Sad blue dunes; they’re sleeping beneath black and blue clouds, and the clouds are piled in the sky. Disturbing. It’s disturbing to see nice work in a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Somebody did a good job and exercised their talent, and as a result a pointless cartoon had its background filled up. Meanwhile, the crap show running in front won’t go away. I saw Scooby-Doo when I was a kid. The character designs were blah and the stories dull, and from what I see they still are. Not that I’d watch an episode, but I don’t have to. The crap lives on no matter what.
For instance, there’s “Top 50 Cartoon Fan Theories That Will RUIN Your Childhood,” a YouTube compilation running 47 minutes. That’s where I found the blue dunes (“What a gloomy spot for a beach party,” says Daphne), along with clips from Rug Rats, Fairly Odd Parents, Wall-E, and on and on. The narration recaps various Reddit posts by ingenious timewasters. Gags and gimmicks meant to entertain are taken literally and thereby underpin hard-edged new interpretations of the familiar. The spooky old houses and mills in Scooby-Doo aren’t just spooky, they’re signs of economic decline; hence all those wrongdoers hatching their desperate schemes. The goofier cartoons tend to get written off as hallucinations (“Yes, this is another age-old ‘it was all a coma’ theory,” concedes the announcer), while cartoons with disparate characters are presented as allegories of the unpleasant: Pooh’s compulsive, Piglet has an anxiety disorder, etc., and the dwarves in Snow White represent stages of cocaine abuse. Some detail for that last one would’ve been interesting, but the pace wouldn’t allow discussion.
To get French about it, YouTube expositions about sinister or semi-sinister or just contrary theories regarding cartoons are an example of how swamped we are by mental product. Long ago Harvey Kurtzman might wonder what was up with Superman or the Lone Ranger or maybe Little Orphan Annie. Now it’s not just the heavyweights, it’s everybody. (Danny Phantom, Samurai Jack?) Some guy wearing a trim little beard pops out a new slant on… maybe not an old favorite, but an entity known to enough other wise guys that they’ll dig the references. Drones paid by WatchMojo scan the posts and repackage the commentary as YouTube product. Someone layers in fretful gamelan music, way in the background, for when the original footage goes silent. A couple of very skilled voice artists read the material (with theory number 20, a savvy-sounding black man is replaced by an upbeat white woman) and we have a pipsqueak version of transgression for anyone with the time to spend on it.
Glut means pile-up, and sorting through all the theories can wear you. But here’s a good one, meaning that it’s probably true: Syndrome is Mr. Incredible’s rejected bastard child. And here’s a beautiful one, the grim-and-gritty Peanuts. Charlie Brown’s in a coma because he has cancer. The hair, you see, or the lack of it. While he’s unconscious, Charlie Brown dreams of the ordinary life that he could’ve led, a life of pets, friends, school, baseball. But because he’s dying of cancer, this life is spun toward misery. Suffering infiltrates the old standbys of childhood, with each becoming a reminder of how alone and hopeless he is. Balking on the pitcher’s mound, bobbling a class presentation, suffering the horror of Lucy Van Pelt, being outshone by Snoopy. “Everything I do turns to failure,” Charlie Brown confesses. In other words, his life is a trap and he’s only at the start of it. Just wait until the thing plays out and he adds up what the decades brought him. Loneliness, ineffectuality, futility, obscurity—a lifetime like that is just a different version of cancer, the equivalent of lying in bed while your cells kill you. Whenever I think of this theory, I laugh out loud. Maybe seeing Charlie Brown’s hairless globe of a head is what does it.
What lies underneath all the theories is adulthood and what the hell good is it. When you’re grown up you can jerk a thumb at Dopey the dwarf and say he’s the burnt-brain-wiring stage of cocaine addiction (anyway I bet that’s it). As an adult my theory is that somebody at Scooby-Doo earned a living by adding their mite of talent to a big pit full of crud. Makes you think.