Remember the toxic waste cartoon craze of the 80s and 90s?
I'm thinking about it, and thinking it might be time for it to make a comeback.
It was such a weird time to be a kid in some ways. You could still play outside without folks calling Child Protective Services, there were still some parks most places. Stuff was often unaffordable for us, but there was nominally more disposable income flying around at the time, even if I never saw it in my own hands. (Mom was supplementing our food stamps by urban scavenging and going mushroom hunting with her genuinely enviable mushrooming skills -- and her even more enviable palate for mushrooms, and every year we got gifts from Toys For Tots and that was most, though never all, of what we'd get.)
I remember Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, also the Toxic Crusader. I often get the villains of The Toxic Crusaders mixed up a bit with Captain Planet, which also had villains gleefully filling lakes and such with TOXIC WAAAASTE. (I wonder how much of this was the Turner network.) I even had a Dr. Killemoff figure, which I just confirmed was the lead villain of The Toxic Crusaders, whose backpack would spout pollutants if you pressed it, as long as you occasionally opened it up and put flour in it. As I recall, he was trying to xenoform the world into being just like his home planet, which I think was Planet X -- a whole other subject I'm sure -- so that it was unlivable for humans but great for him. I don't honestly remember much about it, I just thought he was silly and fun, and I enjoyed faffing about with my Toxic Crusader toys like Headbanger and Nozone and Toxie, and the little cansters of TOXIC WAAAASTE!
G.I. Joe even had a stab at this. I remember when I was in grade school we managed to afford a G.I. Joe villain who had a backpack squirtgun on him that you'd fill with water, then spray at other Joes figures, and their colors would change to represent corrosion from the TOXIC WAAAASTE!
Captain Planet deserves way more mention here, but I honestly only remember vaguely crushing on the villainess with the hair that covers the scarred half of her face. Everything else kinda didn't stick much in my memory.
We can't forget the granddaddies of this, of course. There's such old figures as Daredevil, but also in direct relation to him there's the shockingly popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Toxic mutagens were flung around like candy corn in some of those cartoon storylines. (The connection with the Utroms was pretty much abandoned for the purposes of the 80s cartoon along with New York City's racial diversity, but survives at least in the form of Krang, who would certainly be so heinous a figure to the utroms that, for lack of any willingness to ever kill, they probably did exile him to DIMENSION X.)
Come to think of it, He-Man also had ooze. Ooze was a favorite at the time, wasn't it. I don't remember what actual role any ooze played in it, I only remember getting very weird, slightly uncomfortable stirrings of feelings about strapping He-Man down into a pit to have ooze poured over him in a basin. … It was a weird time to be a kid.
And of course there's the infamously gross scene in RoboCop where Emil plows into a large drum of abandoned industrial waste and begins to melt. Maybe don't call people the f-slur, Emil! Look where toxic masculinity gets you! It gets you TOXIC WAAAASTE!
Maybe it's time to bring back the cheesiness of the Toxic Avenger. Toxie could run around murdering executives with a mop, just like the old days. A merry band of mutants, victims of uncontrolled pollution, fighting back against global warming as vigilante justice.
Maybe I have more flarian-related material to write about this yet.
#toxic-waste #robocop-1987 #the-toxic-avenger #the-toxic-crusaders #I-did-approximately-1-research-point-of-research-on-this-rant-as-I-wanted-to-give-an-authentic-personal-account-rather-than-a-nuanced-and-intelligent-commentary #TMNT #teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles #weird-media-trends #1980s #1990s #nostalgia #of-a-sort-anyway #it-was-a-shitty-time-to-be-alive-but-guess-what-it-still-is #captain-planet #brief-mentions-of #he-man #daredevil #apologies-to-the-Captain-Planet-fans-who-click-this-and-find-out-how-little-I-had-to-say-about-our-hero-who-brings-pollution-down-to-zero
