Woody. I'm looking to see what lies ahead in something.
Are you a jealous type? I certainly am.
And age nine and nine. Well. Hello and welcome to Shows That Haunt Us, a podcast in which three millennial scholars from different
disciplines revisit scenes from our childhood that we just can't seem to get out of our heads.
I'm one of your hosts, Zoe Copeman, and I'm an art historian who's a little bit too much into the paranormal.
I'm Averee Luhrs.
I'm an environmental anthropologist. I’m Azlan Smith, they/them, and I think a lot about fiction writing, narrative structure and queer community.
So to get us started today, it's our pilot. And I just wanted to think about not only the shows but the phrases that haunt us.
So what are some lines from your guys's childhood that haunts you today?
There's like the obvious ones. Things like with “great power comes great responsibility.”
That one doesn't just haunt us. That one is like in the canon, right? That's like part of every American.
I was thinking of “Y'all ready for this?”
[Singing a beat] Exactly. Is that in a show or is that in a song?
It's a song in a movie. Is it Space jam? Yes.
Now there's a movie. Space Jam does get an A-plus. And I can't believe I totally don't remember that part.
But like, that was my jam for a couple of years. Another one.
So this is one that's kind of weird, but it's stuck in my head.
But it's—“There's no such thing as a good bomb.”
I don't have anything for that. Yeah. Did you ever watch Captain Planet when you were kids?
I'm aware of Captain Planet, but I did not watch it. We only had public television channels.
We watched movies rarely in my house. I never had TV. So my Captain Planet is like.
I can vaguely picture the captain, like, blue and green, I think.
And then there's like, kids and there's rings and like Captain Planet or something like that.
But yeah, that's about all the Captain Planet And I have. As a conservationist and environmentalist coming from that background,
I know a little bit about Captain Planet just because it was really popular in the
public that was aimed towards children in particular that focused on environmentalism.
But I have not actually seen a full episode of it, and I think my impression of it is it's like the Power Rangers,
but if it was funded by government money. I know that there is a diverse group who are trying to work together to save the planet,
and they each have powers and they might be from different countries.
But I think that they all come together to create the man captain planet, which I guess is an interesting concept.
Yes. So just for some framework there,
the way that the show works is that each of these children from around the world get a ring and it's supposed to represent an element of the earth.
And when they join together, their powers combined, as we will learn in the intro song, is what creates Captain Planet.
And so it's all about community building and about how all of our continents have to come
together to solve the world's problems while also putting it on the shoulders of children,
which is very interesting as a show for children that we could also unpack a little bit.
But “there's no such thing as a good bomb.” It comes from the very end of this episode that I kid you not, in my memory bank,
this episode was about these planeteers going back in time to defeat Hitler.
I mean, I think every childhood group of heroes has to defeat Hitler at least once, right?
Like, that's like in the contracts for all nineties media or 2000s media.
You guys, you didn't defeat Hitler as a child?
Was that not part of your…? So yeah in preparation for you know telling you all about this one episode which is called “A Good Bomb is Hard to Find.”
I rewatched it.
My memory was kind of off because I remembered specifically that the planeteers went back in time to defeat Hitler because of pollution,
not because of the Holocaust. It's not entirely inaccurate, but I did not remember the bomb at all.
I remembered the quotes, but not the bomb. So would you guys mind if I just described a scene that I think just really encapsulates what is going on?
Yeah, tell us the story. Okay. So first, some background.
What's going on here is that you have Dr. Blight. She is one of the main villains of the TV show.
She reoccurs quite often. A woman scientist!
Mm. Yes, She's a woman scientist. She's incredibly hot.
She is like in her thirties or forties, complete hot head, and she hates the earth and she meets her future self.
And then they go back. In time to 1940s Germany and they're just having a conversation over who can we sell our bombs to.
And then they go, You know what? World War II leaders, they have a lot of money and they want bombs.
So fast forward to the actual scene and I want to describe for you all. It is the penultimate moment where Dr.
Blight negotiating with Hitler over a bomb and their negotiations goes sour and the planeteers,
they show up just in time, actually, to save Dr. Blight because Hitler had doubled, crushed her.
And and so she decides she is going to triple cross Hitler and to detonate the bomb.
Of course, Captain Planet is there and he decides to launch the bomb into space.
