But in another, timelier sense, Scooby Doo offered a hyper-realistic sensibility. It’s the lack of realism in Scooby Doo that makes its general insistence on being realistic all the more inviting. But then again, the protagonists of Scooby Doo being so young and cool (the teenagers) as well as classically cartoonish (the talking dog) allows Scooby Doo to speak on multiple levels to its young audiences. Indeed, every episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You? actively pursues and valorizes realism, ending on a note of comfort and explanation-strange, considering its protagonists are four detective-teenagers and an anthromorphic pet. It’s important, then, that Scooby Doo episodes do not end on a moralistic theme, but a realistic one. Jenkins building Charlie the Robot to run his amusement park more efficiently than a human worker, or Bluestone the Magnificent, the magician trying to scare off visitors so he can search for treasure in a castle, or Stuart Weatherby, costuming himself as a spirit to scare relatives into giving him their inheritance, all the malfeasance and related costuming in Scooby Doo is a desire for some economic gain. While the villains of Scooby Doo require an understanding of physics and engineering to devise things as diverse as fan-propellers to levitate tables or mechanisms to effectively project Pepper’s Ghost, they are all motivated by a single thing: greed. But this is twofold: there is always a physical, scientific explanation for spooky phenomena, as much as there is a consistently human motivation for waging an intricate deception, in the first place. The very point-the most dependable part-of Scooby Doo is the lesson that there is a reasonable explanation for every strange occurrence. The show is, in its roundabout, farcical way, an indictment of adult-world capitalism, not too far out of line with the general principles of the counterculture movement that was concurrently beating through the country. But this formulaic revelation, promised to come at the end of every episode, offers on its own a particular criticism of the world at large. In our own zeitgeist, this conceit has become the most ubiquitously recollected thing about Scooby Doo: the gesture of yanking off a ghoulish mask to reveal the innkeeper’s assistant Hank or old Captain Cutler himself or Carl the stuntman is as widely known as the corresponding villainous accusation of “I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids” (though the quote is, much like “elementary, my dear Watson,” never actually uttered in the original show). Thus, very often, in Scooby Doo, the creepiest, most otherworldly happening will simply turn out to be something as banal and realistic as real-estate fraud or a marketing scam. Scooby Doo and the kids usually trespass on the property, encounter the creature that has been causing trouble, chase it around for a bit, elaborately trap it, and then unmask it-usually revealing that it is actually just some forger, counterfeiter, treasure-hunter, or other opportunist in disguise trying to keep people away from the property to exploit its resources or conceal it as the base of criminal activity. Often, a particular space-an amusement park, an abandoned mansion, an old castle, a deserted mine, an empty theater-is occupied by a malevolent entity (usually a ghost, occasionally a monster) which has driven or scared people away, or prevented them from coming near it. Not that you likely need it rehashed, but just in case, here goes: there is some strange, usually supernatural happening that the teenagers, driving around in a groovy, tricked-out van called “The Mystery Machine” stumble upon. The show, which released seventeen twenty-minute-long episodes in its first season, and eight in its second, follows a simple formula. The countless spin-offs and sequels within the Scooby Doo franchise (including the late-80s series A Pup Named Scooby Doo, which reimagines the five sleuths as children) have attempted to offer context and origin stories but ultimately, when viewers first encountered Scooby Doo and his friends, they were asked to take all these elements at face value-including that, if the lyrics to the title song were to be believed, there was some important work to do that required Scooby Doo’s assistance, and in fact could not be done without him. The pilot episode of the CBS series Scooby Doo, Where Are You!, developed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, offers no backstory and not a single reason to explain how a giant talking dog and his four adolescent human friends came to know one another, or why they began solving mysteries together, let alone how they turned this habit into a specialized business-of-sorts. But when he appeared on television for the first time, on Saturday, September 13th, 1969, he was not given any sort of explanation. Fifty years after his creation, Scooby Doo needs no introduction.
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