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Is Ted Turner the real Captain Planet? That’s what he says in Lizz Widdicombe’s hilarious “Talk of the Town” segment of this week’s New Yorker (“Born Green”), in which she catches up with the man who claims to be the one who beat Al Gore to telling the world an inconvenient truth with his now-defunct TBS cartoon, “Captain Planet and the Planeteers.” (Sounds like a bad ’70s funk ensemble.) The story comes from an Atlanta fundraiser for Turner’s Captain Planet Foundation. In the article, he boasts that he was his own inspiration for the Captain Planet character, who does battle with all the earth-unfriendly nasties out there.

Here’s a sample from the article:

With the show, Ted Turner is fond of saying, he invented a television genre that he called “edu-tainment” — a noble endeavor but one that has taken a lot of grief over the years. Critics of “Captain Planet” have pointed to the broadness of its allegory (characters include “Kwame from Africa” and “Gi from Asia”), and the heavy-handedness of its plots (battles against a villain named Hoggish Greedly and a Pollution Syndicate), to suggest that it’s less entertainment than a vehicle for “left-wing propaganda,” as one watchdog group put it. But Turner remains unfazed. “In terms of programming, it’s the best thing I ever did,” he said the other day.

Really, Ted? As opposed to, um, non-programming? Whatev, it definitely struggles to stand the test of time, as this clip demonstrates. But there is a kitschy charm about the whole thing. See for yourself, Planeteers!

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