I think this is it

https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto...

>That family edutainment goal affected a lot of the show’s writing. Pyle didn’t want kids to see their family members as evil, ecologically speaking. “That’s one of the reasons we made the bad guys and their plans so ridiculous,” she explained, “We tried to point the finger at behaviors rather than industries. That way, no child would go home and say, ‘Oh, daddy, you’re in a blah blah business.’ It would be horrible for some child to see their family member as a Captain Planet villain.”

I do not see why it would be terrible for a kid to see the ramifications of their future due to their current lifestyle of a 2k+ sq ft detached single family house with an SUV and pickup truck and flights to Disney world as a villain.

Good goooood... and then we have left them most vulnerable and depressed and upset the foundation of the family, we will cut to commercials rife with aspirational advertising!

Yes, my student! Feel the power of the dark side!

Perhaps the child pressures the parent to change careers. Perhaps the parent pressures the child to “stop watching that stupid show” and Captain Planet’s audience shrinks. I know which one I’d bet on.

Pretty much exactly this.

My kids bring things up sometimes. We have a discussion about them, about our role in society, etc. But a good portion of the time the discussion becomes a lesson in critical thinking and not taking over-simplified idealistic pleas from randos on the Internet at face value.

bad idea to put adult burdens of conscience and politic on children -- let them be children for a while

You're not putting that on the child, you're putting it on the parent. The children will put pressure on them without being hurt in the process. I've seen similar things with smoking - children are taught smoking is very dangerous and they start asking their parents why they smoke. "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!" I know of several cases where the parents quit smoking in part because of their children. The children felt really proud of themselves, which is great.

I mean, the child is still the agent of change in that scenario— and it's perfectly possible for it to go the other way too, where no change occurs and the parent and child end up resenting each other over it.

I don't know if I'm necessarily making a value judgment either way here, but I don't think "get to them through their young kids" should be considered a general-purpose strategy for effecting societal change... and fear of this kind of thing is exactly what breeds mistrust in public education, parents pulling their kids out of sex ed, etc etc.

It's true, but the opposite strategy - sugarcoat the truth to avoid raising uncomfortable questions about the status quo - also breeds mistrust in education and institutions. All we can really try to do is present our best view of the truth, with all the uncertainties around that. Does smoking cause lung cancer? That certainly appears to be where the weight of evidence sits, and it would be a lie of omission to avoid saying so. Should you quit smoking? That's up to you.

That's true. The alternative is a bland world of platitudes where no one ever says anything and all the conflicts are fully made up (as in the case of over-the-top villains for a cartoon purportedly about being good stewards of the environment).

> "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!"

This would definitely have a negative impact on a child growing up- feeling like I had to worry about my parents' health when I was ~12 definitely did.

It's terrible if your goal is to sell a TV show to kids, whose viewing is controlled by their parents.