Our Complex Relationship with Scooby Doo

My kids love Scooby Doo. I don’t know why. You might think they find some perverse thrill in being scared, or a sense of security knowing that the kids in the show can solve the mystery and defeat the monster. But these hypotheses break down because they’ve watched every single episode over and over again. It’s to the point that we’ll see a monster on screen and Chiara will say “it’s just the shopkeeper” or “Shaggy is going to fall in the water.” It’s a scary mystery with no scare and no mystery.

Our troubled relationship with Scooby goes way back. Chiara once threw her greatest tantrum ever in my care when I refused to buy her a $5 Scooby Doo movie at Target – the kind of tantrum that had women of all walks of life coming up to me and saying “hang in there, you’re doing a great job.” As great a job as I was doing, to avoid the tantrum it would have been worth the five bucks for the dang movie.

Scooby predates Cody’s TV-watching days. Early on, Chiara could only watch at times when either Cody couldn’t (i.e. nap times) or when Andrea was too tired to give a darn. Andrea’s feeling was that there is no educational value so Cody shouldn’t be able to watch. It’s my contention that she got this basically backwards – that at, say, 20 months, Cody could learn from pretty much any old show where colored shapes move by the screen and people speak to each other in complete sentences (not sure if Shaggy’s “Zoinks!” counts as a complete sentence) and that Chiara should only be allowed to watch educational shows when Cody was asleep.

The kids are only allowed to watch the classic Scooby episodes, partly because the theme song really jams, but mostly because the new ones are dumber and meaner. The people in the new episodes sometimes say things like “stupid” and “shut up,” things that no 3-year-old should hear. Language like that is the sort of thing that will get a show banned from the Kimmel household for a long time (at least until Andrea’s too tired to care anymore).

Scooby Doo villains have been the source of much stand-up comedian derision, which I think is unfounded. If you’re a guy who just wants to find some buried treasure on a piece of property, I think it makes perfect sense to run around dressed as a pirate ghost or monster or whatever to scare away other would-be treasure hunters. Perfectly logical, if you ask me.

But I do run into one issue that I can’t get my head around: Let’s say you are one of those pirate ghost-cladded treasure hunters. Periodically you’ll actually catch one of Scooby’s gang that you’ve been chasing after trying to scare them away. And they’re scared and all, but they are either frozen with terror or cornered in the closet. Do you have any options here besides just cackling at them maniacally and waving your sword at them? You’re not going to try to hurt them, right? Presumably you went with the whole pirate ghost thing to avoid using violence in the first place. I mean, you’re not a bad guy, you’re just a normal dude searching for buried treasure dressed as a pirate ghost. Now you’ve got screaming kids and/or dogs within arm’s reach whom you’d like to get rid of. What are you going to do? It’s quite a conundrum, and you’re starting to be pretty glad you installed those trap doors in all the closets.