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Woody. I'm looking to see what lies ahead in something.

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Are you a jealous type? I certainly am.

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And age nine and nine. Well. Hello and welcome to Shows That Haunt Us, a podcast in which three millennial scholars from different

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disciplines revisit scenes from our childhood that we just can't seem to get out of our heads.

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I'm one of your hosts, Zoe Copeman, and I'm an art historian who's a little bit too much into the paranormal.

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I'm Averee Luhrs.

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I'm an environmental anthropologist. I’m Azlan Smith, they/them, and I think a lot about fiction writing, narrative structure and queer community.

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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.

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So what are some lines from your guys's childhood that haunts you today?

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There's like the obvious ones. Things like with “great power comes great responsibility.”

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That one doesn't just haunt us. That one is like in the canon, right? That's like part of every American.

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I was thinking of “Y'all ready for this?”

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[Singing a beat] Exactly. Is that in a show or is that in a song?

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It's a song in a movie. Is it Space jam? Yes.

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Now there's a movie. Space Jam does get an A-plus. And I can't believe I totally don't remember that part.

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But like, that was my jam for a couple of years. Another one.

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So this is one that's kind of weird, but it's stuck in my head.

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But it's—“There's no such thing as a good bomb.”

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I don't have anything for that. Yeah. Did you ever watch Captain Planet when you were kids?

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I'm aware of Captain Planet, but I did not watch it. We only had public television channels.

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We watched movies rarely in my house. I never had TV. So my Captain Planet is like.

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I can vaguely picture the captain, like, blue and green, I think.

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And then there's like, kids and there's rings and like Captain Planet or something like that.

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But yeah, that's about all the Captain Planet And I have. As a conservationist and environmentalist coming from that background,

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I know a little bit about Captain Planet just because it was really popular in the

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public that was aimed towards children in particular that focused on environmentalism.

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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,

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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,

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and they each have powers and they might be from different countries.

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But I think that they all come together to create the man captain planet, which I guess is an interesting concept.

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Yes. So just for some framework there,

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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.

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And when they join together, their powers combined, as we will learn in the intro song, is what creates Captain Planet.

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And so it's all about community building and about how all of our continents have to come

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together to solve the world's problems while also putting it on the shoulders of children,

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which is very interesting as a show for children that we could also unpack a little bit.

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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,

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this episode was about these planeteers going back in time to defeat Hitler.

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I mean, I think every childhood group of heroes has to defeat Hitler at least once, right?

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Like, that's like in the contracts for all nineties media or 2000s media.

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You guys, you didn't defeat Hitler as a child?

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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.”

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I rewatched it.

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My memory was kind of off because I remembered specifically that the planeteers went back in time to defeat Hitler because of pollution,

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not because of the Holocaust. It's not entirely inaccurate, but I did not remember the bomb at all.

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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?

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Yeah, tell us the story. Okay. So first, some background.

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What's going on here is that you have Dr. Blight. She is one of the main villains of the TV show.

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She reoccurs quite often. A woman scientist!

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Mm. Yes, She's a woman scientist. She's incredibly hot.

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She is like in her thirties or forties, complete hot head, and she hates the earth and she meets her future self.

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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.

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And then they go, You know what? World War II leaders, they have a lot of money and they want bombs.

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So fast forward to the actual scene and I want to describe for you all. It is the penultimate moment where Dr.

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Blight negotiating with Hitler over a bomb and their negotiations goes sour and the planeteers,

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they show up just in time, actually, to save Dr. Blight because Hitler had doubled, crushed her.

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And and so she decides she is going to triple cross Hitler and to detonate the bomb.

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Of course, Captain Planet is there and he decides to launch the bomb into space.

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But he can't do it at first because he has this face to face off with Hitler.

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And it's this really awkward moment where I kid you not Captain Planet,

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he's looking at Hitler, and he’s like, The toxicity is killing me.

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Not just nuclear weapons are toxic. People can be toxic, too.

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And they both look so constipated the entire time.

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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.

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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.

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But it was just this moment where it just felt very strange to me.

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The space between Captain Planet and Hitler, where, once again, nobody tried to defeat Hitler.

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It was all about the bomb and how there's no such thing as a good bomb.

