The Power Is Yours  (Or “Lies To Children”) A My Life in Horror

The Power Is Yours  (Or “Lies To Children”) Captain Planet: A Reflection on Childhood Fears A My Life in Horror

Beneath the superficial positivity and apparent empowerment is an attempt to foist responsibility for the abuses and indulgences of older generations onto the young: “Here’s the mess we’ve made of the planet. Now you go and fix it.” The fact that said younger generations were  -and remain- uniquely powerless in the face of those phenomena is the most blatant species of corporate and cross-generational gaslighting. 

If you were born in any decade following World War 2, it’s likely apocalypse looms large in your psyche (whether you realise it or not). Being a child of the mid-1980s, I was born into an era of pervasive and imminent catastrophes: 

From lingering nuclear Armageddon to economic and industrial collapses, from epidemics, pandemics etc to escalating awareness of human-authored environmental disaster, the threat of annihilation was everywhere, and no less so in media aimed at children (at us). 

The cultural wasteland of 1980s UK was a fascinating one: The place of media in the home environment had escalated to the point that it was assumed as part of our existence: The development and widespread availability of home video meant we had access to cinema and TV in a way no prior generation did. The lingering publishing boom meant that every wall boasted sagging bookshelves stocked with everything from Stephen King novels to multiple volume encyclopedias.

New media such as video and computer games were becoming more and more an established part of that portrait (once again, fuelled by booming industries both at home and abroad). Toys, comic books, novels, films, video games, cartoons. . .they became the very stuff of childhood, such that nostalgia for 1980s/1990s children’s media has become an industry powerful enough to dictate the state of culture itself (here in 2024, we find ourselves in the latter-years of the traditional 30-years-nostalgia-cycle, in which culture becomes obsessed by the nigh-mythic decades of 30 years prior. In the 1980s, that obsession was with the 1950s, the styles and music and cinema of which made an enormous comeback).

A fascinating element of our media is how profoundly it -often unconsciously- reflected the apocalyptic concerns and paranoia of the era. Many of our cartoons, particularly those aimed at boys, are clearly post-Vietnam in ethos, often involving conflict between clearly defined “good” and “bad” guys, often casually and profoundly racist to the present-day eye. Surprisingly, many of them also reflect more immediate cultural concerns: 

One of my personal favourites, and one I follow up to its present-day incarnations, is The Transformers;

a franchise involving a war between two factions of feuding alien robots whose conflict-ravaged world has been desolated and sapped of all but the merest resources (the war itself revolves profoundly around the robot’s perpetual need for energy to power their weapons and, indeed, mechanical bodies). 

Anyone who lived through the 1980s -and the prior decade- will recall the energy crises of the era: Owing to numerous historical and economic factors, energy of all kinds -from gas to electricity- was in fluctuating supply, often resulting in power cuts and shortages that could last for days at a time (unthinkable in the present-day digital age). Retrospective analysis of the era and the myriad wars initiated by the U.S.A and the U.K throughout the Middle-East and beyond reveals that much of this strife was inspired, at least in part, by those country’s reliance on foreign fuel sources (of course, the official line was always far removed from such predatory concerns, usually involving ideological rhetoric borrowed from the extant Cold War). 

Whilst I sincerely doubt the writers of The Transformers cartoon and comics were consciously aware of it -for the most part-, those cultural and historical factors clearly underpin the core narrative of the franchise, communicating them to their audience in a narrow, simplified form. As a member of those audiences, I can’t say to what degree that affected or influenced the state of my mind and imagination (not to mention my politics); only that I became keenly aware of the impending “death of history” saturation of culture -that would blossom more fully in the 1990s- from a very young age. 

