Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

[acroyear]

On the subject of how in current TV shows involving supernatural events or powers, they're all "real" and the skeptical one has to accept the "evidence" and believe, rather than actually having it be faked by someone and skeptical thought vindicated...

Pharyngula: The corruption of Scooby Doo:

I think an excellent example of this trend is the Scooby Doo cartoon. Way back when I was a young'un, they always ended the same way: the Scooby Doo gang would always discover that the monster/spectre/alien was actually Old Man Cargill, dressed in a costume, trying to keep visitors away so they wouldn't discover his secret uranium mine, and they always led him away in handcuffs at the end, while he muttered, "If it weren't for those darned kids, I would have gotten away with it." I know, the cartoon was cheesily and cheaply animated, the plots were boring and predictable, and the characters were annoyingly trite, but at least they had a consistent message that the supernatural wasn't real.

That changed last time I saw it — the ghosts were "real". It was very strange: it was a badly done cartoon, waning in popularity, and instead of trying to reinvigorate it by, say, coming up with creative plots, or getting better artwork, or making the characters more interesting, they chose to throw away the one novel element of the show. The supernatural resort is often the act of lazy hacks.

I guess it's just been too long since Project UFO.

Granted, strange and dark as it was, the Torchwood episode, Countrycide, was a unique change of pace: everybody *wanting* and expecting there to be aliens involved but really it was merely our own dark souls...

Comments

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

the way I remember it, there was often a bit at the end of the show, as the bad guy was being hauled away, where Shaggy and Scooby would see a ghost. Sometimes, Scooby had backed into a switch turning on the ghost machine, and everyone would laugh, but other times, it was supposedly the real ghost, suggesting that even though the ghosts didn't do the crime, one never knows...