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Wait. So. How do you get around the toxicity of Hitler? Do they wash him off?

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I have so many questions. And I'll add just before turning it over to get your general thoughts on that scene,

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that Hitler, the way he looks, is so strange.

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His mustache is not, you know, his iconic caterpillar mustache. Instead he has a Fu Manchu. A Fu Manchu! And

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I don't understand why. So I have a question on this.

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You said that Captain Planet was being physically affected by the presence of the bomb or the existence of the bomb.

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And so is he. Does he, like, physically suffer when things happen to the earth?

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Yeah, that is something that I didn't remember.

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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.

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So Captain Planet can die. Is the bomb is it meant to be like a nuclear bomb?

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Yes. So that's another thing that I'd love Averee to get more of your thoughts on,

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is that so what ends up happening is after the scene, Dr. Blight, she's a genius.

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And the implication is that she invented the nuclear bomb, and she's bringing it to the past.

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Oppenheimer Who? And

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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.

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And he's an American. Oh, okay. So the implication is that because she was back there, she left the information,

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we wouldn't have discovered nuclear weapons unless Dr. Blight had left her journal.

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Yeah, I have thoughts on the the nuclear aspect of it,

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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.

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Oh, okay. So just Hitler himself was so toxic as a person that he was melting the planet.

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That's—that gets into morals and ethics. Azlan?

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Yeah. What happens in between the 

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“I am melting. I can't” and “Now I can.” What is the plot reason to make that possible?

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Can I guess? Yes, please. Can I guess that it's like one last display of love and courage?

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The kids are like, “You can do it, Captain Planet.”

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And then he is healed enough that he has just enough strength to hurl a nuclear bomb through the atmosphere, into outer space.

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Oh, my God, Averee, you should write children's television.

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That's exactly what happens.

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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.

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And in rewatching it, there's no context given. In other episodes.

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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.

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And I was almost wondering if this might be because it's for children.

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They picked a topic that you can't give context to and some executive was like, Let's take that out.

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So I was wondering like, I mean, as long you haven't watched the episode, but from a ratings studies perspective.

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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.

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I don't know if anyone's read the books by Elena Ferrante.

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The first one's called My Brilliant Friend, and then there's a series of them,

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these amazing Italian stories about a friendship between two young women.

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But one of the things that in the second or third novel this author comments is that fiction is very weird in that

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it has to arrange into—or it is often in the business of arranging into a meaningful arc life experiences that

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don't make a lot of sense. The complete mess of your life does not usually have a nice plot arc.

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And like if there's a mysterious person outside your house on Monday,

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that doesn't mean that we've learned that they're your long lost dad by a fall.

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Like usually there's just a person and then they never come back.

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So that there's this attempt to make something narratively compelling and narratively compelling has a lot of,

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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,

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and we might not want to get big into who Hitler is, but that like Hitler and Naziism,

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is both a useful horror of the time and then also an opportunity for us to show our heroism. That again and again,

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this narrative gets made where we get to be the good guys against the foil of this horrible person.

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And that maybe exists in the nineties to extent that we don't need to talk about who Hitler is,

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because for the purposes of this show, it's not super important who he is.

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It is important that he is like a recognizable villain to whom

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a lot of meaning coheres by just him being him.

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Which brings me back to the mustache,

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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.

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Why decide to not do the most iconic image of him, but yet to use the name, but yet to not explain him.

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And I think there's this kind of—and I'm not saying that Hitler was a scapegoat.

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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.

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Yes. So that is another thing is that in the entire show, he is the only historical villain.

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All other villains are made up. And so I wonder if also to go back to us on the saying,

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I wonder if the choice to put a different mustache on him was to conflate him with other foreign leaders, other villains.

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It's like a composite villain. That's what I was thinking.

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Yeah.

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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.

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This time it opens up with this beautiful landscape of this jungle.

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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,

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the polluters, and they want to pollute the landscape.

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And this is when the future people come in and are like, Wait wait wait!

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This is actually already polluted with bombs.

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There is so much to unpack there. The very first thing that comes to mind is there's this idea,

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there is a place that is nature, there is a place that is not. So in Western civilization in particular

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we have a very clear binary in terms of people and society and development are not part of nature.