Another prominent children’s franchise of the era, Thundercats, begins its story with a literal apocalypse:

The eponymous alien cat-people’s home-world of Thundera explodes in spectacular fashion while a handful of refugees escape in a battered star-ship. The fate of Thundera is a cartoon portrayal of images and concerns that existed in the collective consciousness, that drove so much of the materialist distractionism and petty politics of the era. Here is the future we all fear: The death of our planet, the extinction of our species (the fact that the nature of Thundera’s apocalypse isn’t explored until much later also leaves some curious and sinister space into which audiences might insert the numerous species looming in their own minds). 

Even more curious is the eventual world the Thundercats settle on: A place of deserts and desolation, of strange, scattered remanets of humanity, aliens, robots and other, less-defined species, labelled “Third Earth,” by its inhabitants. Whilst the show doesn’t necessarily delve too deep into the fact, this is clearly meant to be our own Earth some hundreds of millions of years into the future, when most traces of recognisable civilisation have been scoured away, what humanity remains devolved into various groups and nomadic peoples. 

There’s a strange inevitability in the Thundercats portrayal of the future Earth; a sense that all we know and recognise will eventually end and be forgotten. Once again, the exact nature of the cataclysms that brought Earth to this condition are left vague, but it’s clear that environmental catastrophe, war and even mythological revelation played some part (the only entity that might be able to tell is the show’s antagonist: The immortal “demon priest” Mumm-Ra, who presides over this empire of ruin, and he’s barely forthcoming on the matter). 

Whilst none of this is directly explored in the cartoon (a huge missed opportunity), it is heavily implied through the aesthetics of Third Earth;

the grungy, dark and dismal painted backdrops, the poisoned swamps, seemingly-eternal deserts, haunted wastelands. Even the horizons against which the action occurs are often portrayed in oppressive, dusky or stormy tones, as though nature and reality are breaking down. What frugal pockets of civilisation the eponymous cat-people encounter are always tribal and/or nomadic in nature, largely ignorant of any prior history, whatever cataclysms occurred having wiped the slate clean. 

Aesthetic or implied as it might be, it’s a curious condition in which to set a children’s cartoon; one that subtly addresses the pervasive cultural and political concerns of the era, that even those of us barely-born experienced.

Other cartoons and children’s media of the time address those concerns in a somewhat more cynical fashion:

The likes of G.I.Joe (Action Force in the UK) and the more science-fiction based M.A.S.K utilised imagery and language relating to the political climate of the time, primarily from a jingoistic, ra-ra pro-military stance in which absolute good did battle against forces of absolute evil, chaos and “terrorism.” These two examples took the opposite position to Thundercats and Transformers, painting primary-coloured pictures of a world in which evil and entropy are not systemic, historically based but are the results of external forces, defined “enemies” and bad people inevitably doing bad things.

They refuse to address -or even refer to- the wider problems many other cartoons of the time did,

instead settling for a species of right-wing distraction in which military and technological might is ALWAYS morally correct, conflict is ALWAYS inevitable and the “Bad Guys” are evil innately, not proponents of alternative ideology or positions, but simply evil, simple wicked people. The cartoon’s intention is clearly Capitalist in nature (i.e. to sell kids plastic), but dovetailing with that -entirely cynical- intention is a profoundly troubling political dimension (marrying in children’s minds the enthusiasm and positive association of a new toy or favourite cartoon with militaristic propaganda, jingoism and demonisation of “the other” not the least of their sins). 

It’s also notable that M.A.S.K in particular features its heroes and forces of “good” waging war against evil and entropy in vehicles, many of which are iconic of certain U.S. cultural myths of itself (the big-rig, muscle cars, motorbikes and more). Even were it not the explicit intention of the shows themselves, they can’t help but be influenced by -and become redolent of- the cultural concerns and political climates of their creation. M.A.S.K in particular is an interesting portrait of a species of normalised U.S. life which is aggressive in its conformity, in which every disruptive element is external and the product of caprice, stupidity and/or insanity. There’s an especial kind of horror when one glances back at these childhood influences and wonders: 

How much of this is in me? To what degree did this influence and shape my developing imagination, my identity? 

