Captain Planet, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Toxic Crusaders: Environmental Toxicity and Children's Animated Programming

• In Event: Adventurous Nature: Environmental Heroes and Villains on Screen

Abstract

"With your powers combined, I am Captain Planet!" In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a blue superhero with a green mullet introduced the concept of environmental protection to a generation of children. Elsewhere on television, the Ninja Turtles fought their enemies in the sewers of New York after exposure to toxic ooze as baby turtles. On Canadian television, the Toxic Crusaders banded together after their exposure to radioactive waste transformed them into mutants. The Crusaders fought aliens from the planet Smogula who needed pollution to survive. Notions of the environment and toxicity permeated animated children's entertainment for nearly a decade, inundating both television sets and toy boxes through seemingly endless releases of tie-in toys. This paper examines how these animated shows presented ideas about the environment and toxicity through good guys and bad guys for a young audience, indelibly framing pro-environmental values as a positive good. As these shows became core childhood cultural references for now-geriatric Millennials, Saturday morning cartoons and their ancillary toys became critical sites for creating environmental values.

Author

• Sherri Sheu, Science History Institute