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And nature is this sort of untouched wilderness, a jungle, lots of animals, lots of plants that that is pristine in some way,

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which now we can all understand that that's a very colonizer way of approaching nature in terms of like

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understanding that people have actually been part of nature for millions of years. It's a false binary,

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essentially. But environmentalism in the nineties and conservation in the nineties was very much still focused on this preservationist ideal,

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where we wanted to maintain and preserve a pristine and untouched nature.

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Again, now we might say we're living in the Anthropocene.

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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,

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whether or not that's still nature, you know, we don't have time to get into all of that.

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But it is very interesting to me that there's this understanding that there is a good nature and then there is

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a bad nature that has been polluted and that pollution is inherently something where it's like visually clear

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that it's been polluted and that it's destructive and that it's dangerous to people where we know that there's

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plenty of pollution that may not actually pose a harm to people but is more harmful for the ecosystem at large.

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So it's very a very clear message in terms of there is there is a pristine,

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clean, untouched nature and we need to save it for the health of the planet.

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And minefields don't do that, which I will say yes, minefields are pretty ecologically damaging.

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So that makes sense. But it is interesting that that that is sort of the message that there is, you know,

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an image of pollution or there's an image of like clear environmental destruction in a very specific way represented in this show.

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And that nature in the environment are represented in a very specific way.

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I think it's also worth noting, though, that it's it's a group of people that end up saving nature.

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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

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the sense that it's seeing like we need people to prevent the harm that other people are doing.

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So then you kind of have this there are good people and there are bad people for the environment.

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It is an emphasis on we all have to come together and collaborate to to achieve a successful conservation or environmental care.

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Yeah, there's definitely collaboration is central to the show and it even brings the audience

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members and like puts agency on you as a kid to do what's right for the environment.

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Very end of the episode, they tell you how you can do good change in your community.

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Go dig up some mines. Maybe not that, but it's usually like you can dispose of your bombs properly.

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Yeah, not bombs, usually water bottles. But this episode was different because instead of talking about how you can recycle properly,

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they talked about gun violence in inner city schools and how you should gain more knowledge about that.

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That's very interesting, especially given the the plot of the episode.

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I don't know. I was like, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I was struck a little bit ago.

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There's the bad people and there's the good people.

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And the creation of these dichotomy and the bad people require the good people to do something and rise up.

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But one of the things that's I think interesting in that dynamic is that there's no talk of anything systemic.

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There's not any talk about if your food system distributes food and single use packaging,

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there is factory farming, and then the results of factory finding are distributed and single use plastics.

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And that's a system independent of the goodness of the badness of the people doing it is going to have a result.

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And one of the things that's fascinating to me and this whole conversation that I keep coming

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back to is that figure of Doctor Blight where there has to be someone who just hates the earth,

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who's looking at the earth to be like, Oh man, I hate that. I wish there was more pollution in the world.

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Because as we're sitting here wondering like, you know, like, oh God, like why is it 1992 or three or whatever it is?

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And like, as a little kid, how come my, you know, my parents are handing over to me a world that, like,

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we're understanding and more and more ways is like so impacted by our behavior that what we're

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looking for is a villain and we're looking for a villain because we don't see a system that might.

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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,

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maybe single use food packaging and not like not individual uses of straws.

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But the way that, like food is distributed to grocery stores, from grocery stores, it makes for what we would call a good narrative,

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a narrative where the villain at the end of the day is the system that we all participate in,

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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

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that you can throw away where there is this badness that we can like throw out from ourselves.

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And there's goodness that can be held up by the kid being we believe in you, Captain Planet.

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And instead there's just these systems that we are complicit in that are broken and breaking and ongoing.

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And it's interesting to me how the narrative structure of kind of a hero and a fight and a villain recreates this,

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looking for an individual to blame a monster instead of thinking about a system.

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Yeah, I really love that. I was thinking about this as well.

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And we see that across the board with children's shows.

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They have this very simple narrative of there's a bad guy and you have to defeat it.

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But I think it also speaks to the style of these shows.

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I mean, a lot of kids shows in particular, this is sort of an what I think are called edutainment cartoons,

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where they're like meant to teach kids lessons or teach kids about something.

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Obviously, the theme of Captain Planet is environmentalism,

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but these tropes of like teaching a lesson through a story that's very ancient, you know, go back to parables.