But he can't do it at first because he has this face to face off with Hitler.
And it's this really awkward moment where I kid you not Captain Planet,
he's looking at Hitler, and he’s like, The toxicity is killing me.
Not just nuclear weapons are toxic. People can be toxic, too.
And they both look so constipated the entire time.
They're like having this face off where you can see it's just this pent up rage and, oh, like he’s trying to release himself and can't.
And then, of course, Captain Planet sweating all over the place and Captain Planet, he gets over it, he's able to launch the bomb into space.
But it was just this moment where it just felt very strange to me.
The space between Captain Planet and Hitler, where, once again, nobody tried to defeat Hitler.
It was all about the bomb and how there's no such thing as a good bomb.
Wait. So. How do you get around the toxicity of Hitler? Do they wash him off?
I have so many questions. And I'll add just before turning it over to get your general thoughts on that scene,
that Hitler, the way he looks, is so strange.
His mustache is not, you know, his iconic caterpillar mustache. Instead he has a Fu Manchu. A Fu Manchu! And
I don't understand why. So I have a question on this.
You said that Captain Planet was being physically affected by the presence of the bomb or the existence of the bomb.
And so is he. Does he, like, physically suffer when things happen to the earth?
Yeah, that is something that I didn't remember.
And in rewatching this episode, really like, sunk in for me again is that Captain Planet can't exist if there's no good in the world.
So Captain Planet can die. Is the bomb is it meant to be like a nuclear bomb?
Yes. So that's another thing that I'd love Averee to get more of your thoughts on,
is that so what ends up happening is after the scene, Dr. Blight, she's a genius.
And the implication is that she invented the nuclear bomb, and she's bringing it to the past.
Oppenheimer Who? And
So she when they're jumping through the portal to go back to the future present, she leaves her journal there and it gets picked up by a soldier.
And he's an American. Oh, okay. So the implication is that because she was back there, she left the information,
we wouldn't have discovered nuclear weapons unless Dr. Blight had left her journal.
Yeah, I have thoughts on the the nuclear aspect of it,
because if you're saying that— if Captain Planet is melting because of the existence of a nuclear bomb, I mean that’s—. No he was melting because of Hitler.
Oh, okay. So just Hitler himself was so toxic as a person that he was melting the planet.
That's—that gets into morals and ethics. Azlan?
Yeah. What happens in between the
“I am melting. I can't” and “Now I can.” What is the plot reason to make that possible?
Can I guess? Yes, please. Can I guess that it's like one last display of love and courage?
The kids are like, “You can do it, Captain Planet.”
And then he is healed enough that he has just enough strength to hurl a nuclear bomb through the atmosphere, into outer space.
Oh, my God, Averee, you should write children's television.
That's exactly what happens.
So here's something that I was wondering from Azlan’s perspective, is that in my memory bank, I hardly remembered anything from this episode.
And in rewatching it, there's no context given. In other episodes.
And Captain Planet, there's some ideas as to why people are put into situations, but here it just feels like there's no rhyme or reason.
And I was almost wondering if this might be because it's for children.
They picked a topic that you can't give context to and some executive was like, Let's take that out.
So I was wondering like, I mean, as long you haven't watched the episode, but from a ratings studies perspective.
This is kind of an answer to that, and maybe kind of I'm still just processing that question and struggling off in other directions.
I don't know if anyone's read the books by Elena Ferrante.
The first one's called My Brilliant Friend, and then there's a series of them,
these amazing Italian stories about a friendship between two young women.
But one of the things that in the second or third novel this author comments is that fiction is very weird in that
it has to arrange into—or it is often in the business of arranging into a meaningful arc life experiences that
don't make a lot of sense. The complete mess of your life does not usually have a nice plot arc.
And like if there's a mysterious person outside your house on Monday,
that doesn't mean that we've learned that they're your long lost dad by a fall.
Like usually there's just a person and then they never come back.
So that there's this attempt to make something narratively compelling and narratively compelling has a lot of,
I think, cultural assumptions about what it means. In this, I'm really thinking about how narratives function to pick up fears of the time,
and we might not want to get big into who Hitler is, but that like Hitler and Naziism,
is both a useful horror of the time and then also an opportunity for us to show our heroism. That again and again,
this narrative gets made where we get to be the good guys against the foil of this horrible person.