Both G.I.Joe and M.A.S.K also stand as expressions of the U.S A’s intention to export a particular idea of itself as not only militarily and technologically unassailable, but as some great bastion of civilisation in where the questions of history have been satisfactorily answered, in which there can be no upheaval or disruption that doesn’t originate from the evil beyond its borders, because all is as it should be. 

To adult eyes, it’s a distressing portrait of how forces of Capitalism and global militarism married in the late 1980s/early 1990s and became powerful enough to influence every aspect of our cultures and media. 

Perhaps the most conspicuous examples of these media-focussed assaults upon the young occurred in the early 1990s: As general awareness of our effect on the environment became more pervasive, so certain cynical forces saw opportunity for their own agendas: 

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the multi-billion dollar, Ted Turner “eco-project” that was Captain Planet. 

An extremely popular Saturday morning cartoon, Captain Planet ostensibly stood as an attempt to educate and galvanise the young regarding the various environmental issues facing the world in the early 1990s. This was certainly how the show was marketed; a fairly unique project of its time, one that might seem problematic to criticise in terms of its intention (after all, wasn’t it  trying to spread awareness, to educate, to spur to positive action?). 

The problems arise when one examines the phenomena beyond a surface level: For all of its purported positive intentions, Captain Planet stands as a remarkable expression of contempt for its young audience: 

First of all, the product itself was hardly a “clean” or environmentally friendly enterprise: As well as the obvious costs incurred by the production of the cartoon itself, it also spawned entire ranges of merchandise, from plastic toys to video games, all of which now occupy landfill. The innate hypocrisy is an especial species of Capitalist, dystopian horror that emphasises just how blinkered and self-destructive these systems are and have always been. 

Secondly, and arguably most significant, is the message of the project: 

Encapsulated in the slogan: “The power is yours,” the show did a remarkable job trying to convince six-to-twelve-year-olds that they had some sway or influence upon the titanic, corporate engines vandalising the environment. Beneath the superficial positivity and apparent empowerment is an attempt to foist responsibility for the abuses and indulgences of older generations onto the young: “Here’s the mess we’ve made of the planet. Now you go and fix it.” The fact that said younger generations were  -and remain- uniquely powerless in the face of those phenomena is the most blatant species of corporate and cross-generational gaslighting. 

We had no power whatsoever at the time, being barely out of the cot, and increasingly lacked the influence necessary to change or influence those engines as we grew up.

Within the show itself, the “solutions” presented are invariably magical and mythical.

The young protagonists use their elemental rings to overcome the evils they’re set against, ultimately combining those elements to summon the eponymous eco-super-hero. 

This, of course, flies in the face of the show’s purported ethos and project: Magical and mystical solutions are of no help given the very real, material crises facing the world. Furthermore, the existence of such in the world the cartoon paints makes the very phenomena of ecological collapse questionable: If there are spirits and magic and supernatural forces, why don’t they just use their powers to end pollution and ecological vandalism for good? Why appeal to young people and place them in danger when there are magical solutions to such problems? 

The dynamic of the cartoon is also problematic in other ways: Rather than acknowledging the systemic problems resulting in ecological disaster, the show paints a scenario in which everything would be basically okay were it not for a handful of freakish “bad guys” who seem to have no other motivation than polluting and vandalising for the prurient joy of it. This presentation of the issues the show purports to address is profoundly skewed and serves to distract from the real and profound sicknesses inherent to the societal systems history has left us with: 

“The problem is not the insatiable materialism and production of Capitalism; the problem is just a few bad apples who operate entirely outside of those assumptions.” 

The central criticism and dynamic of the project is therefore off-kilter, more of an obfuscation and distraction than any genuine attempt to tackle the issues. As one of the children exposed to the project, upon whom it attempted to impose responsibility for the sins of prior generations, I have to wonder what effect that had on our psyches both collectively and on an individual level: 

“The power is yours.” 