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But it is interesting that, like how we construct the villains speaks a lot to to a certain time.

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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.

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I we'd have to watch more where it's a little bit more nuanced or it's like maybe an

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executive who's like greedy and just wants profit or wants to cut down a forest.

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I can imagine that that is an episode somewhere. Probably. Definitely, yeah.

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The nineties form of environmentalism, that preservationist critique, we didn't really have a villain yet.

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I mean, there were definitely some people in the field in literature who were saying, We do need to change our system.

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Nineties. The nineties was a very capitalistic time, very neoliberal, very like consume, consume, consume, especially in the United States.

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And so it's interesting that there's this the the lesson is that it places the agency on the individual that

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it's the individual's job to to care for the environment and that you will save the environment by say,

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recycling properly. That's a very, very, very simplified and very problematic in many ways.

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Message You mentioned a villain that has more, more nuance to it.

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I think that's an interesting question. And then alongside that, I think we can zoom out.

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There's an amazing writer named Ted Chiang who did an interview back in 2020.

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I think we can put a link in the description, but talks about how this is from memory.

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Fantasy narratives are designed to be conservative, where if a fantasy narrative narrative works like this,

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there is a state of the world, usually an ancient evil erupts to disturb that state.

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And then we go on a quest to destroy the ancient evil and reestablish the world as it was.

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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.

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And I'm wondering how much Captain Planet is recreating this that like sure.

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Like we sometimes get do a little bit of pollution but the basic state of the

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world is good and we need to collaborate and work together to get back to that.

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From the interruption of doctor blight, from the interruption of this bad person.

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But it's still doing this fundamentally conservative narrative change that proposes an another narrative, right?

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If instead it was there is a state of the world, something new emerges and the world will never be the same.

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That wouldn't be a fundamentally conservative nature anymore,

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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.

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And instead we're thinking that our current moment was a constructed contingent possibility and that we've there's a no constructed

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contingent possibility that might be better in larger ways than any one person getting thrown into outer space or not.

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Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct because and I didn't say this,

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but this is another part of the episode where they the planet cheers me along the way.

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This young girl who recently actually hit one of the mines in the minefield.

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And so she is on crutches. She's missing half of her leg and she saves them.

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In my mind, it's like this is a bad ass person. And when they go back in time,

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she comes with them and she sees one of the soldiers representing Japan and she has a conversation with him and the planet Tears.

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I ask her what she said. She told the soldier about the minefield to clean the minefield.

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And so when they come back to the future, she has her leg again because she never stepped on the mine.

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The minefield never happened. I feel like minefields were a big topic of discussion in the nineties.

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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.

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And they'd be like, Oh, okay. And they do it.

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Yeah, I think it would be really funny, like if we were going to do a modern remake of Captain Planet and,

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and kind of adjust it to today's environmental narrative.

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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.

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You know how to blow up a pipeline.

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Yeah, that's a book, actually. How to boycott a company effectively until they change their practices.

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If I went back into World War Two, I would probably try to, like, stop the Exxon Valdez oil disaster from happening.

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Do you know what I mean? Once you add time travel into the equation, how do they open a time?

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You said it's a portal. It's not like a time machine, right? I don't know.

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This is part. I'm going to be honest.

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I had to make myself a gin and tonic to get through this 20 minute episode.

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I don't know what happened.

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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.

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So they have to jump through the time portal. So they might have just ended up in Germany by mistake.

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There's like, zero context. It's just people are being thrown into situations in the show.

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And I kind of wanted to circle back before we finished to the representation of the villain.

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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.

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And I'm wondering, in contrast, if you all have seen Fern Gully.

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Oh, definitely. I mean, that scene with the skateboarding on the Leaf, that is the coolest thing to be recorded ever.

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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,

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but the way that the villains are depicted are completely different in Fern Gully.

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If I remember correctly, the villain is like a bulldozer. Like, it's not really clear.

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No, the villain is a polluted mess.

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It's like an amorphous creature that comes up from the earth to go back to Alison's description of how fantasy narratives work.

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The bulldozer knocks down this ancient tree that had been housing it,

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and it's just this amorphous creature that is just pollution, and it's voiced by Tim Curry, so it's fantastic.

