The Hero We Deserve?

THEY can use super powered rings, why can't you?

Those of us who survived the early nineties knew that there were loads of dangers. Maybe it was getting hooked on crack and ending up a burn out that needed help from Kirmit the Frog and the Ninja Turtles in order to break the destructive cycle. Maybe it the possibility of getting kidnapped because you trusted a man you'd never met before. Or maybe it was just because of your Cabbage Patch doll who wanted to eat your head. But there was one thing that we were certain about: the ecology of earth was in danger... Or, at least, that's what Captain Planet and the Planeteers would have us believe.

The premise of the show was simple. Gaia, the Spirit of Earth, gets 5 teenagers to help preserve nature with the aid of 5 magic rings, each representing an element. Earth, fire, wind, water, and heart. Although the heart is definately more of a vital organ than an element, we're going to let that slide for now. Now, as a stand-alone, these powers were pretty awesome. Fire could conjure up flames at any moment. Earth could make you an Earthbender. Water would give you dominion over all water. Wind could... well... blow wind... And Heart would allow you to talk to animals. When these powers combined, however, we got a green-mulleted, shiny super hero named Captain Planet who would be the embodiment of all of these powers.

There are a couple of flaws in this show that maybe got overlooked. The first and most shocking to me is that they gave the troubled, inner-city youth dominion over fire. This just screams attempted arson. Even if he's not that troubled, giving a boy the ability to conjure up flames at his beck and whim is terribly irresponsible. Every boy goes through something of a pyromaniac stage, burning all sorts of crap just because it's there to burn. Another thing that I'd want to point out is that it seems like if anyone in any cartoon gets the ability to talk to animals, it's always the Indian kid, right? And finally, I'd just like to point out for anyone else interested that the voice of Linka was also the voice of Sally Acorn from the Adventure of Sonic the Hedgehog and is also the voice of female undead in World of Warcraft. (Kath Soucie)

Only two of these had disturbing fan art when I image searched the names. Try and guess which ones!

The show, understandably, got some parents in a fervor. I had friends whose parents wouldn't let them watch the show. The problem is that all of the villians are usually big-wigs in corporations. So, in the Captain Planet world, all corporate heads are terrible villians. There isn't a single company in this show that is eco-friendly. So, it gives something of a weighted view for young viewers. They grow up thinking the same thing. How much of that is steeped in truth and how much of it I just made up is anyone's guess. But I think that's the same reason why there's so much hooha about the new Lorax movie...

ANYWAYS, this series spawned a game with 10 levels of eco-friendly awesome.

HE'S HEADING RIGHT FOR US!!!

I had the opportunity to play this game all the way through, but to be fair, I only made it to level two with insane amounts of save states and then after that I hacked for lives and health. The main design flaw is that your attacks use energy. This is the same energy that you use as life. While this is not that important while flying in the helicopter (as one hit will kill you dead), this is terribly unfair when you're playing as Captain Planet. Understand that while Captain Planet only exists to fight things like pollution and toxic waste, the very thing he battles renders him weaker than a heart-attack patient. Blow some smoke in his face and he's on the ground. The game makes sure you remember this by coating the walls in any sort of slime that is very fatal to our beloved blue captain.

Level one has you trying to stop Hoggish Greedly as he's tapping oil reserves or drilling for oil or whatever. The point is that he's got an army of helicopters ready to shoot down a bunch of teenagers because he's violating every EPA law and code that has ever existed. After a seemingly never ending side shooter that's horribly redundant and insanely difficult, you land and the Planeteers summon Captain Planet. The ritual is simple: you draw a pentagram on the floor in chicken's blood and get someone to start reading from the 6th chapter of the Necronomicon. While you've got someone chanting, you sacrifice any sort of small animal in the center with the sacrificial knife. What's that? You only remember having to combine the power of the Planeteer's rings to summon him? Well... sure... I guess that would work too...

Captain Planet infiltrates the base. Here he can punch and fly. Also, he can kind of do this Sonic Spin-Dash attack which turns him into whatever element you have chosen. Now, it's at this point that I must point out that in order to change the element you have selected, you must press Start. To pause the game, you must press Select. Now, maybe it's just me, but it seems like they broke like, the only real law there is to video games: Start button pauses the game. You never mess that up. It might bring up a menu screen, but the game will be stopped after pressing Start. This led to many unnecessary deaths on my part when I tried to either pause the game or tried to switch out what power I had equipped.

