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Ok; more than one person has asked that I repeat my public comments on Scooby Doo here.
I loathe Scooby Doo.
I hate him. I find Scooby Doo useless, annoying, aggravating, downright awful, and insulting. What's more, I thought this almost as soon as the character first appeared on Saturday morning TV -- ie almost as soon as his addlepated brain-dead idiocy first invaded the American cultural landscape.
Is this anti-cartoon snobbery? No, t'aint. At the time the lobotomized canine first said, "Roo? Ree?", I was but a tad of a child, who loved Saturday Morning cartoons. I loved and still loved Bugs Bunny. I loved and still love the Road Runner. I watched the Archies, I watched Jonny Quest, I watched
the Herculoids.
(I enjoyed THE HERCULOIDS quite a bit as a kid, even though it made no sense to me even then. This was the Hanna-Barbera action cartoon about a barbarian family (Dad, Mom, and kids) who lived on a planet of purple rocks with their pets and protectors a torpedo-shooting dragon, a super-strong ape made of rock, and a pair of helpful balls of snot called Gloop and Gleep. It was a good thing these folks got along, because every single week or so this tiny patch of real estate got invaded by an entire alien armada, necessitating some serious ass-kicking. Now, why this stupid family didn't just move to the next useless patch of purple dirt just down the block, or why these huge alien armies hauled their badly-animated asses out of nowhere to harass these four people -- and why the megalomaniacal war-mongers of the universe never learned the simple lesson that the humans with their ape and their dragon and their sentient balls of snot were best off left alone -- is best explained as, "Because then there'd be no show", but it also helps explain real-life terrestrial phenomena like, let's say, the Gaza strip.)
But Scooby Doo...
...Scooby for God's sake Doo...
...Look. Bugs Bunny was a formidable antagonist. Donald Duck was a formidable person. Daffy Duck was a formidable person. Woody Woodpecker and Popeye were formidable persons. They were protagonists. They may have been capable of idiot behavior, but they were capable of INTERESTING idiot behavior.
Scooby Doo was just plain useless. He did nothing. He accomplished nothing. His job was to bug his eyes at anything even remotely disconcerting, and run like hell to the accompaniment of a canned laugh track (leading the young me to wonder at the sanity of those laughing). Scooby Doo was the cartoon canine equivalent of the bug-eyed darkie who used to populate live-action
comedies of the thirties and forties. His entire shtick was to have no balls. Spaying him would have redundant. He didn't even rally, like Lou Costello, whose terrified antics in every Abbott and Costello comedy always led to him meeting the challenge at film's end; Scooby Doo just trembled and cowered and ran, while his band of poorly-animated humans also ran along with him, being chased by some lame-ass monster or ghost unmasked in the last reel as the only suspect they had in the first place. (The same is true of his only companion with any personality, Shaggy. He was another wastoid: no balls at all, which helps to explain why his only real love object is a dog. His habit of beginning every sentence with "like," his total absence of courage, and his awful posture were of course '70s slams at the hippie phenomenon, and even as a kid, too young to know much of the real politics involved, I knew that attacks on hippies were the lame and resentful tactics of adults who had nothing intelligent to say about them. Now that Shaggy's thirty years past his time, he's not just an idiot without balls, but he's a cultural burnout as well; draw him holding a sign saying WILL WORK FOR FOOD and you have a good idea of where he should be right now.)
Encountering Scooby Doo as a kid, I was dismayed and insulted by mysteries so lame that they had only one possible solution, and bored by storylines that week after week came down to the idiots running from one room to another while something not scary at all chased them. Being a kid, it took me about four or five episodes to decide the logical solution was not to watch, and I would have long forgotten the whole goddamn cultural canker sore by now were it not for the obscenity of this one, pointless, one-joke non-character becoming not just one of the most popular cartoons of all time but a friggin' CULTURAL PHENOMENON still rocking the vote after THIRTY FUCKING YEARS. It is a lamprey, sucking the blood of the zeitgeist. It is the goiter that won't go away, while childhood entertainments with far more energy and zing dry up and blow away, their treasures lost forever while we continue paying obeisance to the vampiric presence of the foul Doo.
