Until I was twelve, I accompanied my mom to my grandmother’s house every Saturday morning. While my mom styled my grandmother’s hair and went shopping, I watched television. Specifically, I watched Saturday Morning Cartoons. When I was a kid, my life revolved around television – mostly cartoons. This was in the primitive days. Before cable. Before a time when entire channels were dedicated to playing cartoons 24/7. There were only specific times when cartoons were on. Weekday afternoons, and Saturday mornings.
On Saturday mornings, my schedule was carefully chosen as I switched from channel to channel on the hour and half hour to catch all my favorites. These included Superfriends, Smurfs, Drak Pack, Gummi Bears, Bugs Bunny . . . and my all time favorite animated Saturday morning cartoon, Scooby Doo.
At this time (1979), the iteration of Scooby Doo currently playing Saturday mornings was The Scooby and Scrappy Doo show. I was not so crazy about this. I liked Fred, Daphne, and Velma. I liked the mysteries. The ghosts. The scary settings. Not so much the slapstick. However, I loved the opening sequence – especially the shot of that train coming at the camera. There was a real menace in how that opening bit plays out. Sadly, it is entirely absent from the actual episodes themselves.
The Scooby Doo I knew and loved was Scooby Doo, Where Are you? Which played on weekday afternoons. But only on one or two days a week. The rest of the week was dedicated to the two-parter guest spot episodes, or the mid-seventies Scooby Doo Show. But these versions lacked those special qualities that I loved about the original series.
Even as a kid, I always liked stories with a little danger. I liked villains planning to do harm to the heroes. I liked menace. I liked creepy shit. And Scooby Doo was my horror movie training wheels. Scooby Doo presented a world populated by haunted mansions, secret passageways, bats, cobwebs, skulls, lightning storms, spooky organs, portraits with moving eyes, trap doors, creepy-looking old chests, bats, echoing ghastly laughs, gray skies etc. And always with the ghost hands, grabbing at our heroes from the shadows. I have known those who actually claimed that Scooby Doo was too creepy for them as a child, and granted, re-watching old episodes, it does feature a lot of imagery that cartoons would most likely not feature these days.
Of course there was never any real danger. Death was never explicitly mentioned. Instead, bad guys threatened to turn Scooby and Shaggy into ghosts (which is code for threatening to kill them). And I was never all that clear what would happen if a phantom actually managed to successfully grab a member of the gang. But for a kid who was not allowed to watch anything remotely scary or adult, it was as close as I could get to all out horror for a very long time,
I loved the way the cheap animation was used. How each character had a distinctive way of running and standing. Frantic chases down endless hallways (as a kid, I discovered very quickly that if I run down a hallway, I hit the other end very quickly). The echoing shuffling that accompanied their footsteps. Even the overly dramatic had gestures when a character was “kidnapped” by some mysterious force behind a wall. I even loved the constant rotation of stock music. Also a plus, the hippie chase songs. I was obsessed with the show. At one time, I could tell you which images in the opening titles weren’t really in any episode. (The shot of Freddie in a chair sliding into a secret passage proved an especially difficult-to-see-episode for a very long time).
(While on the subject of grabby ghost hands, I often wandered why the gang never encountered villains with guns. Only costumes. I knew the show was from an earlier era, and I had a very shaky grasp on history, so I began to suspect that the show took place in a time before guns were invented. Unfortunately, I had seen a western or two, and was unable to account for the discrepancies in the timeline of my theory.)
Scooby Doo inspired an entire sub-genre of Saturday morning cartoons: the teens solving mysteries show. And naturally, these shows all featured mysteries with someone dressed up as a ghost. For the most part, ghosts did not actually exist in these shows. Perhaps this was meant as a reassuring message to kids that there is nothing to be afraid of, but I have to admit that what I took away from it was something more pragmatic: that perhaps there is nothing supernatural at all. That everything unnatural is really just an invention of man. This reading may be especially heavy for a kid, but I swear it painted how I looked at monsters, Santa Claus, and God.
Perhaps what drew me most to Scooby Doo, Where Are you? Was the idea of driving around with my friends and solving mysteries when I grew up. Sadly, this dream was never realized,
In later years, the show went off the rails, but there will always be a special place in my heart for the final continuous iteration of Scooby Doo: The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo. In this version, the gang (now in different clothes for the first time in 15 years) opens a Chest of Demons – releasing 13 of the most terrifying ghosts on the face of the Earth. The idea was thrilling to me, but I was initially disappointed that the series opted for a lighter, post-modern take on the material rather than the darker, more dramatic take I was hoping for. Regardless, the bizarro humor grew on me and prepared me for the rising trend in self-referencing animation. Bonus: this iteration featured a warlock named Vincent Van Ghoul who looked and sounded exactly like Vincent Price.
Later on, I watched a lot of G.I. Joe, He-Man, The Real Ghostbusters, etc, but they all fell short of the euphoria I experienced when Scooby Doo was new to me. While none of the later series were as good as the original, Scooby and the gang remains a vital part of my childhood. I still hope to ride around in my flower van with my peeps and chase a few ghosts around an oversized rundown mansion.
A side note: after watching a lot of old cartoons this weekend, I noticed a great amount of unabated liberal propaganda in my old Saturday morning cartoons. First off, I wish there were more blatant liberalism in today’s cartoons. However, I appreciated how Scooby Doo was generally lesson-free. Except of course that the villains were all selfish, money-hungry meanies. It featured a tight nit group of friends who looked out for each other as they explored dangerous places and encountered faux dangers. There wasn't much more to it than that.
Where did Scooby Doo lead me?:
- Other weekday afternoons cartoons for one thing. In the mid-eighties, weekday afternoons became inundated with first run shows - not just decades-old reruns. So I watched a lot of G.I. Joe, He-Man, even some Ducktales later on.
- But what Scooby Doo really did was pave the way for my obsession with horror films. From the stock imagery, to the genre's conventions. Scooby Doo has affected how I view horror movies. It has taught me to empathize with the good guys - the victims. Obviously, the villains are the more dramatically drawn characters in horror, but I remain firmly invested in the good guys despite how stock and one-dimensional they are. Only a few years later, I became obsessed with black-and-white horror movies. I attribute this to Scooby Doo.
I still can't watch the lightest of shows without longing for at least a little darkness. For al the lightheartedness of Scooby Doo, there was a darkness in each episode that the characters took seriously. Shaggy and Scooby were terrified in every episode. Sometimes, even Freddie and Velma were scared. I still need this in everything I watch. I NEED the characters to take whatever situation they are in seriously -at least for a fleeting moment. Scooby Doo, Where Are You? wasn't ground-breaking. It wasn't even particularly imaginative. But it filled a very specific niche - and I was its intended audience.
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