Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Captain Progress

I remember Captain Planet, that 90s cartoon about saving the environment. Then I learned economics and I cringe when I read some of their old plots. Consider this gem:
NO SMALL PROBLEM
With landfills overflowing, Sly Sludge is ready to cash in on his new garbage reducing ray. But when the Planeteers threaten to expose his operation, Sludge shrinks them down and buries them in a sea of refuse. In jeopardy from toxic trash, and seagulls the size of jumbo jets, our heroes have to do some serious recycling in an effort to engineer their way out of their new "world of waste!"

Wait, reducing garbage is bad? Is it because he's making money or because he's not recycling? Talk about missing the industry for the firms.

I would love to make a comic about Captain Progress or maybe Captain Profit and the Profiteers. I'll develop this as the ideas come, but I'll need someone who can draw.

4 comments:

M said...

Might I suggest, instead of Profiteers, maybe Marketeers? Profiteer has a pretty negative connotation, and we want this cartoon to sound hip and fresh!

David said...

Captain Market and the Marketeers? Hmm. We could say, "Go Market!" I like it, but I was hoping to keep the same "P" pattern. Worth the exploration, though, as Captain Progress and the Progressives doesn't quite work...at all.

Ideally, the comic would feature the "villians" in the original as heroes, a group of capitalists making the world better (granted, the villians were kinda villians as they often violated property rights). They would then go up against the original "heroes" as they spat hypercaution protectionist domga.

Just like the original, I'd like to see the villians then get together and make evil versions of the rings to summon....hmmm...Captain Commune. Or something.

Anonymous said...

It seems like you run into the problem of either having the comic be just about the virtues of capitalism and the market, which isn't exciting, or it becomes a comic about ideological battles. The latter might be more exciting, but a bit less truthful, and you always run the risk of becoming Mallard Fillmore -- pedantic, annoying and (worst of all) decidedly not humorous.

David said...

Yeah, that was something else I became concerned with after I posted this. Clearly if this were to be a long-running series then a better name with fewer negative connotations would be better. How about Captain Liberate?