‘Scooby Doo’ Offers Simple Pleasure

Mon., March 27, 2000

Dani Peterson Mt. Spokane

As of late, the cable channel Cartoon Network has been running old episodes of “Scooby Doo,” which seems to have made a comeback.

(Lately, lots of new - or old - Scooby Doo toys, games and other products have appeared on store shelves.)

I’m talking the good episodes, not the “New Adventures” with just Daphne, Scooby and Shaggy or the ones with the Godforsaken Scrappy-Doo, who is in dire need of euthanasia.

Hanna-Barbra has even recently released new videos of Scooby escapades, including “Scooby Doo and the Witch’s Ghost” and “Scooby Doo on Zombie Island,” which has aired on the Cartoon Network.

It has all the basic plot points as the cartoon except for one. The ghosts - zombies actually - are real, and the movie also answers the question, “What happened when they finally had to grow up and stop driving around in a van?”

The story is still pretty weak, with one dimensional characters, but the animation has greatly improved. Still, the whole concept works for some odd reason deeply embedded in the human mind.

Kudos to anyone who watched the “The Scooby Doo Project,” a parody of “The Blair Witch Project,” complete with shots of an abandoned van and a missing person’s poster for the gang. It ran last fall over Halloween weekend.

All in all, Scooby Doo with the original characters, is one of the simpler pleasures in life, along with Jolly Ranchers and fast-forwarding through commercials on recorded TV shows.

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