you'll pay for this captain planet!!!
Growing up, kids are taught that everybody is good at something at the expense of being good at something else. This was best exemplified by the 5 Planeteers (who were later shamelessly copied by the Power Rangers). As a more specific example, Wheeler was a bumbling fool (note his untied shoelace in the picture) who knew next to nothing about saving the planet, but somehow his good heart and fighting spirit redeemed him as a powerful ranger. While this is certainly ridiculous and borderline outrageous, it’s perfectly acceptable for a children’s TV show to tell every kid they can be the best at something.
What bothers me is how people grow up and still believe this. You hear it all the time:
- He might be rich, but he doesn’t enjoy life as much as I do.
- He might be good-looking, but he’s not as funny as I am.
- He might be a great cook, it’s but only because his parents taught him how to cook, I never had that opportunity
- He might have gone to a great school, but I’m smarter than he is
- Tom Brady might have millions of dollars, a supermodel wife, and fingers filled with Superbowl rings, but I bet he’d trade it all for the freedom I have in public.
The list literally goes on forever and gets more and more outrageous. Basically, the formula is:
- _____ has X but Y
When X has no correlation at all to Y. Take #2 as an example. Why does being funny have anything to do with being good-looking? “Oh well, if you’re ugly you have to be funny to get by”. No, fuck that, that isn’t true. If Jerry Seinfeld was a fat, balding Jew he would not have been funnier as a result. In fact, the opposite is probably true. Creating observational comedy about real-life situations (generally perceived as the funniest comedy) requires actual experiences. These are experiences that ugly people don’t have.
Ugly people don’t have experiences, they make them up. They sit in a room by themselves and create all kinds of “possible scenarios” that they think are funny because, to them, it’s just as possible that these scenarios and real-life scenarios will happen. Here’s a comic from a strangely popular website (XKCD) that illustrates my point here:
I'm not laughing because I don't get it, I'm not laughing because it isn't funny
Oh wow, it’s observational comedy on a ridiculous contrived situation that requires Wikipedia-first-paragraph knowledge of Fibonacci Numbers to understand. ISN’T THAT FUNNY? FUCK NO!
95% of the people who laugh at this will never come close to getting married. The other 5%: Battle Trolls
Conclusion: there are more “Captain Planets” out there than Planeteers. Most of the time, the people who are better than you at something are better than you at mostly everything. The guy who is better than you at X is probably smarter than you, funnier than you, enjoys life more than you, and (with some practice) could kick your ass at whatever it is you’re best at.
Also, that person is not ugly or fat. Did Gaia give those rings to any ugly fat kids? Fuck no.
DC Hero To The Rescue 
Exactly the reason why u and most others are so boring to me. U for instance are a onesided megalomaniac. Yaaawn. bye
Power Rangers was definately more of a Voltron jacker than Captain Planet. Moreover, _has X, but Y is the formula at the basis of every ensemble/team action/adventure/heist story. See Ocean’s Eleven, A-Team, etc. The whole point is that each member has strenghts and weaknesses that compliment the strenghts and weaknesses of other team members forming a whole that is greater than the sum.
Just browsing around and found your site. Very nice post. Will be adding you to my RSS reader.
Aha, wrong. Wheeler was the buttmonkey, the foolish white capitalist american who carried the idiot ball in most episodes teaching people that only socialist racial minorities can be right. He was the member of the team who was used to present moral quandries by being stupid and wrong about everything.
People didn’t learn hope from captain planet. They learnt that russia was a socialist paradise with no environmental problems whilst america was a despoiled wasteland whose people only wanted to hurt. The creator was quite open about his purpose in interviews, and it’s pretty obvious in show.
So don’t worry. Captain Planet understood thats some people were inherently useless, such as Americans.
You truly have no idea how distasteful I feel this post is…
You seem to believe that if a person has a negative trait fat, ugly, bad, introverted, that they are worthless, and that if a person has a good trait hansom, athletic, hot wife(?), that they are probably the epitome of human greatness.
I subscribe to the belief that people have both good traits as well as not-so-good traits, I’m sure there are things that even Tom Brady isn’t good at. It is not that _____ has x but y, rather it is _____ has x also ____ has y (and z and q and m). They may not be related but there are certainly people who are good at one thing and kind of suck at another thing. The line about practicing to be as good at something as someone else is inherently ridiculous, there is no way that anyone could with just ‘a little practice’ kick the ass of someone else at what they are best at, if it is what they are best at they have probably practiced for a significant period of time and are very good at it. That would be like saying you could with ‘just a little practice’ be a better QB than Tom Brady, or smarter than Richard Dawkins. You may be able to see how this is becoming ridiculous (although I doubt it).
Lastly I think it is odd that you have bought the line that ‘all nerds/geeks are going to turn out to be fat depressed losers with no sex life’ hook line and sinker. Let me tell you from experience, many geeks turn out to be quite fit, happy, and married.
Anyway, there is about 0% chance my post changed your mind, but that wasn’t really the point to begin with so…
P.S.
– re: XKCD – Crime Scene – not their best I agree
XKCD – Names – you’re not laughing because you don’t understand