Combining, at last, the undeniable powers of Earth, Fire, Water, Wind, and Rampaging Millennial Nostalgia, Netflix has apparently landed a live-action reboot of ’90s animated superhero series Captain Planet. The series comes with some pretty hefty names attached, too, especially considering we’re talking about a reboot of the cartoon you only watched when Gargoyles turned out to be a rerun: Former TV superhero mastermind Greg Berlanti is producing, along with Leonardo DiCaprio’s environmentally focused Appian Way production company, and a little boost from Warner Bros. TV. The series is being written by Tara Hernandez, best known as co-creator of 2023’s AI-minded Peacock series Mrs. Davis.
Hollywood has been poking around at a Captain Planet revival for a few years now, because there’s no corpse of millennial childhoods so rotted or moldering that networks or streamers won’t try to chuck it in the machine and juice it to grab hold of a few more eyeballs. (Weirdly, many of these conversations were centered around Glen Powell, who, per Deadline, was set to co-write, and potentially star in, a live-action reboot for Appian a few years back; that project fell apart, but Powell apparently stayed enthused even as he ascended to higher tiers of fame after Top Gun: Maverick.)
News of the revival comes during a lull in Berlanti’s reputation as a TV hitmaker. His Arrowverse is dead and gone; Riverdale blasted itself into various alternate universes back in 2023; his effort to give a similar live-action reboot treatment to The Powerpuff Girls never got off the ground. (He does have a few shows in production at the moment, Brilliant Minds and All American, but his most high-profile project at Netflix, You, just ended its heavily narrated run.) This is actually the second “live-action adaptation of an old cartoon” project Berlanti Productions is working on at the moment: The studio is also developing a live-action version of Scooby-Doo. (Never let it be said that the man doesn’t have a wheelhouse.)
The original Captain Planet And The Planeteers was cooked up by Ted Turner and Barbara Pyle, Vice President of Environmental Policy at TBS, as a form of environmentally focused edutainment back in the 1990s. The series actually existed in two runs, with the original, which debuted in 1990, noted for bringing in a lot of high-profile performers—including Meg Ryan, Jeff Goldblum, Whoopi Goldberg, Martin Sheen, and Sting—to voice its adult characters. (Mostly the baddies.) The show was rebooted by Hanna-Barbera in 1993, bringing in well-known voice actors like Maurice LaMarche to fill the gaps left by the A-listers.
The biggest question now facing the series, to our minds, is tone. The original Captain Planet was earnest, and a little hokey, pretty much by design, with its titular green-haired superhero summoned by a multi-cultural group of teenagers, and given to delivering environmental platitudes at-will. Figuring out how to mediate those impulses for modern brains feels like a pretty tall order, even before you get to all the awful things the internet has spent the last 30 years saying about poor, innocent Ma-Ti.