And that maybe exists in the nineties to extent that we don't need to talk about who Hitler is,
because for the purposes of this show, it's not super important who he is.
It is important that he is like a recognizable villain to whom
a lot of meaning coheres by just him being him.
Which brings me back to the mustache,
and I'm curious about what was going on by animators and by people who were reviewing this for like its suitability to be on TV and whatever.
Why decide to not do the most iconic image of him, but yet to use the name, but yet to not explain him.
And I think there's this kind of—and I'm not saying that Hitler was a scapegoat.
You should probably cut that part out anyway, but that like people get to…people are picked to kind of inhabit the role of evil.
Yes. So that is another thing is that in the entire show, he is the only historical villain.
All other villains are made up. And so I wonder if also to go back to us on the saying,
I wonder if the choice to put a different mustache on him was to conflate him with other foreign leaders, other villains.
It's like a composite villain. That's what I was thinking.
Yeah.
Another thing that came up for Averee I'd like your perspective on is that the beginning of the show, it opens up usually with a scene of pollution.
This time it opens up with this beautiful landscape of this jungle.
I think it's supposed to be on a Japanese island, and they're talking about how ugly it is because it's untouched by man,
the polluters, and they want to pollute the landscape.
And this is when the future people come in and are like, Wait wait wait!
This is actually already polluted with bombs.
There is so much to unpack there. The very first thing that comes to mind is there's this idea,
there is a place that is nature, there is a place that is not. So in Western civilization in particular
we have a very clear binary in terms of people and society and development are not part of nature.
And nature is this sort of untouched wilderness, a jungle, lots of animals, lots of plants that that is pristine in some way,
which now we can all understand that that's a very colonizer way of approaching nature in terms of like
understanding that people have actually been part of nature for millions of years. It's a false binary,
essentially. But environmentalism in the nineties and conservation in the nineties was very much still focused on this preservationist ideal,
where we wanted to maintain and preserve a pristine and untouched nature.
Again, now we might say we're living in the Anthropocene.
We might say that we're we know that there's no part of nature that hasn't been affected in some part by human presence,
whether or not that's still nature, you know, we don't have time to get into all of that.
But it is very interesting to me that there's this understanding that there is a good nature and then there is
a bad nature that has been polluted and that pollution is inherently something where it's like visually clear
that it's been polluted and that it's destructive and that it's dangerous to people where we know that there's
plenty of pollution that may not actually pose a harm to people but is more harmful for the ecosystem at large.
So it's very a very clear message in terms of there is there is a pristine,
clean, untouched nature and we need to save it for the health of the planet.
And minefields don't do that, which I will say yes, minefields are pretty ecologically damaging.
So that makes sense. But it is interesting that that that is sort of the message that there is, you know,
an image of pollution or there's an image of like clear environmental destruction in a very specific way represented in this show.
And that nature in the environment are represented in a very specific way.
I think it's also worth noting, though, that it's it's a group of people that end up saving nature.
Right. So it's it's quote unquote, nature. These kids that come together and summon Captain Plant and this idea that is a little radical in
the sense that it's seeing like we need people to prevent the harm that other people are doing.
So then you kind of have this there are good people and there are bad people for the environment.
It is an emphasis on we all have to come together and collaborate to to achieve a successful conservation or environmental care.
Yeah, there's definitely collaboration is central to the show and it even brings the audience
members and like puts agency on you as a kid to do what's right for the environment.
Very end of the episode, they tell you how you can do good change in your community.
Go dig up some mines. Maybe not that, but it's usually like you can dispose of your bombs properly.
Yeah, not bombs, usually water bottles. But this episode was different because instead of talking about how you can recycle properly,
they talked about gun violence in inner city schools and how you should gain more knowledge about that.
That's very interesting, especially given the the plot of the episode.
I don't know. I was like, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I was struck a little bit ago.
There's the bad people and there's the good people.
And the creation of these dichotomy and the bad people require the good people to do something and rise up.
But one of the things that's I think interesting in that dynamic is that there's no talk of anything systemic.
There's not any talk about if your food system distributes food and single use packaging,
there is factory farming, and then the results of factory finding are distributed and single use plastics.
And that's a system independent of the goodness of the badness of the people doing it is going to have a result.