I understand adults who still like cartoons; I am one of them. But adults who still show enthusiasm for Scooby Doo, who look forward to the movie, who seem to believe this character has any entertainment value whatsofriggin' ever, baffle me. I don't understand how a nerdy but let's face it intelligent guy like Harry Knowles can waste screen after screen ranting on how the nonexistent integrity of Scooby Doo was ruined by the introduction of Scrappy Doo. Scrappy Doo? Please. He was cut from the same maggoty pork. Complaining about Scrappy Doo's presence is a lot like being more disgusted by the one differently-colored turd in the bowl. ("Yeah, I can deal with the rest of this bowel movement. I think it has character. But this one over here, yeccch. I approved up until now.")
...and then we have the movie, which can muster no greater moment for its trailer than Velma shrieking, "Your name means Scooby Poop!"
And people are anxious to see it.
I don't unnastan.
Why is Scooby Doo so awful?
It may be that he's a clear example of the ruinous effect of censorship.
The late 1960s had a host of adventure-style cartoons: ie, JONNY QUEST, the aforementioned HERCULOIDS, AQUAMAN, SUPERMAN, SPIDER-MAN, THE LONE RANGER, THE FANTASTIC FOUR, etc. All were crappily animated; the Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the period had such miniscule budgets and such primitive technology that for a while people were complaining that great animation, as exemplified by the achievements of Fleisher and Disney, seemed to be a lost art. (The animated TV cartoons of today, while not of cinematic quality, are nevertheless so well done within their limitations that they're really different beasts. Look at the difference between a Hanna-Barbera Batman and BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES and you see the difference between a series of waxwork dummies and actual movement.) Still, these were adventures: morality plays of good vs. evil, that served in a very real way to spark the imaginations of their
viewership.
At about that time -- and, yes, I remember this from being a kid, as I was even at that time a kid who paid attention -- parent groups started to complain about all the "violence" these cartoons (and Chuck Jones cartoons) contained. There was very little real violence, of course. Nobody died. Nobody ever got hurt. Batman might occasionally throw a punch at the Joker, but really, if you buy the characters at all, that's what you want to see anyway. Still, the level of violence was enough to alarm the nervous nelly parents, who raised such a stink that, between one season and the next, all the adventure cartoons disappeared. They were replaced (at least partially under the aegis
of the loathesome Fred Silverman) by shows driven by witless slapstick, horrendously intrusive adult laugh tracks, and the mugging of charmless and intrusive animal sidekicks.
SCOOBY DOO was born in that environment. Which is why Scooby Doo's gang, which always ran from danger, was never in any real danger, and which is why Scooby Doo himself never showed an aggressive reaction to any provocation. He just bugged his eyes and ran.
SCOOBY DOO was pointless and puerile and devoid of any wit, but he was also a bland, market-tested, lifeless icon whose sole purpose as a character was to be unthreatening in any way. As such, he was preferable to those who judged their art -- even their mass-market juvenile art -- only by the single criterion of its essential, empty harmlessness. The idea that cartoons might harm children far, FAR more by being empty and stupid, than they ever could by displaying the aggressiveness of true wit, was lost. So we got a cartoon that never got any smarter than, "Roo? Ree?"; that showed that damn annoying sequence of Scooby being fed a snack in every single episode; that never did anything but adhere to a plot formula so rigid that the scripts might have written by abacus. And we got a succession of Mr. Witherspoons the caretaker being unmasked, to nobody's surprise, in the last reel.
SCOOBY DOO is thus a perfect example of what censorship accomplishes. It results in entertainment that treats kids like idiots.
Like I said, my loathing for Scooby isn't the retrospective viewpoint of an adult. It was the immediate, resentful, and dead-on dislike of a perceptive kid. As I was a kid, and one things kids do is keep watching TV because it's on, I did watch a bunch of episodes before I finally decided I couldn't stand any more. I never went back, but I will say that every single exposure I've had since then -- mostly by being the uncle of three, and by enduring the truly baffling enthusiasm adult friends have displayed for the Scabby One -- has nauseated me as much as I was nauseated back then.
He sucks. He and his meddling kids.
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