Now, using these powers drains your health bar. Getting hit drains your health bar. Staying in one place probably drains your health bar. When you get to the end of the level, you fight Hoggish Greedly as he stands in a control room controlling two robotic arms that will keep grabbing you. The battle was interesting until I realized that attacking the arms does nothing, and instead I had to fly to the blind spot for the arms and bullets which is right in front of the glass to the room Hoggish is standing in. You punch through the glass and beat the level.

The next level you're back in the helicopter. The wicked Dr. Blight wants to dump toxic waste into the water! Why, you might ask? Because screw you, that's why! That toxic waste isn't going to dump itself into the water! This level requires you to use the power of earth to throw a rock in front of three different trucks to stop them from dropping the sludge into the water. I was able to thwart the first one just fine. The second... well...

Damn you nature!

The second truck is nigh impossible to catch up to before it reaches the next dump point. (Your helicopter inexplicably explodes when it starts to dump the sludge) After watching my helicopter blow up half a billion times, I decided that this level was broken, on account of the truck perpetually going faster than you helicopter, and used a password to skip it. (637511, in case you were wondering...)

Another level as Captain Planet. These are ridiculously easy if you're cheating. If you're not cheating... well, if you're not cheating or using billions of save states, then you're probably still on level one. I beat the boss. Praise is had.

"Well done in stepping back and letting me get all the glory! Couldn't have done it without you!"

Level 5 has you playing underwater. Hoggish Greedly is now poaching sea creatures. (Hoggish is kind of a dick, in case you hadn't noticed.) This is a really hard level, since you move so slowly and you'll have these homing mines that make you explode. There are also these missiles that launch up and will make you explode. And these walls... that... make you explode... I think maybe the submarine is made of nitroglycerin? Well, there are other boats of better structrual integrity that are poaching the sea creatures. You use the power of heart to command the animals to attack the boats for you. Or fall in love with them.

The yellow squid, romantically entangled with a boat... Nature is beautiful...

Jokes about squids copulating with watercraft aside, this level really is a beast. But it pays off as you dock in Hoggish Greedly's base and have Captain Planet stop him before any fish get really hurt.

Oops... Well, better late then never, right?

The showdown with Hoggish is even easier this time around. You just need to get to him. There's a hallway of vacuum pipes that feed into meat grinders (like the one above) that you have to dodge and then once you get near Hoggish he gives up and Captain Planet blows up the base, because looting and polluting is wrong, but terrorism is hunky dory.

The next level is rather interesting. Looten Plunder is hunting the African Elephant for its tusks. Ivory is a big deal, even today. Of course, this is wrong. We must stop it. What we do here is... It's easier to show you, actually...

Not shown: Using the elephant to take out anti-air missile bases... Seriously...

The power of heart apparently can be used as some sort of flesh magnet to pick up and elephant. You then drop him off right before an anti-air missile silo for it to trample it to smithereens and then it trundles off into a wildlife preserve. Of course, in reality, an elephant can't survive a fall much larger than a foot, much less three to four times its height. But we couldn't have the Planeteers be killing off the elephants while trying to save them, could we?

Finally, after all (read: 3) elephants are safe from captivity, Captain Planet is summoned to stop the slaughter of the elephants. This is where things get messed up for a kids game...

Captain Planet is channeling fire power, in case you were wondering. Pictured above is an elephant's skeleton (tusks intact, interestingly enough) at the bottom of a pool of blood. Watered down blood, perhaps, but you are in a slaughterhouse after all. That's definitely not Kool-Ade.

After navigating the slaughterhouse maze and freeing a bunch of elephants along the way, you get to fight the boss. It's actually more of a chase that requires luck and memorizing the path that you run along. You just need to get close enough to punch the ship and then it disappears.

Now we're in the home stretch. The last two levels are facing off against none other than Duke Nukem!

He's here to radiate and chew gum... and he's all outta gum...

