God, when I was a kid being concerned about the environment was such a normal, accepted thing that you could put it into kids stuff like Captain Planet and Ferngully and just about every cartoon and people just accepted this was a noncontroversial thing to tell kids, up there with "be yourself" - ThreadSky

bitterkarella.bsky.social • 110 days ago

God, when I was a kid being concerned about the environment was such a normal, accepted thing that you could put it into kids stuff like Captain Planet and Ferngully and just about every cartoon and people just accepted this was a noncontroversial thing to tell kids, up there with "be yourself"

Comments

kobayashimaruu.bsky.social•110 days ago

it's so annoying that pretty much every morally normal thing has been politicized and reactionaries explode over any crumb of anything for views and money... caring about others and the planet shouldn't be political.

braegrosz.com•110 days ago

I had a “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” lunchbag for most of elementary school and it was treated just as normally as everyone else’s cartoon character lunchbags and lunchboxes.

jlilycorbie.bsky.social•110 days ago

I loved Captain Planet as a kid, and my dad absolutely hated it. I didn't know the full extent of his climate change denial at the time (he's gone full oppositional defiance as a political stance and personality). He used to wake out of a dead sleep to turn off the TV when I watched it.

werechicken.bsky.social•110 days ago

They stopped doing the “be yourself” when they saw we were becoming ourselves.

werechicken.bsky.social•110 days ago

If my parents and teachers could see me now they’d be like “stop for the love of god stop”

bitterkarella.bsky.social•110 days ago

no keep going 😍

werechicken.bsky.social•110 days ago

I am fat and I am happy

j-anne-bonne.bsky.social•110 days ago

Hell, I’d be myself even harder just to prove a point

bitterkarella.bsky.social•110 days ago

I feel like it is now, like almost every problem in american life, been tarred so heavily as "a political issue" that you literally can't talk about it. you put a pro-environment message in a movie now and people lose their shit because it's "too political"

bitterkarella.bsky.social•110 days ago

just the most anodyne stuff, things that were so universally accepted as good that not even the biggest john birch shithead would blink an eye, meaningless feel good slogans like "hug the whales," that's all too political now

bitterkarella.bsky.social•110 days ago

i'm hearing how people just refuse to engage with environmentalism, how they're afraid of even appearing to consider it, because "it's too political" and it's just become a third rail like EVERY PROBLEM in america

bitterkarella.bsky.social•110 days ago

you can't talk about you can't talk about queer people, that's too political. you can't talk about trans people, that's too political. you can't talk about racism, that's too political. you can't talk about covid, that's too political. you can't talk about vaccines, that's too political.

bitterkarella.bsky.social•110 days ago

you can't talk about conservation, that's too political. you can't even talk about recycling, that's too political. any issue facing us is too political to discuss, it's all verboten to the point that the overton window only allows discussion of completely fake problems

bitterkarella.bsky.social•110 days ago

the only thing that's not to political to discuss is endless debates over whether certain people should have rights. that and whether or not video games have enough tits. literally everything else is off the table.

paris-green.bsky.social•110 days ago

political third rail to suggest your neighbors might not actually be sacrificing babies to satan

ecowen.bsky.social•110 days ago

oil corps set this in motion 20+ years ago. They turned every forum into a well of lies & any environmental concern was an attack on civilization, & scientists were hounded into silence. Those tactics, the attacks on science & scientists led us here. Never underestimate the cruelty of the rich.

emptywrites.bsky.social•110 days ago

💯 this

rasslinwithdemons.bsky.social•110 days ago

Like the fact that everyone is too sensitive now because of woke. Never mind, of course, that the folks who claim this are themselves the ones for whom it's all gotten "too political", who scream for coddling of their non-serious, inconsistent, and therefore hypocrisy-proof beliefs.

weswalser.bsky.social•110 days ago

People are too afraid to rock the boat for so many reasons. I think they fear rejection from friends and family for thinking different. The problem is people don’t want to talk about everything you mentioned. Things will never change if we can’t have discussions.

petticoatshrink.bsky.social•110 days ago

The John Birch shitheads were for sure hopping mad about this stuff. I think the biggest difference is that they just hadn’t captured every American institution at that point.

pailbn.bsky.social•110 days ago

Everything is political in a sense but by god, we used to be normal enough about it! It’s so very annoying.

coopersbeckett.com•110 days ago

someone complained that i mentioned a character HAD COVID at one point in my book. And that was somehow taking a stand. ///

The fuck?

longcriercat.bsky.social•110 days ago

American Nationalists will sniff anything remotely critical of Capitalism and deem you a Communist.

