Jeff Goldblum, Meg Ryan, and Sting voiced the rotating cast of baddies. Whoopi Goldberg played Gaia, the spirit of the earth. LeVar Burton starred as Kwame, one of the teens.
From the beginning, the series’s good intentions and impressive pedigree (it was created by media mogul Ted Turner and activist Barbara Pyle) lured high-profile talent. It wasn’t hard to get fancy guest stars either. Given this undisguised do-gooderism, it wasn’t a stretch to tell a story about the ignorance that threatened those with HIV. Almost every episode was about an ecological disaster that was averted when the kids summoned the titular hero, an eco-conscious hunk with a seafoam-green mullet.
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Many were still terrified, but there was an emerging precedent for how to discuss the facts with a large audience.Īnd if any animated series was going to tackle the subject, it was Captain Planet, an action-adventure show about five kids battling dastardly villains that was also an unapologetic piece of climate activism. By 1992, however, the nation was slightly less frenzied, thanks in part to public figures like Magic Johnson revealing they were HIV positive, and TV movies like The Ryan White Story putting human faces on those with the disease. The Season 3 episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers premiered 30 years ago this week, making the TBS series one of the first children’s shows to directly address HIV and AIDS.īoth culturally and politically, this was probably the first moment when the episode could’ve been made, given the panic that surrounded AIDS in the ‘80s. It’s heavy-handed, weirdly paced, and features an Oscar-winning actress giving a terrible performance, but “A Formula For Hate” is still one of the most significant cartoons of the ’90s.
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