Not who you were expecting, huh? The creators of the Duke Nukem we know and love actually changed his name to Duke Nukum for a little while to avoid a potential lawsuit until they found out that Captain Planet's Duke Nukem wasn't actually copyrighted, so they changed the name back. And Gaia looks totally hot right there. Kind of like Storm's long lost sister or something. Mmmm.... Nature....

This is the most infuriating level of the game, aside from level 3. I used a billion save states to get to the end, because you're forced into little tiny pathways that always include a fatal trap at the end, while enemies are shooting at you from every which direction. Also, touch anything and you'll explode. That's why I didn't get any screen caps until the very end.

I never thought that I'd see the radioactive monster's evil lair as a sanctuary until now.

The last level of the game is kind of like Contra. Everything makes sense up until then. The last level is a myriad of colored balls and radioactive isotopes. All of which hurt you. The end fight is actually a puzzle. Duke Nukem will shoot some sort of laser at you. All around the room are little mirrors that you have to position correctly in order reflect the beam at the energy core that Duke is standing under. After three self-inflicted blows, Duke is susceptible to a single punch. And like that, Captain Planet has saved the day! Roll ending sequence!

YEAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

...Unless you didn't make it that far...

Great Odin's beard! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!!!

Who is the Real Villain?

In the far forgotten mists of time of the year 1998, I was at a movie theater reaping the benefits of being a "fringe-friend". You know what I mean. One of those kids who were filler at a birthday party. You can't have a birthday party of only 3 kids, or mom and dad would get depressed that their little Tyson isn't as cool as he should be. I can't really remember the kid's name, what my relation was to him (I think Cub Scouts...? Maybe?), or how old he was turning. But I do remember that we were all given promotional Pokemon Cards (Mine was a Promo Mew) and were told that we'd be going to go see the Pokemon Movie that night.

That was bitchin'.

Well, about 15 years have passed since then. And in that 15 years I only got worked up to see Pokemon Movie 2000 (which wasn't, in fact, the 2000th movie, but was actually the second.) for which I got a promotional Ancient Mew card (which is still unopened somewhere in my room for reasons I can no longer remember.) The movie in question sucked a bit more than I could bear and so it saved me from going down the long and depressing road of the endless Pokemon movies. As of now there are 14, with one slated for this summer, not counting all the non-movie specials like Mewtwo Returns.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity of rewatching the first three and I was surprised at how much I still loved the original, how much I disliked the second, and how much I just didn't care about the third. (Why Entei? Raikou is way cooler!) But, more importantly, I came to understand something about the Pokemon universe and how it ties in with us: We are the worst of all the villains in the Pokeverse.

We break it down like this. By the year 2000, there were two main motivations to play the Pokemon games. To "Catch Em All" (Which is something that we "Gotta" do.) And to "Battle Em All", which being an RPG is something that we avoided at all costs only to find ourselves ridiculously under-leveled to fight the next gym leader. And then we take a look at the villains of the first pokemon movies.

Not technically a villain.

The first Pokemon villain.

Not the 2nd Pokemon villain.

Mewtwo is the first Pokemon villain in any movie and he was genetically created in a lab. He kind of had a hang-up about not knowing what he was created for, which probably means that blowing up his creators a few minutes after being born was a bad idea in retrospect.

Doctor Tenma creates yet another sin against god.

Giovanni arrives and tells Mewtwo that his purpose was to help him. So he does for a bit, until Giovanni goes all jerk-face and tells the unstoppable, psychic powerhouse that he was just using Mewtwo to gain power. It turns out that Mewtwo didn't like being told that he was a total tool and he level's Giovanni's place as well, taking with it a bitter view of how humans treat Pokemon. As it turns out, his skewed view is probably pretty true.

The crux of the film is that Mewtwo creates an unstoppable clone army and plans to eliminate all life on the planet and replace it with his superior clones. One thing leads to another when all the best trainers are invited to visit Mewtwo's island getaway to prove his point. Ash is somehow invited, despite him getting to the fifth round of the Indigo League Championships and losing. The best trainers (plus Ash) are then pitted against the clones. In the climax, Mew faces off with Mewtwo while all the clones fight their originals in what would be considered the most epic Pokemon battle ever... Except that it's not.

Oh the humani- Holy crap! Are those Charizards fighting?! SWEET!