And one of the things that's fascinating to me and this whole conversation that I keep coming
back to is that figure of Doctor Blight where there has to be someone who just hates the earth,
who's looking at the earth to be like, Oh man, I hate that. I wish there was more pollution in the world.
Because as we're sitting here wondering like, you know, like, oh God, like why is it 1992 or three or whatever it is?
And like, as a little kid, how come my, you know, my parents are handing over to me a world that, like,
we're understanding and more and more ways is like so impacted by our behavior that what we're
looking for is a villain and we're looking for a villain because we don't see a system that might.
Create it. We don't see that like, oh, maybe, you know, like a fossil fuel industry, maybe colonialism as a system of of power and domination,
maybe single use food packaging and not like not individual uses of straws.
But the way that, like food is distributed to grocery stores, from grocery stores, it makes for what we would call a good narrative,
a narrative where the villain at the end of the day is the system that we all participate in,
doesn't have the good punch fight at the end, where at the end of the day the villain is Hitler or or Dr. Blight The villain is this bomb
that you can throw away where there is this badness that we can like throw out from ourselves.
And there's goodness that can be held up by the kid being we believe in you, Captain Planet.
And instead there's just these systems that we are complicit in that are broken and breaking and ongoing.
And it's interesting to me how the narrative structure of kind of a hero and a fight and a villain recreates this,
looking for an individual to blame a monster instead of thinking about a system.
Yeah, I really love that. I was thinking about this as well.
And we see that across the board with children's shows.
They have this very simple narrative of there's a bad guy and you have to defeat it.
But I think it also speaks to the style of these shows.
I mean, a lot of kids shows in particular, this is sort of an what I think are called edutainment cartoons,
where they're like meant to teach kids lessons or teach kids about something.
Obviously, the theme of Captain Planet is environmentalism,
but these tropes of like teaching a lesson through a story that's very ancient, you know, go back to parables.
But it is interesting that, like how we construct the villains speaks a lot to to a certain time.
And so I think that when it comes to these environmental villains, it is interesting that they they don't have a villain, at least in this episode.
I we'd have to watch more where it's a little bit more nuanced or it's like maybe an
executive who's like greedy and just wants profit or wants to cut down a forest.
I can imagine that that is an episode somewhere. Probably. Definitely, yeah.
The nineties form of environmentalism, that preservationist critique, we didn't really have a villain yet.
I mean, there were definitely some people in the field in literature who were saying, We do need to change our system.
Nineties. The nineties was a very capitalistic time, very neoliberal, very like consume, consume, consume, especially in the United States.
And so it's interesting that there's this the the lesson is that it places the agency on the individual that
it's the individual's job to to care for the environment and that you will save the environment by say,
recycling properly. That's a very, very, very simplified and very problematic in many ways.
Message You mentioned a villain that has more, more nuance to it.
I think that's an interesting question. And then alongside that, I think we can zoom out.
There's an amazing writer named Ted Chiang who did an interview back in 2020.
I think we can put a link in the description, but talks about how this is from memory.
Fantasy narratives are designed to be conservative, where if a fantasy narrative narrative works like this,
there is a state of the world, usually an ancient evil erupts to disturb that state.
And then we go on a quest to destroy the ancient evil and reestablish the world as it was.
That is a fundamentally conservative narrative, where the idea was that the beginning state was the good one and that our fight is to get back to it.
And I'm wondering how much Captain Planet is recreating this that like sure.
Like we sometimes get do a little bit of pollution but the basic state of the
world is good and we need to collaborate and work together to get back to that.
From the interruption of doctor blight, from the interruption of this bad person.
But it's still doing this fundamentally conservative narrative change that proposes an another narrative, right?
If instead it was there is a state of the world, something new emerges and the world will never be the same.
That wouldn't be a fundamentally conservative nature anymore,
because the idea wouldn't be that we're trying to get back to what was which is understood to be good in a stable way.
And instead we're thinking that our current moment was a constructed contingent possibility and that we've there's a no constructed
contingent possibility that might be better in larger ways than any one person getting thrown into outer space or not.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct because and I didn't say this,
but this is another part of the episode where they the planet cheers me along the way.
This young girl who recently actually hit one of the mines in the minefield.
And so she is on crutches. She's missing half of her leg and she saves them.