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Well, that's one way to mark a villain, is if Tim Curry is the voice.

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Are they fairies? Yes. Yeah, fairies that live in a forest.

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What's interesting is they had to invent a humanoid race that you are supposed to feel sorry for.

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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.

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Then you can care about the environment. Then you can care about like, the broader, oh, her home is being destroyed.

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It's the same environmental message that there is a pristine earth,

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pristine habitat or an untouched area that that is being destroyed that we need to save.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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I loved Scar the Lion. That was. Yeah.

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Yeah. Jeremy Irons. Jack Halberstam has written about this in a in a book called The Question of Failure.

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But talking about how like to be a kid is to have your life controlled by these all powerful folks who,

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like, are giving you arbitrary rules and watching and whose motivations you don't really understand.

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And so you like stories of getting away with it. You like stories of rebellion, not universalizing that to everyone.

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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.

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And then also depending on like, well, which kid? Where are we talking about?

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Who you are in relation to this story is going to have a big impact too.

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When we look at media design for children, we're seeing often well, we're seeing two things.

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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.

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And neither of those are the children who are not free to kind of make sense of the world independently of all this input.

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They're like inside all of this input making sense, but are also not totally abandoned to just be pushed along.

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Like read a book to a four year old or a five year old, and sometimes they'll be like, Wait, what's happening?

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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.

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And they'll be like, No, I don't like that one. That one's mean.

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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,

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there's like these constraints and these designs being like, think of it this way, design it this way.

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And then there's also, and I don't mean to idealize children,

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but there's also the way that different people pick up this input and play it in different ways.

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I wish I had a good anecdote for that right now. Do you think any kids watched this episode of Captain Planet?

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And we're like, Yeah, Hitler? No, but definitely Doctor Blake I remember kind of having a crush on her.

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I want to know what her Ph.D. is and where does she get her funding?

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I don't know. But she is a badass. I mean, she knows how to fight.

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She knows how to, like, solve every kind of equation.

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She builds AI robots. Her cohort are just robots that help her.

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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.

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Thirties, forties. Yeah. Playing into this like white feminist mindset of the 1990s, they make her a villain.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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They're always given a chance to to grow as a person or to be convinced otherwise.

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Doctor Blade has this arc where she's allowed the chance to forgive.

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And maybe because she's been shown forgiveness or care by the planet two years,

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despite everything she's done, then she starts to feel like, Oh, maybe, maybe I should be better.

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I'm very interested to know. How they represent her as hating nature.

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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?

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Nature sucks. My memory is not that good.

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So that is just generic kind of squishy. Yeah.

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Yeah. It's also interesting that you don't remember that piece.

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You know, Swatch Roadrunner or like, what it was. It was a Calderon runner and coyotes chasing like, you never wonder, like,

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what's the capitalist system besides all of these acne products that coyotes are like.

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I never wondered where they came from like that. That was just like, not relevant to the story.

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I think there's something interesting that narratives do where some things need to be explained and some things don't like.

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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.

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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.

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And then Captain Plane is like, I can now there's goodness in the world.

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So like, I think narratives do an interesting job of steering.

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What can we assume and what do we have to be led towards?

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Do the kids themselves have any powers or is there only power that they can summon Captain Planet?

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Well, I would I would put pressure on that that that their only supernatural power is summoning Captain Planet.

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But they have like really unique personalities.

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When you get more into the show, I mean, they follow stereotypical lines obviously, but they, you know,

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they work together and they each have a unique skill set that disregarding the rings with them

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working together and just collaborating without Captain Planet is also important to the show.

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I mean, they also have like Airbending, right, and water bending and fire bending, like that's what the rings give them.

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Oh, wait, there they do. Yeah, the rings.

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The rings. Give them powers. Oh, okay. So they do have some powers?

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Yeah, Powers over the elements. Okay, there's. There's something else to.

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To unpack. Which is that. Most of our relationship to nature as like Western society, is based on this idea of control.

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We have to control nature in some way or contain it or manage it.

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It can't just be left alone. And so it's it's so now they have control over the elements.

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They have control over summoning this sort of earth spirit. It's this this kind of, in a way, a fantasy of control.

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It control over the earth in a but in a benevolent way.