McCarthyist Nazism left a bigger mark on America than we all admit.

beefkazenzakis.bsky.social•110 days ago

Make shooting Nazis in the face an American pastime again.

dthalliday.bsky.social•110 days ago

They reportedly removed environmental messaging from AQUAMAN 2; a movie in which Black Manta's evil plan is to flood the Earth using toxic emmissions; because they were afraid it would be perceived as "woke nonsense" and affect box office.

We are so BONED. >__<

darthhellokitty.bsky.social•110 days ago

Good lord! If fucking AQUAMAN can’t talk about defending the ocean who can?

dwoboyle.com•110 days ago

I specifically remember my conservative dad and his friends making fun of all that stuff back then. I think the money won out on their opinions rather than sense.

cerril.bsky.social•110 days ago

It's right up there with 'if you might be sick, stay away from people' when I gripe about uncontroversial messages that we all used to agree were good to follow and teach kids.

kalliopi.bsky.social•110 days ago

I think about this all the time

j-anne-bonne.bsky.social•110 days ago

I think the last pro-environment things I ever saw were… just Captain Planet again, but in a different cartoon. (OK KO)
It’s crazy that lessons like that (and even be yourself) have been so much rarer!

j-anne-bonne.bsky.social•110 days ago

Or worse, “be yourself” but if you “be yourself” in a way we don’t like, we’re gonna cancel your show!

latexmorbidity.bsky.social•110 days ago

feel like the backlash to 'treehuggers' mostly became a big thing under the Bush & Blair years. so much of todays bullshit started out under these two

cargoweasel.com•110 days ago

right around the time of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" documentary

jikukeiseki.bsky.social•110 days ago

as a guy who worked in the institution space there was a big hay made about "ecophobia" -- arguing that actually reckoning with the hyperobject would be do nothing but drive normies to despair.

jikukeiseki.bsky.social•110 days ago

what was good, on the other hand, was research driven workshops on the best metaphor to help people understand without scaring them. along with IMF Bill Gates population control shit.

jikukeiseki.bsky.social•110 days ago

we could never talk about relevant things to this depressing lack of progress like the 90s' extreme crackdown on environmental groups or the Bush era's ascendant petroleum consumption culture

jikukeiseki.bsky.social•110 days ago

could we even lobby, or advocate for ballot measures somebody else filed? no. that would endanger the company's tax status.

ds00n.bsky.social•110 days ago

Well yeah, but then it got more complicated and “boring” and meant changing themselves in ways that didn’t feel good, so people decided they hated it.

See: Everyone deciding they hated MLK (again) when he denounced the Vietnam War and started helping garbage workers unionize.

amagire.bsky.social•110 days ago

losing my fucking mind about this lately. state legislations talking about banning residential solar panels like "screw the government, I'm gonna live off grid" wasn't right-wing-coded up to about eleven minutes ago

salvius23.bsky.social•110 days ago

I literally learned to read, over 50 years ago, on a book called "Farewell to Shady Glade", which was about a bunch of animals forced to move away from their home as it became industrialized & polluted.

np-complete.bsky.social•110 days ago

Remember the Lorax??

dashwallkick.bsky.social•110 days ago

Power Rangers had entire extra segments filmed with the actual actors about planting trees and recycling.

cargoweasel.com•110 days ago

it was bipartisan! everyone agreed on it! they passed legislation to ban CFCs in spray cans and it fixed the ozone layer! caring for the environment was a basic bedrock thing.. except for Randroids, and the fundie christians who thought jesus was coming back soon anyways so no need to worry.

marissarowan.bsky.social•110 days ago

The Republicans got taken over by fundies somewhere around 1980.

petticoatshrink.bsky.social•110 days ago

It’s going too far to say it was noncontroversial, Captain Planet did get conservative pushback at the time. But yeah, it was different. I’ve rewatched a few of those episodes recently and, man, there’d just be full on MAGA riots if they aired that stuff today.