In my mind, it's like this is a bad ass person. And when they go back in time,
she comes with them and she sees one of the soldiers representing Japan and she has a conversation with him and the planet Tears.
I ask her what she said. She told the soldier about the minefield to clean the minefield.
And so when they come back to the future, she has her leg again because she never stepped on the mine.
The minefield never happened. I feel like minefields were a big topic of discussion in the nineties.
It's also fascinating that there's this idea that a little girl could come up to a single soldier and be like, Clean up the minefield.
And they'd be like, Oh, okay. And they do it.
Yeah, I think it would be really funny, like if we were going to do a modern remake of Captain Planet and,
and kind of adjust it to today's environmental narrative.
I would love to do like a spoof where it's like, Hey kids, here's how to build your own pipe bombs, like radical resistance.
You know how to blow up a pipeline.
Yeah, that's a book, actually. How to boycott a company effectively until they change their practices.
If I went back into World War Two, I would probably try to, like, stop the Exxon Valdez oil disaster from happening.
Do you know what I mean? Once you add time travel into the equation, how do they open a time?
You said it's a portal. It's not like a time machine, right? I don't know.
This is part. I'm going to be honest.
I had to make myself a gin and tonic to get through this 20 minute episode.
I don't know what happened.
Doctor Blake has a future self who comes to her in the present, and then they're there trying to steal plutonium, and then something goes wrong.
So they have to jump through the time portal. So they might have just ended up in Germany by mistake.
There's like, zero context. It's just people are being thrown into situations in the show.
And I kind of wanted to circle back before we finished to the representation of the villain.
This very tangible visual representation of a villain that you can latch on to and say, That's bad, that is the model I will not follow.
And I'm wondering, in contrast, if you all have seen Fern Gully.
Oh, definitely. I mean, that scene with the skateboarding on the Leaf, that is the coolest thing to be recorded ever.
That is a very nineties moment. It is. That movie is around the same time period as this episode, and they're both about preserving nature,
but the way that the villains are depicted are completely different in Fern Gully.
If I remember correctly, the villain is like a bulldozer. Like, it's not really clear.
No, the villain is a polluted mess.
It's like an amorphous creature that comes up from the earth to go back to Alison's description of how fantasy narratives work.
The bulldozer knocks down this ancient tree that had been housing it,
and it's just this amorphous creature that is just pollution, and it's voiced by Tim Curry, so it's fantastic.
Well, that's one way to mark a villain, is if Tim Curry is the voice.
Are they fairies? Yes. Yeah, fairies that live in a forest.
What's interesting is they had to invent a humanoid race that you are supposed to feel sorry for.
I think the main characters in Fern Gully are all white, so they had to create, like, a pretty white lady who's a fairy.
Then you can care about the environment. Then you can care about like, the broader, oh, her home is being destroyed.
It's the same environmental message that there is a pristine earth,
pristine habitat or an untouched area that that is being destroyed that we need to save.
But it's a very different way of going about it. I think there's also something interesting in that, like you were talking about how for kids,
we have these like the bad one and the good one, and that's certainly something that adults do and in making media for kids.
I'm sitting here thinking about the different ways that people pick it up, though, because like I knew a lot of kids who really liked Darth Vader.
I loved Scar the Lion. That was. Yeah.
Yeah. Jeremy Irons. Jack Halberstam has written about this in a in a book called The Question of Failure.
But talking about how like to be a kid is to have your life controlled by these all powerful folks who,
like, are giving you arbitrary rules and watching and whose motivations you don't really understand.
And so you like stories of getting away with it. You like stories of rebellion, not universalizing that to everyone.
I think the way that its story can be designed for a kid to pick up is often not the way the kid is in fact going to pick it up.
And then also depending on like, well, which kid? Where are we talking about?
Who you are in relation to this story is going to have a big impact too.
When we look at media design for children, we're seeing often well, we're seeing two things.
We're seeing what corporations think they can make money from by advertising to children, and we're seeing what adults think children should like.
And neither of those are the children who are not free to kind of make sense of the world independently of all this input.
They're like inside all of this input making sense, but are also not totally abandoned to just be pushed along.
Like read a book to a four year old or a five year old, and sometimes they'll be like, Wait, what's happening?
And you'll tell them and they'll be like, Oh, okay. Like I was like that. And sometimes you'll be like, Well, this is the good one.