It’s funny, because I never felt “empowered” by any of this, and never have in the years since. Whatever “power” Captain Planet spoke of was always nebulous and ill-defined, something its core audience could neither comprehend nor exercise. What “power,” exactly, did late-1980s/early 1990s kids have against the bloated, rampaging powers of Neoliberalism and corporatism that were then at their heights?

Furthermore, though we couldn’t articulate it to ourselves at the time, in us all was the inchoate suspicion of the message’s euphemistic nature: 

When the eponymous Captain and his teenage cohorts proclaim their slogan, it’s not as the words might make it seem: What we have in Captain Planet is a fairly scurrilous attempt to foist responsibility for a dying world on the shoulders of the young, who have neither the power nor resources to heal it. “The power is yours” may as well have subtitles reading: “The responsibility is yours, as you’re the ones that are gonna have to deal with the consequences as you get older. Suck it, kids.” 

In retrospect, it’s a bleakly dystopian expression of cross-generational abuse; an effort by elder generations -but also, the corporate structures they’ve built- to wash their hands of the situation. On top of this is the cynical profiteering from the message that came part-and-parcel of the product. We, as kids at the time, did not understand this, but I believe that, as we’ve grown older and experienced the cynicism and deceitfulness of such phenomena in a more conscious way, we’ve come to appreciate the true, inextricable horror of it: 

As our media endlessly, endlessly insists:

We are children of imminent apocalypse, born into a world on the brink of myriad species of disaster. Most of the cartoons and fiction we experienced as children  reflect this in some fashion, be it subtly, as in Thundercats’s setting or overtly, as in Captain Planet’s grotesquely insincere sermonising. That influence during our formative years, alongside numerous other factors, has left us peculiarly scarred and strangely put-together in psychological terms: 

Apocalypse has always loomed large in our psyches; a pervasive, undeniable sense that the systems we operate in are ephemeral and prone to inevitable collapse. As we’ve grown, the nature of those collapses has expanded and conflated, from the lingering spectre of Cold War nuclear annihilation to pandemics, economic catastrophe, war and a whole host of others. Ours is arguably amongst the earliest post-World War generations to grow up with this status drilled into us and reinforced every moment of our young lives. Though I can only speak personally, the consequences of that input have been profound: 

Systems are artefacts of profound cynicism and inevitable decay, in my purview:

The evils of society are almost universally systemic at root, symptoms of more fundamental, underlying corruption that most people refuse to perceive or consider. By the same token comes a profoundly problematic sense of displacement; it’s difficult to fully or sincerely engage with mechanisms you know are also primed to destroy you and themselves at any given juncture. The resultant divorce from society can be extremely damaging, leaving one feeling like a ghost in those machines, ineffective and without volition. 

From our earliest experiences of culture, we have operated under a cloud of foreboding cataclysm, the exact nature of which varies, but is always marketed to us as something we not only can fix, but have an obligation to. The profound sense of our own impotence in this regard thus clashes with what our media insists: We have “the power,” and are flawed if we can’t access or exercise it. 

I believe this goes some way to explaining some of the generational eccentricities we -Generation X, Millennials, early Gen-Z- experience: 

We Millennials are often remarked upon for our oddness, our separation from the societal systems our forebears expect us to engage with and their assumptions of what life “should” be. It is often the case that we operate in strange circumstances, outside of the same trajectories of living that defined our parents and their parents: 

We express a certain strain of anti-materialism, non-standard family and romantic structures, unusual domestic arrangements etc. Furthermore, we evince a pervasive suspicion and cynicism of prescribed systems. This is partially due to our experience of those phenomena over the last 40 years (almost every moment of which has provided further evidence and impetus for our continued rejection thereof), but it also finds root in the media we were subjected to, that -often subtly and outside of direct authorial intent- cultivated an indelible mistrust regarding the prescriptions of tradition and history (after all, isn’t it those very phenomena that have led us to the brink of extinction?).

