A critical anlysis of your cherished childhood memories

The president wants to send a man to Mars by 2015.

And Captain Planet is nothing but a tool of imperialist, racist global corporate capitalism.

In cartoon form.

How's this you ask? The Captain did so much for the environment, you say?

Not so fast. As if the mullet were not enough evidence, look at the powers all of the planeteers were assigned: there was wind, earth, fire, water, and heart. And what does the Latino kid get stuck with? Heart.

The shittiest power of them all.

While everyone else was out there making floods, and forrst fires, and earthquakes, this kid's stuck in the back standing there like a douchebag with no discernable superpower. No one wants the power of heart. I mean, what could he do? Make people fall in love? No! Only fate and circumstance can do that. A love devoid of free will is no love at all.

So, Captain Planet gave the shittiest job to the Latino kid. It's like the entire American economy, only in scale. Cartoon scale. People complain about Mexicans taking all of our jobs, when they’re not taking the kick ass jobs like doctor, or water; they’re taking the shitty jobs like janitor, or heart.

But they tried to mask the fact that it was racist by including one of every major ethnic minority group as defined by the network legal team. But of course, in their racist conception, the asian girl was a scientist. Obviously they needed a scientist to teach kids about the earth and that type of shit, but why'd it have to be the Asian girl? Why couldn't it have been the Scottish kid, or was he too busy getting drunk and playing golf?

So what's the point of all of this?

It’s called being a critical thinker, asshole. Captain Planet seemed like a harmless cartoon. In fact, it seemed like a good one. It tried to teach our children to love and respect the earth. Instead, it implicitly taught them to be racist tools of global capitalist imperialism. It’s just like this Mars landing. It sound all benign and even wonderful, until you think of the fact that there are millions of peple starving on earth, and instead of feeding them, we’re wasting billions of dollars sending people thousands of light years away for little to no reason. We may as well be searching for five magical rings that combine to form a weird gray superhero.

The kind of thing graduate study in the social sciences enables you to figure out.

Hurrah for education!