jamesjhare.com•110 days ago

it is quite weird seeing people behave like the unbelievably stupid villains from captain planet

revolvoe.bsky.social•110 days ago

now they would raise hell just for the presence of the kids who aren't WIND and FIRE

arianaserpentine.bsky.social•110 days ago

Nah, my family hated both and said that they made innocent businessmen and workers trying to do their jobs and feed their families look bad. “Nobody is really against the environment.” they’d say. So I don’t think it was no one, but the public discourse on it has shifted alarmingly.

robinbobcat.bsky.social•110 days ago

I think the turning point for us as a society was when Mister Rogers passed. Without an actual grownup telling us how wonderful it is to care about each other, you get the chuds telling us to hate each other.

missindulgence.bsky.social•110 days ago

It irks me so bad now. The 90's really were a different time.

Multiculturalism, individualism, and environmental awareness have been totally scrubbed from children's media post 2005, and it's fostered a whole generation of conformist sellout lil shits who've embraced "Fuck you, I got mine".

betsvc.bsky.social•110 days ago

I knew a born again Christian (they were pretty rare in Ireland), who wasn't allowed to watch it because Captain Planet had power and only God has power. Or something. Didn't make much sense.

jonnyv.bsky.social•110 days ago

I was raised as a fundamentalist evangelical in the US and we were banned from anything with an environmental message. Even Bambi was suspiciously pro-nature. I think what happened is that they radicalized normal conservatives.

betsvc.bsky.social•110 days ago

Wow, that is not the reason to keep kids from watching 'Bambi'! (The enduring years of trauma is the real reason). What on earth does caring for the environment have to do with evangelical Christianity? Is it that God will fix climate change, so we don't need to?

jonnyv.bsky.social•110 days ago

There's a verse where God commands Adam and Eve to subdue the earth and exercise dominion over it. That and the climate apocalypse doesn't match the bible apocalypse. We were told that the godless elites were seducing the country back into paganism by getting people to worship nature. So stupid.

betsvc.bsky.social•110 days ago

Wow, that is really stupid. I guess it's good to know where they are coming from, but I really hope I never have to argue with one.

noodlenog.bsky.social•110 days ago

Captain Planet is a witch!

betsvc.bsky.social•110 days ago

I mean I haven't seen it in thirty odd years, so can't remember him cackling around a cauldron, but could well be.

stephenonly.bsky.social•110 days ago

At the time, US evangelicals claimed Captain Planet’s five powers (wind, earth, fire, water, heart) had some occult association. The American Family Association pushed it hard.

noodlenog.bsky.social•110 days ago

The writers accidentally picked up the wrong Aristotle when establishing their rhetorical foundations. Perhaps we nearly got a spinoff starring the four humors.

betsvc.bsky.social•110 days ago

That would explain a lot. And is also really stupid.

stephenonly.bsky.social•109 days ago

“that would explain a lot, and also is very stupid” will some day be a chapter heading in my memoir.

Or the title.

reginasrand.bsky.social•108 days ago

I grew up listening to Free to Be You and Me and then the eighties rolled around and everyone decided to double down on the rigid gender roles. We also had PSAs featuring the droids from Star Wars encouraging vaccinations.

maddzhaus.bsky.social•110 days ago

An interesting addendum, I grew up at the same time in a fundamentalist christian environment and we were banned from watching those shows and movies, including the G.I. Joe movie about the oil crisis during the 70s. "Be yourself" was Satanic messaging.

Seeing that become mainstream is horrifying

dthalliday.bsky.social•110 days ago

Captain Planet's only real failure was undeselling just how POWERFUL a guy like Lutten Plunder is...because those guys are winning.

torielectra.bsky.social•110 days ago

Hell, there was an ep where Looten Plunder actually *succeeded* in his evil plan (cutting down an old growth forest) and taunted the Planeteers to try and stop him from doing it again. (The reason they lost was because, for this ep, they...had to go through the US legal system.)

jorvorskielaynes.bsky.social•110 days ago

Greenhouse gas was a topic in my 90s Texas elementary school textbooks. Then Al Gore talked about it, and everyone lost their minds.

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