Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Spaceopoly Kill This Thread IX: The 24-Hour Version (Fifth Time)

I like this take on Captain Planet. There are four in the series, but I don't like the fourth installment particularly. The language in this gets a bit salty in these vids.

It's pretty awesome that some of the episodes are now available online. Ah, nostalgia's biting!

Captain Planet?

The problem with Captain Planet for me was that he was incredibly powerful, but the writers didn't have enough imagination with it. Now this guy knows how to be omnipotent!

I always preferred the five separate kids ... except for the weird *heart* kid.

Captain Planet was better when it was called Psi-Force!

The 5 Planeteers were exactly why I was watching the show. Agree with having them over Captain Planet. I never got into those old Japanese anime with the kids piloting giant mechas and then fusing them into one big robot.

The Wheeler/Linka relationship was kind of cute. The other three were kind of annoying.

What I didn't like was how they always treated Wheeler as the dumb useless kid, at least towards the beginning. He didn't have as much formal education as some of the others, so that was understandable. And his heart was in the right place, and his street smarts saved the group quite a few times.

Wheeler was supposed to be the character American kids could relate to, as they say. Some conservative groups protested because the American was the "dumb" one.

The problem with that was they only had one of the five be unfamiliar with all those concepts. It was like they implied that only the American kids would be out of their depth. Thankfully, he got more development in later seasons.

Yeah, when Hanna-Barbera took over the show, it changed to a lighter tone. The villains became less evil.

That's Hanna-Barbera for you. Although the rebooted Scooby-Doo franchise is decidedly darker in tone.

I don't get the appeal of Scooby-Doo. The original was okay, but it got progressively worse. The less said about Scrappy the better. Now, it's just overplayed.

It just has that inexplicable x-factor that makes it succeed where a Speed Buggy or a Hong Kong Phooey ultimately fail. I really can't explain it, especially how it endured after crappier versions of it were rolled out.

Neither can I. Maybe the 5 original cast members were just more memorable than those of similar cartoon series (Scooby preceded Josie and the Pussycats, Speed Buggy, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels...)

I have a soft spot for The New Scooy-Doo movies, each of which was an hour-long episode that featured either a (then) living real-life celebrity (such as Sonny and Cher or the Three Stooges) , or guests from a different cartoon (including Batman and Robin, and Josie and the Pussycats!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Scooby-Doo_Movies

Maybe it's because the Sonny and Cher episode was the very first cartoon I ever remember watching.

The development of Saturday morning cartoons in the late '60s and early '70s is really interesting.

In 1966, The Impossibles featured characters who were a rock band and were also super-heroes.

In 1968, The Archie Show featured characters who had a rock band, but were also just sort of normal teenagers.

In 1969, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? featured a group of teens who solved mysteries. It was originally to be called Mysteries Five in which the characters would have indeed been a rock band.

In 1970, Josie and the Pussycats featured a group of teens who solved mysteries, some of whom were in a rock band. Two years later they traveled into outer space in a rocket ship that looked like a barber pole.

Teens who solve mysteries. Don't even get me started on how many Hanna-Barbera produced!

Besides Scooby-Doo and Josie and the Pussycats, we have The Funky Phantom, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Speed Buggy, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kids, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Clue Club, Jabberjaw, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels and The New Shmoo.

The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan featured the voice of Keye Luke as Charlie Chan, the only actor of Chinese descent to play the role.

There would later be a series called the Jackie Chan Adventures featuring a fitcionalized Jackie Chan as an amateur archeologist.

In the Doctor Who episode "Utopia", there is a character bamed Chantho who is from a planet where one must say the first part of one's name at the start of speaking and the last part at the end. When asked what would happen if she didn't, she replied "Chan, that would be rude, tho."

Chan is a fairly common Chinese surname. I had three classmates named Chan, none of whom were related.

My surname is so unusual that when my mother moved to Houston the number of people with it in the city doubled.

I never thought your last name was so unusual. I mean, maybe it is where you live, but probably not, say, in New England.

There are more people with my name in Massachusetts than in any other state. I know there are also fair numbers in New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia. I don't know if I'm related to any of those folks. Even in those places, it's not a common name.