Screw the Bangles. The Go-Gos had the beat.
Sua
Scooby was, nay is, great specifically because it sucked.
Scooby is wonderfully predictable. With gloriously developed characters. Scooby and Shaggy are a fabulous comic duo. And to put it simply, Daphne was fucking H-O-T HOT!
I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it (which might suggest that the posters on this board are not the target audience). And I love the fact that my kids love something that I loved.
It is like a running joke, where everyone knows the punchline, but still enjoys hearing it retold.
And for those of you who want a quote, “Zoiks!”
This is not to dis any other cartoons of thhat or other time periods. Myself, I was a Pink Panther devotee. But is a Rothko better or worse than a Renoir? Both are fine art.
If you have access to any of the recent Scooby-Doo movies, please watch them. One of the things I love is for character actors to poke fun at themselves and their situations (see William Shatner in his classic “Trek Convention” skit on Saturday Night Live), and the recent SD movies do that so very well. Fred ripping the head off an actual zombie while explaining to Daphne “It must be animatronic”; Shaggy finally cleaning himself up and combing his hair when he falls in love; Daphne lamenting that no ghosts are ever real, and getting jealous when a girl shows interest in Fred; Velma showing interest in men, and actively wondering why Fred and Daphne always seem to get paired up when the gang splits to investigate something.
Scooby was part of my morning cartoon ritual when I was a child, but comparing it to the Warner Brothers stuff isn’t fair. The WB stuff was created to be shown in theaters during the 50s, and as such it was very high quality. It was a happy coincidence that some TV exec in the 70s realized they could show those shorts on Saturday mornings to kids and generate ad revenue. Scooby and all the other stuff was created specifically for television, and as such was more limited in scope.
Are the WB cartoons better than Scooby? Surely. But Scooby is still great. Why else has it become such an enduring part of Americana?
One other note: Regardless of what some may think about the programming decisions of the folks at Cartoon Network, the people they have writing shorts for them are brilliant. My personal favorite is the one with Aquaman and Wonder Woman being captured by Lex Luthor and his evil friends. The PowerPuff girls bust in and beat the hell out of Luthor et al., leaving them in a pile. WW and AM tell the PowerPuff girls that they’re developing as superheroes, and one of the PPG says “Yes, someday we want to be as developed as you.” WW gets a funny look on her face, and crosses her arms over her chest, while AM, Lex, and the pile of baddies on the floor start laughing. Classic stuff.
Oh it’s on now, Slim. Nah, I’ll save my whipping of the bubbly perky faux-punk nightmare that was the Go-Gos for another time. Belinda Carlisle’s singing voice made her sound like she was copulating with a jackhammer.
Anyway, I think Scooby is a landmark of an era when us Xers were king. It’s all about staying up in “the underwear that’s fun to wear” eating Cap’n Crunch well into Soul Train. But unlike the Baby Boomer generation, The GenX era ended way too soon. We had like a solid few years before GenY (living proof of the banality of evil) took over every aspect of mainstream culture: TRL, NSYNC, “girl power”, and so forth. “Schoolhouse Rock” gave way to half a dozen bad carbon-copies of “Saved By The Bell”. As the Village Voice recently opined, we’re caught between the Boomers and the Brats.
As a result, we need to cling to whatever represented our brief time in the sun. In this case, that anchor happens to be the cheaply animated adventures of a mentally retarded dog and his otherwise unremarkable human friends. Characters that were so boring we have to re-envision them as pot-smoking lesbians who hump in the Mystery Machine just to make them interesting.
I will say the Scooby Doo movie might actually not suck that much if it is written as a merciless self-parody. Hey, it worked for the Brady Bunch movie.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by SuaSponte *
**
Don’t mind if I do…
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[sub][sup]C’mon, someone had to say it![/sup][/sub]
[chanting]
Go Alpha, go Alpha …
I still remember stopping dead still in the Student Union building at college, mesmerized by the sight of the Bangles’ lead singer cutting her eyes from side to side in a televised music video. Lord have mercy.
[Sauron strolls away, humming “Walk Like an Egyptian” and “Hazy Shade of Winter” to himself …]
Sauron’s description of the recent Scooby-Doo movies’ self-parody nature included this little tidbit:
Oh, pish-tosh. We all know that Velma and Daphne were lesbian lovers, and that Fred was merely Daphne’s “beard”.
My personal favorite line from any of the recent SD movies was uttered in “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island,” when Shaggy (whose real name is Norville, by the way) and Scooby are running from a boar and fall into a pit. Shaggy says, “Oh, man, how embarrassing. Chased into a hole by one-third of a BLT.”
What?? What the hell is this GenXers needing to cling onto a shred of their idealized youth?
Dude it was a classic show about a dog, a mystery van, and predicable mysteries.
It is also a classic show that should NOT be tampered with.
Besides…WB cartoons?! I always hated those as a kid and I hate them now. Those are our classics?
I’ll duck and run about now…
Huh? But there was never anything occult about the show! The villian was always a guy in a mask! :rolleyes:
Actually, in the original run of the show, Kasem asked that Shaggy not be shown eating meat, as Kasem was a strict vegetarian, which the producers agreed with. It wasn’t until the recent movies, and a new studio, that the execs insisted on a carnivorous Shaggy and Kasem walked.
How do I know? 'Cuz Cecil Said.
In the interests of being contentious, pu-pu-pu-PUPPY POWER!
Aww. Well, he was KIND of cute. Also nauseatingly irritating, but a bit adorable.