And they'll be like, No, I don't like that one. That one's mean.
And like, you're not going to swim off it, which I think is kind of a delightful for me point of optimism where like in the face of this,
there's like these constraints and these designs being like, think of it this way, design it this way.
And then there's also, and I don't mean to idealize children,
but there's also the way that different people pick up this input and play it in different ways.
I wish I had a good anecdote for that right now. Do you think any kids watched this episode of Captain Planet?
And we're like, Yeah, Hitler? No, but definitely Doctor Blake I remember kind of having a crush on her.
I want to know what her Ph.D. is and where does she get her funding?
I don't know. But she is a badass. I mean, she knows how to fight.
She knows how to, like, solve every kind of equation.
She builds AI robots. Her cohort are just robots that help her.
I think it's also interesting in terms of representation— she is a white woman with like a bang in body, a hot white lady.
Thirties, forties. Yeah. Playing into this like white feminist mindset of the 1990s, they make her a villain.
But then throughout the series, even though she's all about like destroying nature and she thinks nature is ugly and she wants it to actually be ugly,
they attempt to convert her always and they always save her like she gets in all kinds of issues with other people and the parameters always save her.
I think that you see that quite a bit in children's stuff, especially they they are always challenged to forgive the villain to some extent.
They're always given a chance to to grow as a person or to be convinced otherwise.
Doctor Blade has this arc where she's allowed the chance to forgive.
And maybe because she's been shown forgiveness or care by the planet two years,
despite everything she's done, then she starts to feel like, Oh, maybe, maybe I should be better.
I'm very interested to know. How they represent her as hating nature.
Like if there's a back story where she, like, bitten by a snake as a child or like, what was it that she was like?
Nature sucks. My memory is not that good.
So that is just generic kind of squishy. Yeah.
Yeah. It's also interesting that you don't remember that piece.
You know, Swatch Roadrunner or like, what it was. It was a Calderon runner and coyotes chasing like, you never wonder, like,
what's the capitalist system besides all of these acne products that coyotes are like.
I never wondered where they came from like that. That was just like, not relevant to the story.
I think there's something interesting that narratives do where some things need to be explained and some things don't like.
There's a genre of story where you could just say a time for it all, and that's okay, but something else is going to need to be explained.
For instance, in this the kids have to have agency, so Captain Planet has to be like, I can't until the kid is like, I believe in you.
And then Captain Plane is like, I can now there's goodness in the world.
So like, I think narratives do an interesting job of steering.
What can we assume and what do we have to be led towards?
Do the kids themselves have any powers or is there only power that they can summon Captain Planet?
Well, I would I would put pressure on that that that their only supernatural power is summoning Captain Planet.
But they have like really unique personalities.
When you get more into the show, I mean, they follow stereotypical lines obviously, but they, you know,
they work together and they each have a unique skill set that disregarding the rings with them
working together and just collaborating without Captain Planet is also important to the show.
I mean, they also have like Airbending, right, and water bending and fire bending, like that's what the rings give them.
Oh, wait, there they do. Yeah, the rings.
The rings. Give them powers. Oh, okay. So they do have some powers?
Yeah, Powers over the elements. Okay, there's. There's something else to.
To unpack. Which is that. Most of our relationship to nature as like Western society, is based on this idea of control.
We have to control nature in some way or contain it or manage it.
It can't just be left alone. And so it's it's so now they have control over the elements.
They have control over summoning this sort of earth spirit. It's this this kind of, in a way, a fantasy of control.
It control over the earth in a but in a benevolent way.
Which is fascinating. I think probably going further than any writer of Captain Planet ever intended us to do here.
But but it is interesting.
Yeah. So with that, just because we can't keep talking about Captain Planet forever as a wrap up question.
As a child watching this episode, what lesson would you get from it?
Watering is coolest. I haven't watched it, so it's difficult.
But I can imagine I was a very much a nature kid, so I feel like I wouldn't even get a lesson out of it.
I'd be like, Yeah, save the earth. Like, I would just be like, Of course.
There's a there's a scholar who was writing in like the 1950s.
So 40 years before this aired, Aimé Césair, who I think is from Martinique, who's a who's a poet and a scholar,
and one of his central or one of his claims about colonialism, is that what Hitler did is practice colonialism in Europe.
