“Captain Planet” could never be made with adult protagonists (or at least not when written by Manga creators)

So we start this thing out with a thought that occurred to me today, whilst walking home from the hospital after dropping off the On Call phone, and a thought that I will type out now because if I don't I will forget it:
Ma-Ti actually possibly had the best power... or at least one for a team based tactical game with strict vision rules.
Hmm...
I probably should back up a little bit there.

I was walking home and thinking about a game that I have just picked up on the Steam sales. It's called “Frozen Synapse” and I can best describe it as a board game with simultaneous movements. Both players make their minions moves by a series of waypoints and, once both players are satisfied with their minions' moves, the game plays out five seconds of action. If your guys happens to spot an opponent's minion during its movement, your guy will try to shoot him out. Person with guys left at the end of the game (or most guys left after a set period of time, or completes an objective when there is one) is the winner.
Quite a cool game and the single player aspects have an AI that is actually somewhat competent (a major plus for me).
Anyhew... You can play the game “Blind” or “Dark”, whereby you can only see what your guys see. You know what the level layout is, and you know the last position of the guys you have seen (or their starting position if you have not spotted them) but you can not see where the opponent has positioned their players if your minions can not see them now.

And, somehow whilst crossing the bridge (because I wasn't thinking Captain Planet at the time), this is when I made the thought “Ma-Ti has the best power”: The power of Heart has very limited uses... until you are completely blind to what the other people are doing. Once you know where they are, you are able to plan much more effectively. This is a common plot point in the series: Whenever the crew is stuck, Ma-Ti goes “Hang on a bit, let me see what the animals can...”. Suddenly, the birds tell him that the people they are chasing are over that way or a pod of dolphins knocks the boat enough to allow an escape. In short, if you had to leave any one out of the group, the last person would be Ma-Ti... and not only because he had a monkey.

I then realised that I had become somewhat corrupt in turning the biggest pacifist on the show in to something that I would use in tactical warfare.

Then I thought a bit further and each of the Planeteers could have been gods... or at least world dominating masterminds.

Let's devolve this in to a Cracked Article:

5) Gi – Water

Probably the show's second least-obviously useful character, short of Ma-Ti of course. This is largely because Gi's water abilities tended to need a reasonable body of water to be of any use to the Planeteers. I'm not even sure (and can not be bothered to look up) if she managed to make it rain or if rain was ever used in conjunction with her ring's power.
However, if I may be so bold, I'd like to suggest another use of Gi's ring.
The human body is roughly 65% water (give or take 10 percent, depending on who you talk to).
Elimination of opponents has never been easier.

Which, I guess sets the scene for the rest of this article.

4) Wheeler - Fire

As a kid, I (and pretty much everyone else) wanted to be Wheeler whenever we played Captain Planet. Control fire, burn things, hit on Linka. What's not to like? It's the most obvious choice for abuse of power. In the opening credits, he melts the road to stop a runaway van. Hell, even in the first episode he gets a burn when he claps his hands and says “That's HOT!”. It was probably because the ring knows a bad pun when it hears it. On an unrelated note, the fact that I can remember that piece of dialogue and not the finer points of Calculus that I actually trained hard in for many years mean that it was probably good that I did not become a true scientist.
Of the characters, he's the only one that regularly creates his speciality out of nowhere. All the rest require a source for their abilities (Linka being a notable exception only by proxy because Air, therefore wind, is pretty much everywhere on the surface). It wasn't often that there was fire around, so Wheeler generally created it. This, combined with the nature of his power, means that he is also the one most likely to be able to cause wanton destruction.
Your vehicle appears to be running on a combustion engine. Watch me explode it.
You are polluting the river with toxic waste? Watch your factory incinerate.
You were shooting at us until I made you do the burny dance.
You disagree with me, therefore must burn. Please spontaneously combust.
That sort of thing.
Fun.
Note those last two? Yeah, that's exactly what a psychopathic wielder of fire would do (or at least it would be if I were writing the story). Does that say something disturbing about me? I'd like to think that power corrupts.

