, 1992)
“Last Stand In Pollutionland” WRITER: Barry Dutter PENCILER: Craig Brasfield INKER: Jeff Albrecht COLORIST: Sarra Mossoff LETTERER: John Costanza EDITOR: Rob Tokar
Folks, this comic is so bad I’m going with the Scanning My Collection format because this story requires so much illogic to make it work. After showing Captain Planet and the gang in pollution-based traps (a teaser that is the best part of the story) we get into the story proper. Looten Plunder convinces an environmentalist to help him build Pollutionland, a theme park showing the evils of pollution. It’s actually a trap to lure in other environmentalists, brainwash them, and get to them to speak in favor of his products. For the uninitiated, Looten Plunder is every environmental movie industrialist ever magnified, but even for him this is over-the-top. It just screams “I love pollution”, which was one of the show’s problems. EVERY villain seemed to be in it for the pollution.
Meanwhile, the Planeteers see leading environmentalists are praising the hole in the ozone layer and find out about Pollutionland. Wheeler comes up with the idea of everybody going there in disguise to find out what’s going on. There are two trains of thought when it comes to having the audience already know Looten’s full plan by this point. There’s the Columbo route, where it’s interesting watching how the heroes find out who did what, but there’s no real investigation here, and the usual method of keeping the audience in the dark until the hero learns what happened. When their method of learning it boils down to the villain going “you escaped my trap so I’m going to blab everything” the latter is the better option.
Oh, and for some reason Captain Planet gets a disguise, too, instead of keeping him in the rings until they need him. That’s kind of stupid. Looten sees through their disguises rather easily (maybe the guy with superhero boots is just the usual blue-skinned superhero with make-up on?) and lures them into a trap so easy our heroes should be embarrassed. Then he locks them all up in death traps you’re average James Bond villain would approve of. Wheeler’s in a room being hit with acid rain, Linka’s in a giant hourglass (more the Joker’s style), Gi is chased by snow monsters, Kwamie is buried in junk, and Ma-Ti is trapped in a room filled with movies of guys hating things, including (of course) Hitler and some guy in a cheap devil costume. I’ll be honest, that last one is the only one that took effort.
Cap’s tired of being a sewage ride (it’s like a water ride but with sewage) and goes back into the rings in order to recharge and so the Planeteers could escape. That seems like a really dumb move on Plunder’s part. Next time, come up with a trap that neutralizes their powers. For example, put Wheeler in the snow room. Then again, Ma-Ti was able to use his power to call the others despite being in anti-Heart room. Wheeler is jumped by Verminous Skumm, and next week we’ll see the final two issues I own to find out where that was all going to.
The Planeteers burst into Plunder’s brainwashing room, so Looten sends his “polluto-bots” to stop them. The kids do well against them so he has them fuze into a giant robot (less Voltron and more T-1000), and so Captain Planet is tagged in again. The first eco-guy from earlier shakes off his mind-control…somehow…and tells Cap how to blow thing up, so he does. Plunder escapes after setting the island to self-destruct, with no real danger shown since the next page has them on the boat leaving. Eco-guy says he will build a part that shows off how good the world can be, aka an amusement park people might actually go to see.
I’ve seen better episodes of the cartoon than this train wreck. It all hinges on everyone doing at least one stupid thing, if not more, during the course of the story. Eco-guy shouldn’t have created a pollution theme park. The Planeteers shouldn’t have summoned Captain Planet to put on a disguise. Looten (who pushes the eco-villain thing over the edge) should have come up with death traps that negate the rings’ powers like he did Captain Planet and Ma-Ti. Next week we’ll finally see if this whole Verminous Skumm subplot works at all or wasted our time even here. As for this comic, unless you want riffing material, just don’t bother with it.
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