That the tools he used are not surprising.
They they are actually tools that were established European protocols of control and power.
And what was what was mind blowing to Europe is that he practiced them in Europe.
And I think there's something interesting, and particularly like with colonialism,
I think it's like one of the ghosts that white powerful nations in northern Europe and like an America and Canada,
are like most resistant to admitting or most like worried about like, you know, like, ooh, like that's in our closet.
What are we going to do with that? That Hitler becomes such an important scapegoat, not just because he gets to be evil and again, he is evil,
but because we want to completely other everything he did from any kind of practices that are wider or longer standing,
including all of like the genocidal tendencies of colonialism, including the eugenics, which eugenics was a big American thing before World War Two.
There's like the I've there's the new posture photo Ivy League scandal people can read about.
And I think the professor there is named Sheldon. But like we like America was all into eugenics until Hitler.
And then we're like, ooh, like that was a Hitler thing. Like Hitler was awful for doing that.
We sure do hate him. There's a line in and I'll end here,
but there's a line in the Laramie Project where a woman of color is being interviewed
and is talking about how all the white people talking about this hate crime in Laramie,
Wyoming, there are people trying to distance themselves from a crime.
Like if you listen to their narrative, what they're doing is distancing themselves from the crime.
And I'm thinking about how like how these how these childhood narratives are narratives that are trying to situate like,
yeah, crime happened, but we are distancing ourselves from it.
We didn't do that. We had nothing to do with that.
We take it out of the context, the broader social, cultural and economic context in which these crimes occurred, if that makes sense.
So it is it is it is this like oversimplified way of of approaching things.
And it's it doesn't happen in a vacuum, but it is this idea that, like, we need a very clear villain.
We need somebody to blame. We as a society do this all the time, not just in like kids shows or in fiction or anything like that,
that that we always have to have sort of a very clear there is a bad guy and they have to be stopped.
It is something to to think about in the way that like if we are presenting this stuff to children as,
as a model of how to become a person as a way of teaching our cultural values and lessons,
what are we kind of priming them to think or believe or how to approach problems?
If we're consistently doing this oversimplification or this really fictionalized version of like how things go wrong in life,
but it would also be very difficult. I mean, just from a fiction perspective or just a producing TV perspective,
it would be very difficult to do like a takedown of colonial problems, like colonial impacts on environments in a kids show.
You know, it gets very complicated. As far as like, dealing with those problems go, so.
I think it's complicated. I think it's probably more possible than it might look.
But I think one of the things in the way is the narrative structure.
I'm thinking now about the narrative structure of power is itself like interesting that at the core of Captain Planet,
we've got these five kids who are given power over some part of the natural world except for the heart kid.
I'm not exactly sure what they have power over, but like everyone else, like, you get to control something and like that.
Like I can now do. This is the fantasy of control that Avery, you were talking about a little bit ago,
and I'm thinking about that through all our superhero stories of today and the Marvel verse and everything else,
like how we we like mainstream white American media, likes promoting the kid with the power narrative,
which is fundamentally a control power fantasy of, I get to this and I'm wondering, what about a narrative that didn't take that structure?
What if it wasn't? You are special and therefore you get to do this and save the day?
What if it isn't Luke from tattooing to wielding lightsaber?
It's not Harry Potter plucked from like their boring life to go do magic.
But instead of this fantasy, there is a story that emphasizes, for instance, that collaboration maybe,
or something like that, which sounds boring, but I also think is a narrative problem and is in fact not boring.
I'm thinking here we'll put another scholar in the comments.
There's someone who's written about how the narratives we tell children about having to grow out of your mother's love, right?
That like the home is safe, but you don't want to be a mama's boy, especially if you are being raised mask.
You have to grow up and be tough and learn that the world is not like that.
It's about competition. And there's a scholar who's written some beautiful stuff about like, Well, that's just because that's the narrative you value.
Like you want to teach that narrative that you can't just be immersed in the home and interdependent relationships.
You have to break out and go compete because you want to construct a story that's a competition and in fact,
pay attention to any child or any family or any person. Actually, what you'll see is that we are interdependent, that, like any one of us alone,
like, can't do very much at all that like, all of these are social stories.
And therefore it's not that the story of interdependence and a kind of engagement that isn't “power over” isn't possible.