While it should be pointed out that Mewtwo's ideal of Pokemon shouldn't be the tools of personal power struggles while creating a clone army to prove the his own power is highly hypocritical, it still gives us the idea that having Pokemon fight to build up your self-esteem is amoral. Which is interesting, since the first time you see our hero, Ash Ketchum, he pits his Pokemon in a fight for no other reason than, "Hey, you! Let's battle!"

This is where we're even worse. Effectively half of the games is battling. You catch Pokemon to battle other Pokemon. You get experience points to level up, evolve, and gain power to battle even more Pokemon. Mewtwo was battling because he needed to feel like his life had purpose. Ash was battling because of rank advancement in whatever League he happened to be strutting around in. Almost all of your battles were either with the computer, or to prove to your friends that your army of level 100 Mewtwos could wipe his army of level 100 Mewtwos. (If you never knew the Missingno glitch in grade school, you were about as potent a threat as Canada was in the Cold War.) All of your battles were for self-gratification and to smash some other kid's face in the dirt because you probably couldn't do it in real life.

So, if we compare the possible reasons to force other creatures to fight until one lost consciousness, Mewtwo had a pretty legitimate reason compared to us. Even Ash knew when to call it quits. But how many of us threw our little 6-'mon army at the same gym leader over and over until a combination of luck and shoddy AI programming let us finally scrape by that victory?

But, that's only half of the game, argumentatively. The other half, catching them, is brought up in Pokemon Movie 2000.

Lawrence III is your typical rich kid. He's got cash, a hobby, and a giant floating castle made out of wonder and defiance of physics.

I  couldn't find a picture of the real thing, so here's one a bear and a bird made instead.

His purpose in life is to collect. He has quite the extensive collection, we're told. And what he wants more than anything is a Lugia. A rare Pokemon that only appears when the balance of harmony is disrupted by a mystical creature named Discord... Wait. I might have blurred lines into a different show for a minute there.

This is accomplished by capturing the three legendary bird Pokemon. Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres. So, Lawrence III floats around a couple of islands and starts firing cannon shots at random mountains for the birds to show up. He then throws a gigantic electric cage to capture them in and puts them in his trophy room.

I feel that this is as good as any point to ask what Lawrence's collection really is. It starts with an Ancient Mew card and leads to him wanting a live Pokemon. He's also got a lot of other crap in there, including a boat which Ash and the gang escape on later.

He also collects Cow Tools apparently.

There isn't much more to be said about the plot, other than the way that Ash can restore balance to the world is to place three colored stones on an altar and then play a song on an ocarina... Seriously.

Lawrence is brought to his senses only after his ship has wrecked, his collection is strewn across the sea and the only thing he has left to his name is his Ancient Mew card. Which means that his new net worth hovers between $0.99 and $5 (plus shipping and handling.) He's basically told that he shouldn't think of living creatures as simple things to collect.

And then the movie ended and you went home and tried to catch 'em all...

It isn't necessarily the amount that you catch that makes you worse, but rather the method and treatment afterwards. Let me give you an example.

In the movie, Moltres is scared out of hiding with a canon and then placed into a rotating electric cage. He sits on a pedestal in the collection room looking out the window to the world below. He's given the temporary company of Zapdos (and for a brief time, Ash n the gang).

Enter my pokemon adventure. Moltres is chilling in his ice cave when suddenly a 10 year old kid comes out of nowhere and hurls a ball at him. The ball opens and Moltres is now trapped in a small sphere about the size of my fist. It's dark, it's scary, and he sure as hell has no idea of what's going to happen to him.

Lawrence is likely going to check on Moltres once in a while. Feed it, take care of it, talk to it. Meanwhile, my Moltres is never going to leave Box 4 because with my level 100 Mewtwo and a Blastoise that knows both Blizzard AND Earthquake, I'm already an unstoppable force. That Moltres will perpetually be in a state of uncertainty and fear, while Lawrence's Moltres is likely going to adapt to its environment and might even come down with Stockholm Syndrome.

Birds dig crazy cow-licks.

That covers the other half of the Pokemon spectrum. Between battling and catching, we've put ourselves in a position where we're far worse than the villains of the Pokemon movies. But it could always be worse. We could be like Entei in the third movie and say to an unprotected little girl, "Yeah, I could be your daddy."

"I'll make all your dreams come true."