Ted Turner just died at 87. The CNN founder also created Captain Planet, and the cartoon is the most underrated thing he ever built.
In 1989, Turner gave Barbara Pyle a job title that didn't exist anywhere else on Earth. Vice President of Environmental Policy at Turner Broadcasting. She was the first corporate executive in the world with the word "environment" in her title. He hired her to make environmental programming the spine of his network.
The economics killed this idea everywhere else. In 1990, kids' Saturday morning TV was funded by toy companies, sugary cereal brands, and fast food chains. A show whose villains were named Hoggish Greedly, Looten Plunder, and Verminous Skumm could not be sold to those advertisers. Network executives would have ended the pitch in the meeting.
Turner approved it himself. He owned TBS, owned Turner Program Services, and ran the syndication. Captain Planet went from his network to his audience with zero advertiser veto. It ran 113 episodes across six seasons in over 100 countries. At one point it sat at #1 in the Nielsen ratings for kids' programming.
The voice cast tells you who got recruited. Whoopi Goldberg as Gaia. LeVar Burton as Kwame. Martin Sheen, Meg Ryan, Sting, Jeff Goldblum, Tim Curry, Louis Gossett Jr., Danny Glover. A-list rates absorbed by the network owner because the network owner cared about the message.
In 1991, Pyle negotiated a percentage of merchandising revenue into a foundation. The Captain Planet Foundation has funded over 3,700 youth environmental projects since. The cartoon was financing its own ground game.
In 1997, Pyle won the UN Sasakawa Environment Prize. First person from media ever. The same year, Turner pledged $1 billion to the UN, the largest publicly announced charitable donation in history at that point.
Most billionaires fund think tanks and op-eds. Turner ran a cartoon nobody could veto into the bedrooms of a global generation.