It's that we have constructed and we find compelling narrative arcs that are based upon a control
fantasy instead of narrative arcs that are based upon a fundamental idea of collaboration.
And there are other ones, Jack Halberstam, who I mentioned earlier,
thinks that animation and Pixar in particular, when it starts animating crowds like it can in A Bug's Life,
like something interesting happens because the technology creates an ability to animate a crowd as this living character.
And therefore you need a story that centers a crowd as a living character, and that this,
in kind of a fundamental way, starts leading towards an offshoot of narrative kind.
Where instead of a single hero who has power over you might have a collective who has group engagement with.
It also plays directly into this very American individualism.
There's that rugged individualism, the American dream,
the pull yourself up by your bootstraps thing that we really tend to promote in American culture in particular.
So I think that both what you're saying and this, like, we love an individual, we love a hero.
We love like, you know, a do it yourself, fix it yourself sort of lesson as we we look at to these bigger problems of the world.
You're right. It is. We need a collective action. We need a community action.
We need to emphasize interconnectedness, interdependence.
Well, kids were nearing the end of the episode. And the real moral here is you are not special.
You can't do it. You have no power and immersed in the systems that are larger than you.
So enjoy. I do think there is power in collectivism, right?
There is power. There's agency and power and understanding that things are bigger than you.
And admitting that you maybe yourself aren't unique or special does not mean that you do not have power.
And so that's you know, I know you were being tongue in cheek, obviously, but we should emphasize.
But it is a fun thought exercise.
Again, if we wanted to think about what a if we as the three of us were going to like rewrite a modern captain planet,
it would be very interesting to consider, you know, how how would we like a post 2020 collectivist like approach to Captain Planet?
What do superheroes look like when we work as a community?
Right. That's an interesting question. And I love that you brought up Bug's Life.
I know we've talked about this off camera, but A Bug's Life, these ideas of like working as a community to accomplish bigger, paradigmatic change.
It is. It is possible in a narrative structure. So it would be very interesting to see how we might go about that in like a kids show.
Yeah, if I was going to do my moral a little bit more seriously, it might still have the same front part, but it would end with the like.
But look forward to working with you because let's think about the systems we’re included in and how we should tear many of them down.
I wonder if a fun way to end is I was thinking about like saying our own morals for how this would end,
although actually I don't really like that because that's directive, that’s single.
What if we did questions? Like coming out of this coming out of this clip, this conversation,
What questions are in your heads about…
Whatever. I think my question at the end is about a narrative arc and thinking about how I've — I've bought into it.
I've come to love narrative arcs that really value the individual with power and the fantasy
of that power and control and looking for media and narrative arcs that are enjoying,
relishing, taking delight in exploring a story that has less to do with an individual with power and more to do with a collectivity.
I think I will play off of that. And my question would be what made it look like to work in alternative ideas of
nature and what nature is and how we can work with it or protect it in media?
So again, in media, we often, when we look at the way that conservation is or environmentalism is presented,
again, we tend to have a very clear villain. We tend to have a very clear solution.
And we also have a very clear idea of nature as being something pristine and separate from human activity.
And my question would be what would a different construction of nature look like in a television show or a movie?
Or how could we introduce these different ideas of environmentalism focused on interdependence and a relationality with the environment?
How can we present that in media in ways that are that are motivating and interesting to the general public?
Yeah, and I'll just spin off of that with—in terms of media representation and particularly in environmentalism,
you have this strange dichotomy between that centers around primitivism, where in terms of representation,
the primitive person is the not white person, but the white person is the person who's allowed to enjoy nature.
And it's fully like in the subjecthood pushing somebody who's not white into objecthood.
And I'm wondering, you know, with these TV shows, with Captain Planet, there is representation, there is diversity,
but it because of the reliance on stereotypes, it becomes tokenism.
And how can we be more thoughtful in children's TV shows about diversity and that representation?
Not to reify that primitivism. My real closing question is what should we watching out?
Like if this podcast actually has anyone listen to it ever? Like in the comments, like give us shows, music,
movies that are doing interesting things in response to this because there's so much to read and write and I'm always looking for what I don't see.
What are the shows that haunt you? Spoken like a true ghost tour guide.
All right. I think that's it.
I think we're done. That's a wrap. Yeah. All right.
That felt good.