Scooby Fucking Doo

Well. The big news really are taking a geological age to come to realisation; we’ve had some trouble with the site as the images started falling away from the browser and I haven’t heard from the guy responsible in a while. Presumably he’s busy.

So while we all wait, I might as well get back to posting here (assuming there’s anyone still reading – which, according to Sitemeter, there is. Incredible, really. Whoever you are, I love you the way that roses love the rain). Today’s blog entry is going to be a bit atypical as it was inspired by a billboard sighted here in Paris. There’s billboards all over the place in metros, advertising anything from Austrian clocks to the best ways to bury your grandmother after she’s been ran over by a flying windsurf, so it’s kind of hard to surprise one anymore. But I must admit to having felt a slight sense of displacement when I saw a sign yesterday advertising a live musical about, of all things, Scooby Doo.

I’m going to state it frankly. I’ve never really understood the artistic statement behind some musicals. When you see something like the Billy Elliot musical or the Lion King musical, it kind of makes you wonder ‘Weren’t those films? Why would we want to see it again in a medium which doesn’t really fit with the original story in the first place?’ I thought the line had been drawn at ‘Lord of the Rings – the Musical’. As though we hadn’t been arse-raped with that story in every possible medium you can get, film, book, comic-book, fridge-stickers and illustrated condoms (‘If you don’t suck, the story will!’). No, they had to make the musical version of that bloody thing, it’s probably nine hours long too given the kind of audience it appeals to (aka, the Aristotles and the Bachs in the world of nerds).

What the fuck is she wearing on her head?

Even as I thought that the LotR show had stimulated the utmost of my disinterest neurons, the maestros went and topped the line now by making a musical about the most imbecile animated cartoon show in the history of the earth. Scooby Fucking Doo. Now, Scooby Doo is the kind of name that I wouldn’t have the courage to give even to my dog, let alone to my artistic creation, and it ranks among that long list of series made under the simple shared assumption that kids are stupid. How else would you justify the level of idiotic writing that makes up some of its episodes? It wouldn’t hold together even if the animation was superb – which, incidentally, it is ten thousand miles away from being. In fact, the animation is downright crap. All the characters look like they’ve been passed under a steamroller. Not even South Park is so mono-dimensional, and that’s trying to be as flat as possible. When the characters move, it is the Apocalypse Now of the cartoon shows. I’ve seen better running animation in the first Super Mario videogames from the mid-1980s – at least Mario seemed to bob his shoulders forwards and backwards slightly while he moved forward. Scooby Doo characters ‘run’ simply by having their legs alternate positions at every photogram while the camera bobs up and down like it’s been tied to the head of an ostrich as the background slowly rolls behind them. You could achieve the same effect by making a montage of a TV news presenter sitting at his desk, with the desk cut out and a pair of running legs attached beneath the torso. Furthermore, for what kind of a fucking reason does the background move at a different speed from the characters themselves?? You’ve got Shaggy’s legs swirling like hurricane Katrina and the soil orbiting below him at a speed which seems too slow for the Olympics of dead turtles, let alone the pace of cartoon men.



Let’s get something clear, I’m normally much more interested in the story than in the technique, but when it comes to animated shows you’ve got to give some value to the quality of the animation. I mean, if Tom and Jerry didn’t look animated, it wouldn’t make for much of an animated show, now would it? Scooby Doo compounds this concept by combining a drug-snorting bullshit animation with the dumbest story-telling in years. What is the problem with it? One word: F-O-R-M-U-L-A-I-C. Every single story is the remake of the one before except it that the werewolf is switched for the zombie and the evil-doing theatre-owner becomes the evil-doing railroad-owner, or the evil-doing prostitute pimp or the coco-shunter or whatever. This leads to one of most annoying implausibilities in the show. There must have been 800 episodes where the back-yard ghost turns out to be a trick organised by the evil-doing [insert whatever the hell you like here] yet every time you watch it, there you go with those two idiots Scooby and Shaggy petrified in terror at the idea they might be facing the occult forces of the supernatural. I mean, it’s happened to you more often than masturbation by now, how goddamn thick do you have to be?!

Yes, I know what the objection to this argument is – you’re going to tell me that this is their comic role. But this doesn’t solve the problem, it only shifts it. The question then becomes, what the devil were the screenwriters thinking when they conceived those kind of characters in the first place? The show is fundamentally a horror-detective parody with comedy thrown into it (because, you know, you’ve got to make it a cartoon!). The series is in fact so faithful to this paradigm that its characters look like a list of clichés from those kind of movies – tell all, they look like animated versions of those kind of guys who normally get torn to shreds in splatter movies, except that these ones don’t get torn to shreds and we’ve got to bear their mountains of banalities till the very end. Now, try taking a step back for a second. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the only character we really want to see dying in these films tends to be the comic relief. This is the George Lucas paradigm, where any scene with pathos or action has to be interrupted so we can follow the antics of Jar Jar Binks or C3PO or whoever takes his place, a fact as pleasant and welcome as an attack of diarrhoea in the middle of a press conference in the desert. It seems not to enter into the heads of the screenwriters that if you get a curly-haired fat-ass with pimples tripping all over himself whenever there is a battle or a confrontation with the monster, then the audience will want to see the fucker dead, possibly within the first ten minutes of screening. Unfortunately this seldom happens, and we are forced to endure the day’s dickhead until the credits roll on.

Relief from what?? Relief from freaking WHAT????

So it is the crowning achievement of Scooby Doo to have the most irritating type of characters in the history of cinematography as their fucking protagonists. The entire show spins around the hilarious adventures of a whining cocaine junkie who forgot to shave last morning and an Alsatian dog who speaks like a cross between a sixty-year old mongoloid and a horse. Since all of the above appeared insufficient by the time the screening reached the fourth century AD, the writers decided to add another element to the mix in the son of Scooby Doo. Oh, the thrills. The character in question was called Scraggy, a tiny Alsatian which resembled a bizarre dwarf more than it did a puppy and who was utterly insufferable from his very first screening. Among the things that distinguished him from his father was his elaborate faculty of speech (a fact which made the progenitor look even more retarded), while he was ‘distinct’ from the clichéd detective dickheads because, well, he was a dog. Presumably the idea was to have an agent which fell halfway between the comic relief and the clichés by possessing the qualities of both. But the producers obviously got it completely head over heels because they ended up giving him the defects of both, turning him as anally contentious as the Shaggy / Scooby duo and as much of a vomit-bucket as their peers. This made him so unbearably irritating that it almost made you nostalgic for the previous series, aside from raising the question as to who the fuck the mother was and why we don’t see a similar character as the son of the man (Scooby is more shaggy than Shaggy, it appears). The dynamics of the set then became something like having a man who is more stupid than his own dog, a dog who is more stupid than his own son and a screenwriter who is more of a dumb-fuck than all of them put together, to the point of being more stupid than the children that he writes for – thus defeating the point of the original paradigm, that you can have stupid cartoons because kids are stupid!

If my message isn’t clear enough already, Scooby Doo sucks the shit out of a dead nun’s ass and it should be frozen in hyperbaric capsules to preserve as a guide on how NOT to make cartoons. All of this is just so much wasted breath however because the series apparently enjoys a popularity to rival that of the Paris Hilton blowjob video(s). They had more series than I want to remember, a movie and even a fucking sequel to the movie, and now a bloody musical! Honestly, whose idea was this?

He was obviously a genius.