It Can’t Acid Rain All the Time

Sustainable salutations, eco-warriors. This week, we have to go back…to 1991, when toy juggernaut Playmates gave kids across America a taste of nuclear waste with their action figures. That’s right: we’re looking at Toxic Crusaders and the mini-boom in environmentally-themed toyetic properties.

A quick recap for those who missed out on the 1991 neon nonsense that was Toxic Crusaders: loosely (very, very loosely) based on the 1984 Troma film The Toxic Avenger, the Toxic Crusaders cartoon followed the adventures of Toxie, a former nerd-turned-mutant-superhero whose toxic waste-derived powers help him battle Dr. Killemoff, an alien from the planet Smogula who’s bent on polluting Toxie’s hometown, Tromaville, and the rest of the planet. Joining Toxie in his never-ending battle against Killemoff and his infinite legions of Radiation Rangers are the Toxic Crusaders, a motley assortment of mutants. There’s Nozone (a test pilot who flew through the hole in the ozone layer), Major Disaster (he fell into a radioactive swamp—definitely not to be confused with Swamp Thing), and other weirdoes who’ve taken up the ecological cause.

Captain Planet helped kick off the eco-cartoon trend in 1990. An original property without an existing franchise to lean on, Captain Planet was created by Barbara Pyle (and, technically, Ted Turner), who used her post in Turner’s media empire to promote environmental causes. The cartoon was a hit (it lasted 6 seasons and had an impressively stacked voice cast) and it spawned an accompanying toy line (which Pyle insisted be produced sustainably, so that’s something).

Okay, but how did we wind up with a cartoon about mutant freaks from Jersey saving the planet from smog and sludge? The answer lies in part with acid rain. If you grew up in the 80s and early 90s, acid rain was a top-level concern, on par with quicksand, falling into wells, and getting trapped in a refrigerator in the local junk yard—all clear and present dangers to kids. Except, acid rain (basically, rain with high levels of nitric or sulfuric acid) was actually an environmental concern that prompted a coordinated response from the U.S., Canada, and other nations. Cartoon shorthand convinced kids that acid rain was acid that fell from the sky, and thus would burn off your clothes, scar you horribly, or otherwise turn you into a pile of goo.

The reality of acid rain was arguably worse, causing widespread pollution in waterways and forests and generally wrecking the delicate chemical balances that keep ecosystems functioning. If only dissolving jackets were the worst of our problems. Meanwhile, the 1980s was chock full of ecological disasters, from the Chernobyl meltdown to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, not to mention the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest, the hole in the ozone layer and…well, you get the picture. It’s not surprising anxiety around these crises bubbled up into the world of kids’ cartoons.

Of course, you can’t have a cartoon without toys, and Playmates, rolling in cash thanks to the success of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line, stepped in. The Toxic Crusaders hit shelves in all their gross neon glory in 1991 to coincide with the cartoon. Like their companions in the TMNT line, the toys were light on articulation but heavy on gross details (check out Nozone’s, uh, nose, but also: that wheelie foot!) and tiny (and easily lost) accessories.

Editor’s note: I picked up the figures pictured above at a swap meet in 2023 for $5 and thought I’d collect the whole line until I figured out going beyond the base figures themselves was not for the faint of wallet.

Toxie and company weren’t alone in staking out an ecological front in toy aisles in the early 1990s. Nor were they the only green-minded do-gooders ported over from existing R-rated franchises. In 1990, DC Comics hero Swamp Thing got his own cartoon and toyline—a kid-friendly spin-off of the darker Swamp Thing TV series on the USA Network, which was in turn a spin-off of the two Swamp Thing films from 1982 and 1989. Like Toxie, the animated Swamp Thing was fighting pollution in the Louisiana bayou and battling Dr. Anton Arcane and his Un-Men, another batch of mutants turned evil thanks to the power of mad science and lax EPA regulations. We sure did love our mutants in the 90s. Meanwhile, G.I. Joe also stepped into the environmental battle with the Eco Warriors subset, which featured a lot of neon and accessories that squirted water toxic waste/stuff that cleans up toxic waste. Kids love remediation!

Well, not really. While Captain Planet remained on-air for six seasons, neither Toxie nor Swamp Thing were as lucky, with both series (and their toys) vanishing after a year. And if acid rain itself feels like a distant memory, that’s because all that coordination between nations, along with policy changes, regulatory agencies, and activism paid off. This Scientific American article describes how countries came together to tackle the acid rain problem, and how we could do the same with climate change. Maybe we need some colorful-but-kinda-gross action figures to inspire us again.

Reading/Watching/Listening

A quick rundown of what I’m reading, watching, and listening to this week.

Reading: I’m still wading through a re-read of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I’m enjoying, even though I haven’t had a lot of time to devote to it. Also, this early 2024 article about vulture conservation in India is a fascinating read—vultures are cool as hell!

Watching: I watched a ton of horror movies during Spooky Season (which, tbh, is something I do every other month too) and capped October off with The People Under the Stairs, an underrated Wes Craven gem that only mildly exaggerates the horrors of the Reagan years.

Listening: The recent episode of Know Your Enemy, a podcast that guides listeners through the fever swamps of modern conservatism, features a great interview with historian Rick Perlstein. Also, my buds over at Bring Me the Axe covered some of horror’s greatest hits in October—those episodes are worth a listen.