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Which is fascinating. I think probably going further than any writer of Captain Planet ever intended us to do here.

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But but it is interesting.

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Yeah. So with that, just because we can't keep talking about Captain Planet forever as a wrap up question.

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As a child watching this episode, what lesson would you get from it?

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Watering is coolest. I haven't watched it, so it's difficult.

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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.

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I'd be like, Yeah, save the earth. Like, I would just be like, Of course.

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There's a there's a scholar who was writing in like the 1950s.

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So 40 years before this aired, Aimé Césair, who I think is from Martinique, who's a who's a poet and a scholar,

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and one of his central or one of his claims about colonialism, is that what Hitler did is practice colonialism in Europe.

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That the tools he used are not surprising.

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They they are actually tools that were established European protocols of control and power.

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And what was what was mind blowing to Europe is that he practiced them in Europe.

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And I think there's something interesting, and particularly like with colonialism,

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I think it's like one of the ghosts that white powerful nations in northern Europe and like an America and Canada,

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are like most resistant to admitting or most like worried about like, you know, like, ooh, like that's in our closet.

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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,

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but because we want to completely other everything he did from any kind of practices that are wider or longer standing,

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including all of like the genocidal tendencies of colonialism, including the eugenics, which eugenics was a big American thing before World War Two.

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There's like the I've there's the new posture photo Ivy League scandal people can read about.

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And I think the professor there is named Sheldon. But like we like America was all into eugenics until Hitler.

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And then we're like, ooh, like that was a Hitler thing. Like Hitler was awful for doing that.

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We sure do hate him. There's a line in and I'll end here,

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but there's a line in the Laramie Project where a woman of color is being interviewed

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and is talking about how all the white people talking about this hate crime in Laramie,

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Wyoming, there are people trying to distance themselves from a crime.

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Like if you listen to their narrative, what they're doing is distancing themselves from the crime.

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And I'm thinking about how like how these how these childhood narratives are narratives that are trying to situate like,

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yeah, crime happened, but we are distancing ourselves from it.

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We didn't do that. We had nothing to do with that.

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We take it out of the context, the broader social, cultural and economic context in which these crimes occurred, if that makes sense.

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So it is it is it is this like oversimplified way of of approaching things.

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And it's it doesn't happen in a vacuum, but it is this idea that, like, we need a very clear villain.

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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,

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that that we always have to have sort of a very clear there is a bad guy and they have to be stopped.

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It is something to to think about in the way that like if we are presenting this stuff to children as,

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as a model of how to become a person as a way of teaching our cultural values and lessons,

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what are we kind of priming them to think or believe or how to approach problems?

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If we're consistently doing this oversimplification or this really fictionalized version of like how things go wrong in life,

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but it would also be very difficult. I mean, just from a fiction perspective or just a producing TV perspective,

381
00:38:15,950 --> 00:38:25,220
it would be very difficult to do like a takedown of colonial problems, like colonial impacts on environments in a kids show.

382
00:38:25,250 --> 00:38:32,260
You know, it gets very complicated. As far as like, dealing with those problems go, so.

383
00:38:33,480 --> 00:38:37,010
I think it's complicated. I think it's probably more possible than it might look.

384
00:38:38,580 --> 00:38:42,100
But I think one of the things in the way is the narrative structure.

385
00:38:42,120 --> 00:38:48,720
I'm thinking now about the narrative structure of power is itself like interesting that at the core of Captain Planet,

386
00:38:48,990 --> 00:38:54,630
we've got these five kids who are given power over some part of the natural world except for the heart kid.

387
00:38:54,690 --> 00:39:00,629
I'm not exactly sure what they have power over, but like everyone else, like, you get to control something and like that.

388
00:39:00,630 --> 00:39:05,460
Like I can now do. This is the fantasy of control that Avery, you were talking about a little bit ago,

389
00:39:06,120 --> 00:39:12,690
and I'm thinking about that through all our superhero stories of today and the Marvel verse and everything else,

390
00:39:12,990 --> 00:39:23,790
like how we we like mainstream white American media, likes promoting the kid with the power narrative,

391
00:39:23,970 --> 00:39:32,880
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?