Speaking to slightly older friends and colleagues, I find an even more sincere despair regarding said systems deriving from the lingering dread of nuclear annihilation bred by the Cold War: 

Those who experienced stark screeds for nuclear disarmament such as Threads and When The Wind Blows now, in their adulthood, exhibit an abiding wariness for the structures that almost brought us to the brink of unravelling, the poisoning of the planet and the slow extinction of humanity. Those who experienced the likes of Threads in their childhood would be forgiven for removing themselves entirely from the narratives prescribed by culture and lived by their forebears:

Unlike the pseudo-environmental messages I grew up with, these works don’t even pretend that their audience has any particular power to affect change: They simply provide stark and nihilistic omens of what will come to pass should the inevitable insanity of history reach its suicidal conclusion. I can’t quite imagine what it must be to have grown up with the prophecies of Threads lingering behind your eyes. I can certainly extrapolate how young people exposed to the work might abandon hope for the future entirely, descending into despair and fatalism rather than being spurred to action.

Interestingly, once the fetishistic commercialisation of environmental issues inevitably expended itself, the likes of Captain Planet died a death towards the mid-1990s, as corporate agenda and intrigue turned elsewhere, to more profitable pursuits. The imposition of responsibility for the situation on children and the powerless also faded, leaving behind only a lingering sense of foreboding. Conditioned with images and impressions of apocalypse, we transitioned into early adulthood with a pervasive and abiding sense of scepticism regarding enshrined and prescribed systems (all of which seemed ultimately intent on self-destruction). 

That so many of us developed mental health problems during this period is, perhaps, not much of a surprise:

On the one hand, we had endless and insatiable pressures to conform, forces demanding our quiet compliance in the face of their abuses. On the other, we had the lingering insistence that said forces were driving us towards imminent extinction and that we must act in order to arrest it. 

Spitted between those irreconcilable extremes, we found ourselves unable to satisfy either one, to discover appropriate place and trajectory for ourselves. Many of us suffer various forms of anxiety and depression partially as a result, not to mention a host of other mental health issues. 

That lingering disparity, the sense of exile and separation from the systems and status quo others engage with seemingly without thought or effort, has only deepened as we’ve grown, as has the more conscious rejection of those assumptions. This is often not an enviable position; it leaves us floundering, unable and unwilling to engage with systems that, since we first became sentient, have promised nothing but disgrace and death. 

Yet, we are endlessly enjoined to do so, much as Captain Planet and its ilk enjoined us to engage with its empty, asinine message of pseudo-empowerment. We find ourselves adrift, cast out from comfort or certainty and the possibility of either. Our lives become scrabbles through thorns and broken glass, not knowing where to turn or derive direction from. 

This, at least, was certainly my experience of these phenomena; experience that has found echoes in those of others down the years, similarly subjected to the same impositions of media, the same lies to children. 

The power is yours. 

Such hollow, banal, insincere nonsense. Such sub-textually presumptuous imposition. What power did we exercise or express, exactly? What means of utilising that power did the show provide? 

Because, rather than providing instruction on the collective movement and action that might well have proven a form of effective power, the likes of Captain Planet is sadly Reaganite, Neo-liberal at its core, championing the apparent power of the individual over the collective, of superficial exhibitions of power over the slow, subtle transformations that only consistent pressure can bring. In the show, all solutions are magical or miraculous: The variously teenage “Planeteers” use their magical, elemental rings to solve the environmental catastrophes of the week, usually “combining” their powers to summon the eponymous Captain in extremis (who flits around undoing whatever damage has been done with his super powers while wise-cracking like a hack comedian). 

