BW Media Spotlight

This goes on for several hours. You have to figure someone was sweating like crazy that day.

The Scooby-Doo franchise is built on one key formula. A group of teens and their talking dog (speech impediment aside) travel around their hometown or around the world and find ghosts, aliens, and monsters scaring the crud out of usually innocent people. As they investigate they learn it’s really just bad guys in costumes using devices that aren’t quite real but just believable enough for a kids show.The formula has lasted for a very long time now and has made the talking dog and his friends some of most beloved characters in animation.

However, sometimes the monsters are real. As far back as the original (not the first one mind you) Saturday morning period, various incarnations of the franchise has shown that every now and then a real ghost or alien, usually among those being terrorized but not always, pops up to thrown a little shade into the gang’s life. When just traveling with Scooby and Scrappy, Shaggy was running from bullies, minotaurs, aliens, and other weird stuff, when he wasn’t teaching at a girl’s school for monsters or hiring ghosts who watched way too much Three Stooges to bust other ghosts. Sometimes, even among these actual paranormal situations they’d still find baddies in masks. Scooby once saw the spirit of an ancestor finally rest peacefully after solving a years-old mystery AND dealing with a current attempt at theft from someone in costume. The question is, doesn’t this confuse just whether or not a mystery is real or fake?

In a video from NerdSync, Scott Niswander goes over the history of the franchise, the times the monsters were real and the times they weren’t, and while the presence of the fantastic, the marvelous, and the uncanny benefits the franchise for the audience. Not so much for Shaggy and Scooby’s nerves, mind you. And while watching this I had a minor unrelated revelation of my own.

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