Oh and remember FlimFlam? that kid from the 13 ghosts of scooby doo?
Of course Scooby Doo sucked! I loved/love it anyhow!!
Consider the animation, which varied greatly from series to series, the thin plots, the improbable happenings, the changes in some characters – Daffy went from pretty but dumb to pretty and smart – no one else actually changed, and missing obvious clues. It was cheap, not well done but good! Even my Mom, who did not like cartoons for kids then, loved to watch Scooby-Doo because Scooby made her laugh.
Hey! Something doesn’t have to be good to be good!
No sex, no sexual innuendo, no major violence, no buckets of blood, no drugs, none of the main characters carried guns or knives, no complex or obvious plots involving nefarious world conquering schemes, universe conquering, or things like that. Considering the it was created during the cold war era, where far too many movies had Russian or Russian-like spies, villains and so on bent on taking over the world, it was unique.
Plus, in later years, it blended in not only popular figures, like the Harlem Globe Trotters, Momma Cas, Sonny and Cher, but managed to bridge the changing times without changing much of anything else. It also included other popular cartoon heroes, like Speed Buggy and Josie and the Pussycats, and Batman and Robin.
It also managed to escape political commentary. It changed forms, dropping Fred and Velma for a time, replacing them with that annoying Scrappy-Doo and that pesky, smart mouthed kid in the 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, with the Great Vincent Price. (Somehow, Daphne and Co. acquired a jet, which she flew.) Scrappy-Doo was introduced – which probably brought the ratings down, then along came Scooby-Dumb, who I figured fit right in. Then, the latest spin-off, the Scooby-Doo kids, which turns Fred obnoxious, Daffy into a rich primadonna, Velma into a virtually mute supergenius, but leaves Shaggy (My Man!) and Scooby virtually unchanged.
The newer movies have been a basic return to the original, only modernized some, showing then basically frozen in time, but having careers.
BTW, someone has a Mystery Machine out there which is as close as possible to the cartoon one. I saw it on some TV program years ago.
Still, I like Scooby-Doo for the simplicity, the innocence, the corny humor, the fun and how it has managed to stay incorruptible after all of these years.
I mean, look what happened to Batman, Superman, Yogi Bear, Secret Squirrel, The Justice League and Bugs Bunny when they changed directors who changed the art styles. (Secret Squirrel went from a cool guy, to an altered voiced, smirking clown! (Sob!) Cartoon Network portrays Space Ghost as a moronic jerk – something I did not know they could do without permission from the creators and even Tom and Jerry changed over the years!
Scooby-Doo and the Gang have basically remained the same, probably because the owners would not let other art directors get their clammy hands on them. (I hated those Chuck Jones alterations in the characters of every great cartoon character he wound up getting ahold of. Even Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny, after he got through with them, had these silly assed curly smirks and changed features.)
Scooby-Doo cartoons need to be elected to some hall of fame.
In the intensely drug related culture of the 60s, all they ever did was wear bell bottoms, have psychedelic back grounds, pop art and flowers on their van. They kept it cool!
May they go on, basically unchanged, for many years more.
I’m torn.
Because, from a technical aspect, of course Scooby Doo sucked. The repetitive background, the TOTALLY unchanging plot, the myriad of B-list celebrities brought in week upon week to support ratings. In fact, I think the whole Hanna-Barbera enterprise set American animation back about 20 years.
[aside] The Japanese beat us in animation the same time their economy beats ours. Coincidence? I think not.[/aside]
On the other hand, I have nothing but fond memories for Scooby and the gang. Of course, a lot of the things I remember as great from my childhood, in reality, were really, really bad.
So, I think I’ll say Scooby wasn’t good not because it wasn’t fun but because it was the flagship of a company that betrayed the legacy of Warner Bros. and Disney. However, I think HB now has at least something to do with a lot of the new cartoons on the Cartoon Network, so they’ve redeemed themselves.
Thankfully, The Simpsons began an American renaissance in animation that was followed by Animaniacs (the only afternoon cartoon I watched well into high school) and is now seen in the Powerpuff Girls and Dexter’s Laboratory. But even though I think Toy Story 2 is destined to be a classic, it would be nice to see Disney make another Lion King-quality movie using ink and cels.
I think Scooby-Doo goes down in history along with that corny, wonderful, originally thought to flop bit of American TV history that is still shown every day: Gilligans Island.
It is just as impractical, just as cheaply made, consists of improbable plot lines, full of stage scenery, and wacky, but lives on and people love it. The theme song has found itself a niche in American trivia and so has the one from Scooby-Doo.
We Americans just love goofy stuff.
AVSC916 wrote:
Kept it cool nothing. Have you taken a good look at Shaggy? He’s emaciated, he’s always got the munchies, he’s easily spooked, he dresses like a Dead-head, he speaks with a gravelly voice, and he converses with a dog.
If that’s not a sign of regular marijuana use, I’ll be a great Dane’s uncle.
And not just the maryjane. What about that Scooby Snack jones?
::sigh:: Yeah, that’s why even as a kid I adored him. 
See? One reason why its good. Sneaking in drug refs. No one else got away with that.
Skinny, emaciated, always has the munchies…
But seriously, folks, since we’re having a great debate…
Scooby-Doo followed a formula, the same formula every week. Having a good knowledge of what was going to happen next gave the show a comfortable familiarity, making it possible to become one with the characters, and having done so, then transcend them.
You could see God by watching Scooby-Doo. Especially if you were really, really stoned.