Rick & Morty Makes The Original Captain Planet Much Darker

Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for Rick and Morty season 5, episode 3, “A Rickconvenient Mort.”

Rick and Morty presented a horrific take on the classic cartoon Captain Planet in the episode titled “A Rickconveinent Mort.” This is par for the course for the hit Adult Swim series about an amoral, dimension-hopping mad scientist and his socially awkward grandson, which often satirizes popular culture in a twisted fashion. However, the Captain Planet parody in “A Rickconveinent Mort” was notable in that it was not as dismissive as most Rick and Morty parodies and asked some serious questions regarding the source material.

The main story of “A Rickconveinent Mort” found Morty falling in love with Planetina; a conservationist superhero famed for her cheesy one-lines and positive attitude. With her green hair and silver skin, Planetina was a clear gender-swap of Captain Planet, even before the episode detailed her origin and how she was summoned into existence by the combined powers of four magic elemental rings controlled by “four young adults from each major ethnicity” dubbed the Tina-Teers. These young adults, who were shown to now be approaching middle-age having gotten their powers in the 1990s, were also obvious parodies of the Planeteers, who summoned Captain Planet in the exact same way whenever they faced a crisis they couldn’t overcome alone.

The chief conflict of the episode centered around Palentina starting to reciprocate Morty’s crush. While Morty’s mother and Smith family matriarch Beth was largely concerned about the inherent problems with her 14-year-old son dating a being who appeared to be an adult woman, the Tina-Teers were more worried about Morty distracting their cash cow from the busy schedule of personal appearances and autograph signings that made up the whole of her life when she wasn’t actively protecting the planet from pollution. This was a decidedly disturbing take on the Planeteers, suggesting that the idealistic young people originally chosen to build a better tomorrow became materialistic and used their power that was theirs to line their pockets. Worse yet, the Tina-Teers plotted to have Morty killed and were going to sell Planetina into sexual slavery to a wealthy fan, having apparently decided the “Phase 4 hero” was no longer a marketable property.

“A Rickconveinent Mort” became darker still, after Morty escaped from his captors and armed himself with the elemental fire ring. Disguised as a pizza delivery boy, Morty attacked the boardroom where the other Tina-Teers were meeting and began using the rings with lethal intent as he claimed them from the corpses of the Tina-Teers he had killed. Among the more creative uses of the rings was combining the powers of fire and earth to create a miniature volcano and filling a woman’s head with air until it popped like a balloon. This was in marked contrast to the original Captain Planet cartoon which, being aimed at children, never showed anyone dying violently and never showed the Planeteers using their powers to directly harm the villains, even though they had the power to summon fireballs, tornados, and earthquakes at will.

One interesting aspect of “A Rickconveinent Mort” is that it clearly respected the source material and showed that the writers had given some serious thought to various questions about the original Captain Planet cartoons. What happened to the Planeteers after they grew up? Did Captain Planet have an existence outside of being summoned to save the world? Can a person fall in love with a gestalt being that is essentially a sentient idea? Some of the best Rick and Morty episodes have been born of writers asking these questions and trying to answer them in the silliest (and sometimes darkest) ways imaginable and “A Rickconveinent Mort” can now be numbered among them.

About The Author

Matt Morrison
(1836 Articles Published)

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Matt Morrison has been writing about comics since before the word
“blogging” was coined. He got his start writing for the
legendary DC Comics digital fanzine Fanzing,
before receiving his own column, The Mount. Since then he has gone on
to write for over a dozen websites, including 411
Mania, Comics
Nexus and The Cult of Nobody. He holds both an MS in Information
Science from the University of North Texas and a BFA from the
University of Texas at Arlington. Known as a font of comic book
history trivia, he has delivered lectures on the history of American
Comic Books, Japanese Manga, Doctor Who, and Cosplay at over a dozen conventions
and served as an Expert In-Residence for a course on Graphic Novels
for Librarians at the University of North Texas. In addition to his
work for Screen Rant, Matt is currently the Editor In Chief of
Kabooooom.com and writes reviews for No
Flying, No Tights – a graphic literature and anime review site
aimed at teachers and librarians. He also maintains a personal blog –
My Geeky Geeky Ways –
which hosts his extensive episode guide for the television series
making up The Arrowverse as well as his
comedic Let’s Play videos. What little spare time he has is
devoted towards acting, role-playing, movie-riffing and sarcasm. You
can follow his adventures on Twitter, @GeekyGeekyWays.

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