In terms of genuine solutions or direction, there’s none to be had here. A particularly cynical part of my adult, left-wing self asserts that this is partially due to the fact that any sincere solution involves the dismantling of the assumptions and systems upon which the creators of Captain Planet rely for their own privilege and comfort. In truth, however, it lacks even that degree of self-awareness or insight:

The show simply believes in itself quixotically, sincerely and naively assuming that its token “message” is moral and action enough. Nor does it comprehend the more sinister implications of its own subtext: 

The creators of this show had no notion that they were -rather callously and off-handedly- foisting responsibility for previous generation’s sins onto children and other powerless demographics. The show sincerely lacks that degree of intelligence or insight. But it is something that we who were children, and therefore the target demographic of the era, carry with us (for better and worse). 

This factor of our upbringing is, of course, not entirely unique: It’s arguable that every generation since World War 1 has lived with not only the possibility of apocalypse but the near-certainty of it. When one reads the recollections and journals of those who were young at the time, it did indeed seem as though the world was ending, falling apart (and, in certain key ways, they weren’t wrong). 

What we find in the Cold War paranoia pieces such as Threads, When The Wind Blows etc, and later in the omens of environmental catastrophe promised by Captain Planet et al, are echoes and expressions of a reluctant intimation, an entirely rational dread of the traditions and systems that have brought us to these apocalypses. The true horror of it all lies not in the specifics or dynamics of this apocalypse over that, but that they are entirely avoidable phenomena brought about by short-sighted greed, opportunism and near-psychotic political impulse. 

Even if we were to collaborate solutions for the problems Captain Planet broaches,

if we were to remove ourselves from the looming shadow of nuclear self-destruction, the fundamental sickness of the systems that cultivated them still remains, and will contrive new species of self-destructive atrocity as natural symptoms of their cancerous conditions. 

That, more than anything, is the peculiar horror of Captain Planet’s misguided messaging; the imposition upon children of narratives for the world’s ending they haven’t the means to control or barely influence, and the consequent divorce they (we) experience from societal systems that so much of our formative input insisted were set on destroying us. 

We are caught between  irreconcilable positions, stretched in every which way until we can’t stand or sustain it any more: 

On the one hand, we have it drilled into us from the youngest age that tradition and the systems of history have failed and are hurtling us towards extinction. On the other, we are pilloried, demonised and denigrated for not engaging with and perpetuating those systems on their own terms, in their classically cancerous states. We simply cannot win, no matter what we do, what message we take on board or action we take. 

It’s therefore little wonder that so many of us bow out entirely, refusing to engage, seeking out our own designs and definitions of happiness, career, family, love etc. 

Phenomena like Captain Planet demonstrate why and how abyssal the generational gulf yawns between us and our forebears: It is merely a microcosm of the manner in which Reaganite/Thatcherite ideology treated us and those that came after: As consumers and expendable commodities, little life-style extensions and expressions of materialist, status-obsessed vanity. 

It is a horror of our existence that, for many, remains inchoate, ill-defined and unexpressed, simmering away as quiet neuroses and mental health crises that explode in less-than-oppprtune ways and moments. 

And it is something we can never entirely reconcile: It is as indelibly part of us as the Cold War trauma or lingering atrocities of World Wars 1 and 2 were for previous generations. It is bound up with our assumptions of identity and reality, inextricable, despite any effort we might make to disabuse ourselves. That, perhaps, is the most sincere horror of all: 

It is part of us. That cultural imposition, that corporate abuse: It infected and infiltrated us at our most impressionable stages, worming its way into our minds and assumptions of developing self. Any effort we make to question or dissect it now, in our adulthoods, is also self-mutilating by its very nature: 

We are turning the scalpels on ourselves and exposing our most intimate neuroses, points of weakness and compromise that are difficult for us to acknowledge, let alone explore. 

It hurts to realise that the media, the cultures that endlessly enjoin us to engage with them, that proclaim to love and shield and sustain us, are flawed and abusive in these ways. It’s especially scurrilous when that abuse comes cloaked in the guise of a positive and empowering message, the patina of which is all hope, smiles and primary colours. 

“The power is yours.” 

Lies to children are still lies to children, no matter how pretty or positive they pretend to be. 

George Daniel Lea 20-10-204