392
00:39:32,890 --> 00:39:37,799
What if it wasn't? You are special and therefore you get to do this and save the day?

393
00:39:37,800 --> 00:39:41,250
What if it isn't Luke from tattooing to wielding lightsaber?

394
00:39:41,490 --> 00:39:44,910
It's not Harry Potter plucked from like their boring life to go do magic.

395
00:39:45,210 --> 00:39:53,220
But instead of this fantasy, there is a story that emphasizes, for instance, that collaboration maybe,

396
00:39:53,220 --> 00:39:58,920
or something like that, which sounds boring, but I also think is a narrative problem and is in fact not boring.

397
00:39:58,920 --> 00:40:01,140
I'm thinking here we'll put another scholar in the comments.

398
00:40:01,650 --> 00:40:08,650
There's someone who's written about how the narratives we tell children about having to grow out of your mother's love, right?

399
00:40:08,670 --> 00:40:13,410
That like the home is safe, but you don't want to be a mama's boy, especially if you are being raised mask.

400
00:40:13,590 --> 00:40:16,590
You have to grow up and be tough and learn that the world is not like that.

401
00:40:16,590 --> 00:40:25,379
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.

402
00:40:25,380 --> 00:40:33,180
Like you want to teach that narrative that you can't just be immersed in the home and interdependent relationships.

403
00:40:33,180 --> 00:40:38,909
You have to break out and go compete because you want to construct a story that's a competition and in fact,

404
00:40:38,910 --> 00:40:46,410
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,

405
00:40:46,410 --> 00:40:50,820
like, can't do very much at all that like, all of these are social stories.

406
00:40:51,270 --> 00:41:00,870
And therefore it's not that the story of interdependence and a kind of engagement that isn't “power over” isn't possible.

407
00:41:01,170 --> 00:41:06,930
It's that we have constructed and we find compelling narrative arcs that are based upon a control

408
00:41:06,930 --> 00:41:13,080
fantasy instead of narrative arcs that are based upon a fundamental idea of collaboration.

409
00:41:13,470 --> 00:41:16,860
And there are other ones, Jack Halberstam, who I mentioned earlier,

410
00:41:17,100 --> 00:41:24,240
thinks that animation and Pixar in particular, when it starts animating crowds like it can in A Bug's Life,

411
00:41:24,870 --> 00:41:33,510
like something interesting happens because the technology creates an ability to animate a crowd as this living character.

412
00:41:33,630 --> 00:41:38,550
And therefore you need a story that centers a crowd as a living character, and that this,

413
00:41:38,550 --> 00:41:43,890
in kind of a fundamental way, starts leading towards an offshoot of narrative kind.

414
00:41:44,100 --> 00:41:51,300
Where instead of a single hero who has power over you might have a collective who has group engagement with.

415
00:41:52,080 --> 00:41:58,739
It also plays directly into this very American individualism.

416
00:41:58,740 --> 00:42:01,260
There's that rugged individualism, the American dream,

417
00:42:01,260 --> 00:42:08,639
the pull yourself up by your bootstraps thing that we really tend to promote in American culture in particular.

418
00:42:08,640 --> 00:42:15,120
So I think that both what you're saying and this, like, we love an individual, we love a hero.

419
00:42:15,120 --> 00:42:23,939
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.

420
00:42:23,940 --> 00:42:27,929
You're right. It is. We need a collective action. We need a community action.

421
00:42:27,930 --> 00:42:31,500
We need to emphasize interconnectedness, interdependence.

422
00:42:32,220 --> 00:42:36,390
Well, kids were nearing the end of the episode. And the real moral here is you are not special.

423
00:42:36,390 --> 00:42:40,320
You can't do it. You have no power and immersed in the systems that are larger than you.

424
00:42:40,320 --> 00:42:45,629
So enjoy. I do think there is power in collectivism, right?

425
00:42:45,630 --> 00:42:51,480
There is power. There's agency and power and understanding that things are bigger than you.

426
00:42:51,480 --> 00:42:57,420
And admitting that you maybe yourself aren't unique or special does not mean that you do not have power.

427
00:42:57,870 --> 00:43:04,480
And so that's you know, I know you were being tongue in cheek, obviously, but we should emphasize.

428
00:43:04,780 --> 00:43:06,299
But it is a fun thought exercise.

