Toon-arama: Why Scooby Doo Worked

I’m a big fan of Scooby Doo. There’s just something about that show that really works, and none of the copycats (e.g. Jabberjaw, Josie and the Pussycats) had it. So what made Scooby so special? Here are my thoughts.

● The Strong Relationship Between Scooby And Shaggy: The biggest point is perhaps the most obvious: like so many other human-dog relationships, Scooby and Shaggy love each other unconditionally. They also have become very much like each other, sharing the same traits and same hobbies. This makes them the best of friends. And the best moments in the series are those where Scooby or Shaggy sneak off to eat or are scared out of their minds and yet rise up without a second thought to save their friend who they believe is in danger. None of the copycats ever had similar relationships.

● Diversity: When you look at the original gang the way they are written, what you will see is a diverse swath of high school cliques gathered together. Fred is the athletic preppy. Daphne is the hot chick. Velma is the science nerd. Shaggy is the skateboarding dope smoker. The message was clear and powerful: it doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, you can still be great friends.

I find it interesting that such an emphasis has since been placed on including this message in things like Disney and Nickelodeon television shows, but they mess the message up. Rather than showing across-the-school diversity like this, in modern shows, you tend to see the nerds banding together with the minority kids. Thus, these modern shows that are meant to encourage diversity are actually encouraging the opposite, sending the message that blacks and Asians and Hispanics should hang out with white nerds, but rich, good looking, popular white kids should still hang out separately.

In fact, if we were going to squeeze Scooby Doo into the modern “diverse” formula, Fred and Daphne would need to be assh*les who are constantly competing against Velma, Shaggy, and GenericBlackCharacter.

● Culturally Significant Monsters: One of the things Scooby is totally known for is the wide swath of monsters. They cover everything that Leonard Nimoy would soon be covering in In Search Of: aliens, pirate ghosts, the Yeti, haunted mines, ghost towns, vampires, werewolves, witches, swamp monsters, etc. In effect, Scooby zeroed in on the cryptid and alien crazes that were about to hit and would continue through the present day... they were riding a rising wave of exactly the types of things that would come to dominate American culture.

The copycats tended to use generic power-mad villains with no cultural resonance.

● The Fake Monsters: One of the comforting aspects of Scooby Doo was that at the end of the day, all the monsters were fake and the villains surrendered easily once they were exposed. In fact, they were typically quite ashamed of what they had done and apologized. This is a reassuring way to end each episode because it sets the world right again: there are no monsters and good will end evil. The copycats, on the other hand, typically ended with the villains being hauled off screaming about coming back and doing it again. The message there was, the monsters are real and they can only be contained, they can’t truly be defeated.

● The Adventurous Human Spirit: Finally, Scooby Doo tapped into the human instinct to investigate anomalies and things we believe can’t be true. This is the impulse that draws us to detective stories, draws us to science, and makes us want to know how the magician did his tricks. The copycats never got that and they took the approach of having their characters accidentally pulled into an evil plot. That makes them reactive, which doesn’t trigger our sense of adventure or discovery, but instead triggers our sense of self-preservation. By comparison, Scooby and the gang actively investigate, which triggers all kinds of good impulses on our part.

Thoughts? Did I miss anything?