Caught a vintage episode of Scooby Doo recently. I would say that you didn’t miss much–bad guys in masks, main characters disappearing through hidden doors, those meddling kids, blah blah blah–but apparently, thirty years ago, I did.
The entire gang, sans only Mystery Machine, was traipsing along in a cave, or a spooky warehouse, or some such necessary setting, and Velma made a serene announcement.
“Scooby looks really stressed,” she said. “Let’s give him a Scooby Snack!”
Now, since the show has been resurrected on the Cartoon Network (DISH 176) there are actual Scooby Snacks near your grocer’s freezer. They are graham crackers. They look too disconcertingly like Milk Bones to actually eat. I might have made the Milk Bone connection at the age of seven. The rest of it? I’m thinking no.
I mean, the smoking references popped up in the Scooby Doo movie version of about a decade and a half ago; gentle smoke was seen wafting from the Mystery Machine as Shaggy laughed and laughed– Shaggy and the Snack- consuming Scooby, both of whom are always hungry. The problem was, we members of Gen X were too late to understand the sixties, and too young to fully participate in the eighties. The second time around, now that we’re through college and the Nancy Reagan episode of Diff’rent Strokes– yeah, we get it. It’s kind of like when I saw twins Mia and Tia “flash” Lightning McQueen in Cars, and double entendre on top of double entendre cascade from a re-run of Three’s Company: How in the world did this stuff get under the radar?
We can take it all literally, of course, but then it’s not nearly as much fun. Much as comedian Jim Gaffigan recently tweeted that “Cell phones are the carbon dating of movies,” what’s naughty and what’s nice is the decade marker of Hanna-Barbera.