3) Kwame – Earth

In terms of abilities, this is actually one of the better ones from the get go because, short of being in space, mid air or in the ocean, the planet is largely comprised of... well.... earth. His leadership stopped many a quarrel between the Planeteers and his attachment to land was probably the reason he was given his particular ring.

Kwame was a pretty cool guy with the pretty cool ability to rend the planet's crust at will.
Wait... that wasn't meant to sound ominous.
Kwame was the leader of the crew, and his powers involved protecting the planet by destroying the local environment and reshaping it at will.
Ooops... that makes him sound like a bad guy.
Kwame could have made many awkward teenage moments more real when they say that they want the earth to swallow them up.
Hmm.... this is harder than I thought.

2) Linka – Wind

For some reason, the creators of the show thought it would be a good idea to have the American character hitting on the USSR character. For some reason, the USSR character kept rebuking the dumb US citizen's come ons. It was a crazy crazy time.
Linka was the wind-controlling person of the crew. In fact, I'd like to think that the scientists who are testing this out did so because they too wanted to be Linka, but this was the only way they could possibly do that without being a Russian teenage girl.
We don't really need to think too hard about how the wind can screw things up when in the wrong hands... Like flying cows.

The world needs more flying cows.

Anyway, this is another easy one to subvert... mainly because you need to breathe. All your breathing is doing is your chest creating a low pressure zone for the air to come in to your lungs... why not use the power of wind to take that to the next level to teach the baddies a lesson by hyperinflating them?
And we could always do hilarious sudden vacuum cartoon body explosion if you want the wind to go to the other direction.

This gif never gets old.

1) Ma-Ti – Heart

No one, but NO ONE, ever wanted to be stuck with Ma-Ti. The only plus side to having Heart as your useless power is that you got a monkey side kick that did things for you.
Well, as noted in my initial statement, his powers are much much bigger when you factor in real team playing. Not only that, which is nearly lost in the cartoon, but he has the ability to control lesser minds and telepathic thought.
Let those sink in for a bit.
Let's start small and work our way up here.
If you are hiding around a corner, and Ma-Ti is actually doing his job, he can detect exactly where you are and direct the rest of the group to lay an effective beat down.
But why start there? Why not just contact the local fauna to give your position away?
Because that's no fun, and you should totally try dodging the local fauna he has directed to charge you.
But why stop at controlling entities outside of your body when you can directly control the tapeworm in your gut to perform the John Hurt moment?

Even better, using telepathic communication he could whisper all sorts of nonsense in your ear until, over a period of time, you go quite mad and do the job yourself. Assuming that he doesn't take control of you directly, you feeble minded person.
Ma-Ti is, basically, Professor X without the wheelchair. And with a Monkey.

***

So... yeah.
Thinking it through, a teenage kid these days would probably look somewhat more like the above if you were to give them magic power rings.
It's probably a good thing that I am not in control of writing children's shows.
Manga artists, on the other hand...

In wrapping up, I found out a few good things whilst researching for this:
A lot of high profile people provided voices for the cartoon.
Whoopi Goldberg was the original voice of Gaia.
Jeff Goldblum did Verminous Skumm,
Tim Curry was MAL, Dr. Blight's computer (Dr. Blight being voiced by Meg Ryan).
The original Zarm was Sting, and then Malcolm McDowell took over.
Martin Sheen did Sly Sludge.
There are a few others, but these are the main stand outs.

Amusingly, because I had forgotten about the character, there is a Duke Nukem. Remember the story arc where the bad guys get rings of their own? His was radiation based (strangely enough). That makes me an evil character, I think...

Finally, there has been an attempted gritty reboot (which I am sure would feature some of the above) AND a live-action show.
Why we were spared these, I don't know... but I will be sure to thank a higher power for that.