429
00:43:06,300 --> 00:43:13,140
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,

430
00:43:14,400 --> 00:43:25,770
it would be very interesting to consider, you know, how how would we like a post 2020 collectivist like approach to Captain Planet?

431
00:43:26,040 --> 00:43:30,749
What do superheroes look like when we work as a community?

432
00:43:30,750 --> 00:43:34,850
Right. That's an interesting question. And I love that you brought up Bug's Life.

433
00:43:35,060 --> 00:43:46,460
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.

434
00:43:48,140 --> 00:43:57,110
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.

435
00:43:58,640 --> 00:44:04,760
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.

436
00:44:04,760 --> 00:44:11,420
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.

437
00:44:13,280 --> 00:44:20,719
I wonder if a fun way to end is I was thinking about like saying our own morals for how this would end,

438
00:44:20,720 --> 00:44:24,380
although actually I don't really like that because that's directive, that’s single.

439
00:44:24,560 --> 00:44:31,490
What if we did questions? Like coming out of this coming out of this clip, this conversation,

440
00:44:31,700 --> 00:44:35,660
What questions are in your heads about…

441
00:44:36,690 --> 00:44:46,120
Whatever. I think my question at the end is about a narrative arc and thinking about how I've — I've bought into it.

442
00:44:46,120 --> 00:44:51,879
I've come to love narrative arcs that really value the individual with power and the fantasy

443
00:44:51,880 --> 00:44:58,870
of that power and control and looking for media and narrative arcs that are enjoying,

444
00:44:58,990 --> 00:45:07,180
relishing, taking delight in exploring a story that has less to do with an individual with power and more to do with a collectivity.

445
00:45:08,120 --> 00:45:18,319
I think I will play off of that. And my question would be what made it look like to work in alternative ideas of

446
00:45:18,320 --> 00:45:23,150
nature and what nature is and how we can work with it or protect it in media?

447
00:45:23,450 --> 00:45:30,620
So again, in media, we often, when we look at the way that conservation is or environmentalism is presented,

448
00:45:30,800 --> 00:45:34,700
again, we tend to have a very clear villain. We tend to have a very clear solution.

449
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:41,630
And we also have a very clear idea of nature as being something pristine and separate from human activity.

450
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:50,360
And my question would be what would a different construction of nature look like in a television show or a movie?

451
00:45:50,360 --> 00:45:58,550
Or how could we introduce these different ideas of environmentalism focused on interdependence and a relationality with the environment?

452
00:45:58,580 --> 00:46:04,940
How can we present that in media in ways that are that are motivating and interesting to the general public?

453
00:46:05,810 --> 00:46:14,800
Yeah, and I'll just spin off of that with—in terms of media representation and particularly in environmentalism,

454
00:46:14,810 --> 00:46:23,300
you have this strange dichotomy between that centers around primitivism, where in terms of representation,

455
00:46:23,990 --> 00:46:31,430
the primitive person is the not white person, but the white person is the person who's allowed to enjoy nature.

456
00:46:32,460 --> 00:46:39,330
And it's fully like in the subjecthood pushing somebody who's not white into objecthood.

457
00:46:39,780 --> 00:46:46,379
And I'm wondering, you know, with these TV shows, with Captain Planet, there is representation, there is diversity,

458
00:46:46,380 --> 00:46:51,450
but it because of the reliance on stereotypes, it becomes tokenism.

459
00:46:52,110 --> 00:46:58,260
And how can we be more thoughtful in children's TV shows about diversity and that representation?

460
00:46:58,290 --> 00:47:06,849
Not to reify that primitivism. My real closing question is what should we watching out?

461
00:47:06,850 --> 00:47:15,280
Like if this podcast actually has anyone listen to it ever? Like in the comments, like give us shows, music,

462
00:47:15,280 --> 00:47:24,910
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.

463
00:47:25,480 --> 00:47:30,660
What are the shows that haunt you? Spoken like a true ghost tour guide.

464
00:47:33,190 --> 00:47:36,220
All right. I think that's it.

465
00:47:36,230 --> 00:47:39,340
I think we're done. That's a wrap. Yeah. All right.

466
00:47:39,520 --> 00:47:40,240
That felt good.