#2) Captain Planet Solves The Troubles, the Israeli-Palestine Conflict, and Apartheid. In One Episode.

In addition to the environmental and social issues it terribly mishandled, Captain Planet also made a few ill-advised forays into politics. Like, oh, the massive ongoing war in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants in an episode sensitively titled “If It’s Doomsday, This Must Be Belfast”

For those unfamiliar, this was basically a rolling civil war between the Irish and English over who was going to run Northern Ireland, with all the added fun of religious and ethnic tensions exploding into roughly forty years of violence. Over three thousand people have died and they’re still occasionally shooting at each other.

You know, perfect for the kiddies. Especially when you can sum up the Catholic and Protestants not as two groups with very different religious and political views that spent decades trying to reconcile each other to live in peace, but as a bunch of rival gangs with funny accents:

It ends with a Protestant and a Catholic fighting over who gets a nuke before Wheeler steps in and says “Guys, it’s important that we forgive, right?”

And that ends the entire dispute. Thanks, idiot American teenager!

You might be wondering why they chose this instead of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The answer is that it’s a subplot in the same episode. Oh, and they’re also dealing with apartheid in yet another subplot. See, it’s all a plan by Verminous Skumm to sell nukes so people who hate each other can blow each other up. All we need is the Sierra Club’s idea of the Rainbow Coalition to visit and solve these complex issues in, oh, ten minutes.

But, hey, at least they didn’t try to explain the evil of Nazism to little kids.

#1) Captain Planet Vs. Hitler

Oh wait. They did.

We could tell you about this episode, but let’s just say it goes about as well as you’d expect trying to explain Hitler and his actions to grade schoolers