So powerful was the spell of this simple television show - millions of boys, gnashing their teeth through "Schoolhouse Rock": "C'mon, END! I dont give a fuck about adjectives, give us Daphne shakin' her thang in them purple tights!!" - that for a generation of children, those cartoons were like Proust's mom coming upstairs for tuckins and kissys, the indelible, lingering images of our childhoods.
Hanna-Barbera would repeatedly attempt to recreate the Scooby formula, with disappointing results: "Speed Buggy" (callow, annoying), "Jabberjaws" (halfassed, embarrassing), "The Funky Phantom" (Please-God-make-it-stop-awful, like watching maggots emerge from your own flesh). The Scooby cartoons themselves were doomed to quickly degenerate into gimmickry, stunt casting, and repetitive, phoned-in horseshit. Still, the Scrappys, the C-list-celebrity guests, Scoobies Dum and Dee, and a whole pile of other godawful crap I've managed to repress, all this was not enough to sink the franchise. Scooby lives on in our hearts and minds.
And yet.
This new thing, this "Scooby-Doo Movie", does it represent some kind of transgression against, um, all that is good and civilized? Well, no. Scooby-Doo cartoons seem real great to a five-year-old, but then so does the prospect of subsisting on Snickers Bars for the next eighty years. I mean, didn't that sentence "Scooby lives on in our hearts and minds" make you wince (if not, seek help)? So my take was: "let them make a "hip" "ironic", Gap-Ad Scooby-Doo movie. Hell, I liked Zoolander, I didn't think Charlies Angels was a complete waste of time (shaddup!) - maybe this new movie will be good".
Having seen it... well... the movie isn't a complete waste of time: as the saying goes, it has some brilliant moments, and some interminable five-minute stretches. Long story short, the film is a sexed-up (male and lesbian viewers will find themselves spending a considerable portion of the second half of the film ogling Velma's tits. Think about that for a minute), violent, grossed-out (the movie contains pee and fart jokes, but no humor involving scatophilia or fistfucking: presumably these will be included in the director's cut), "ironic", revisionist treatment of the Scooby mythos, sort of along the lines of what Frank Miller did in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, only stupider, and in movie form. And just as Miller's comic book is the sort of thing that passes for serious literature among fourteen-year-olds, I'm sure the towering intellects behind the Scooby-Doo movie are, in between lines of coke, congratulating themselves for being Kevin Smith or David Foster Wallace or whomever. The Scooby-Doo movie is sort of intresting as an exercise in missed opportunites, and worth checking out for free, but if you are going to shell out eight dollars, I recommend buying beer instead.
And yet.
Thirty tears on, flipping channels. Scooby Doo rerun, classic Scoob, first season. Madeline moment: all the constituents of childhood experience flood back into the field of being like a tape being played. That dark brown couch that left courdoroy marks under the thighs; Fruity Pebbles made milk sweet and colorful and grainy: skim off the sludgy flakes floating on top and slurp 'em down, then drink the orange-brown milk; Daphne is so beautiful: one day you will marry her, like with Mom and Dad, presently asleep in their bedroom. A child reflects on phenomenology: Mom and Dad are sleeping, for them this moment, this whole episode of Scooby, is not happening: how can it be that time is for them rushing by infinitely fast, while for you it moves along at normal pace? Where does the time go for them? Where has the time gone for you? Where are you, Scooby-Doo?
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