Local Ghost Masquerader Hounded by Crime-Solving Dog, Meddling Kids

Local Ghost Masquerader Hounded by Crime-Solving Dog, Meddling Kids

A forthright investigation into the social significance of Scooby-Doo

Michael Seaholm

Undergraduate/Computer Science

In this day and age, there are plenty of crises for us to worry about: the economic slump, religious extremism, China’s meteoric rise toward becoming a world power, and the Detroit Lions becoming the first team in NFL history to have a 0-16 season. Given this turn of events, one would think that now would be the perfect opportunity to take a moment and remember better, simpler times, when a loaf of bread cost a nickel and the only people who got shot were ill-tempered booze smugglers, and at least they had the decency not to bleed all over the place afterwards, if cinematic films of the era are to be believed. However, it is often decades after the fact that we realize that things were not quite as serene as they appeared on the surface. In this week’s article, let us consider the celebrated animated show Scooby-Doo and its place in history’s hall of shame, starting with this sinisterly-phrased rhetorical question. Scooby-Doo: harmless children’s cartoon or socially destructive propaganda?

To properly answer this extremely obvious question, let us first consider the events of a standard episode of Scooby-Doo, which occurred mostly in the restless decade of the 1970s. A standard plotline involves a group of meddling “kids” driving a “Mystery Machine” into an impenetrable “fog,” after which there are a whole lot of shenanigans involving “ghosts,” “Scooby Snacks,” and “Old Man Jenkins.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or even a marine biologist!) to figure out that all this is a clever allegory for what was in those days a very common leisure activity: vigilantism. Even though Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and the eponymous canine star of the show are showing great initiative in trying to help out in their community, their thirst for justice has blinded them to the fact that they themselves are bending the law to their whim, like book-savvy Butch Cassidys. I’m pretty sure you need some sort of license for that, and as far as I know I’ve never seen Fred whip one out of the glove compartment so that he could explain to the police why he and his friends had tied a man in a rubber suit to a fencepost miles away from civilization.  

Regardless of their rather lofty aims, however, the group should still be under scrutiny on the grounds that their depiction of characters is dubious at best. In nearly every episode, Daphne, the attractive female, ends up following Fred, the living embodiment of masculinity, while the intelligent but plain Velma is left to basically perform all the mystery-solving functions for the group. Then, at the end of it all, everyone else gets the credit! “Be pretty like Daphne!” this cartoon is clearly stating to our nation’s population of girls. “Attach yourself to a man and don’t let go! If you become even halfway intelligent, you’ll end up with some seedy hippie and his talking wonder dog!” I thought the whole issue of the feminine mystique was cleared up by Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women back in the sixties, and yet we are letting our children watch this show as though it has the same degree of moral fiber and self-respect as Spongebob. Still think Scooby-Doo is harmless?

Now, perhaps you may think I’ve been a little critical of the crew of the Mystery Machine thus far, but I will make up for it only slightly with this concession: Scooby and Shaggy are pretty OK. Hell, they’re the show’s only form of comic relief; while the rest of the cast is trying to advance the plot, Shaggy and Scooby are slipping on banana peels and tumbling into ghosts in a hilarious fashion. This is why in the eighties the fat cats at Hanna-Barbera decided between coke parties to release a glut of animated features starring Shaggy, Scooby, and occasionally that chronically annoying, horridly deformed puppy they call Scrappy-Doo. This sometimes-trio helped to win over disillusioned American audiences with such classics as Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers and Scooby-Doo Trades Weapons for Hostages. In what proved to be a cinematic tour-de-force, Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy the Freakshow starred in Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, in which our heroes assume positions as gym teachers at Miss Grimwood’s Finishing School, which is attended by the daughters of the classic movie monsters. Their mission: get the girls trained to beat their rival school, Calloway Military Academy, at a game of volleyball. Not only did this film get an award for Best Plot Ever Conceived, but it has also received the much-coveted Michael Seaholm Seal of Expert Approval, which it has won as of right now.

Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School deserves these distinctions for a number of reasons. First, it partially makes up for the Scooby-Doo television series’ overtly antifeminist tone, given that the Grimwood girls are able to trounce the Calloway cadets at the volleyball game, even when the scheming lads attempt to cheat by using a remote to control the motion of the volleyball in what appears to be a direct violation of physics. No offense to the Calloway crew, but you have to be pretty incompetent when having complete control of the ball doesn’t somehow lead to immediate victory. Second, the whole movie was basically an experiment to see how many puns a person could weather over a period of 90 minutes. I myself lasted only halfway through the film, at which point Sibella, the daughter of Dracula, mentioned that something was “fang-tastic“ for about the thirty-fifth time, at which point I blacked out. I came to right about when Shaggy got confused about Colonel Calloway’s insistence that they meet at 1400 hours, since Shaggy, being a godless hippie, was not versed in the concept of military time. Third, this whole volleyball business is only one perfect facet of the glittering diamond that is the film’s plot, which I will not reveal to you for fear of spoiling its awesomeness.

There is a lesson to be learned from the above analysis. For starters, never watch Scooby-Doo unless you are wearing some sort of protective HAZMAT suit, or the aura of the seventies will wash over your brain like an ocean of sulfuric acid over a beach covered with helpless babies. Also, it is recommended that you watch Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School with immediate haste, and not just because I receive $5,000 for every person I get to view it. Lastly, I would like to mention that Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf, released in 1988, was the last time that Scrappy-Doo appeared in animated form, according to that ever-popular source of irrefutable knowledge, Wikipedia. Undoubtedly, this means that Scrappy must now exist within the three-dimensional realm we know and love as reality, probably under an assumed name. If you see anyone or anything even remotely resembling Scrappy-Doo, I suggest you take immediate action, preferably in the form of a military air strike or, barring that, cowering in fear. Just be sure to carry your vigilante license with you in case the authorities choose to question your activities.