Scooby, Scooby Doo, where are you....
Some place more bizarre than I ever expected him to be.
When I was a kid, I hated Scooby Doo and the kids in the Mystery Machine but I watched the show with horrific fascination. It was the first truly creepy cartoon I ever saw replete with swamp monsters, ghosts and all sorts of extra creepy things that only seemed to come out at night. With a partial case of the Brady Bunch Embarrassments™*, I’d watch full of self-loathing at my own horror through my fingers and be disappointed and bored by the routine ending with the old person, generally male, so disgruntled by old age, they’ve turned to kidnapping and stalking in a specter’s guise to terrorize the happy, rightful proprietor or proprietress. Even as a kid I marveled as to why any child would want to sleep on sheets with those characters drawn on them. It seemed like a guaranteed parental recipe for bedwetting.
The show was very creepily drawn, but poorly so, in the days prior to shipping animation to slavish animators in Korea. The routine plot was perpetually weak and disappointing, the characters nonsensical; the only thing that made much sense to me was Shaggy’s devotion to his stupid, hungry and misbehaving dog. It was a cheap, boring, ugly cartoon with a devoted audience of six year olds in the days before cartoons became educational.
Twenty years later, pandering to Generation X, They™** have made a live-action movie out of it. And of course, I didn’t go see it, despite the quite funny trailers, because I know Scooby Doo and it’s as dull as dirt. But that didn’t stop me from watching it on TV last night as I ate my dinner.
Read more below.
