The Power Politics of “Scooby-Doo”

“Scoobynatural” was probably a gimmick, an attempt to keep the writers’ room on the adventure-horror show Supernatural working well into season 13. The show’s protagonists found themselves zapped into an episode of Scooby-Doo, a series older than Supernatural’s protagonists—it debuted in 1969. The episode plays mostly for broad comedy, though it does involve a scene where Sam and Dean explain to the Scooby Gang, famous for unmasking fake monsters, that sometimes, monsters are real.

I initially balked at this revelation. Scooby-Doo, throughout most of its history, turned on the theme that what appears to be an otherworldly monster causing terror in Middle America, is actually a human in disguise. This was important for the show’s young audience, mostly still young enough to be scared of the dark. It told the audience that their apparent nighttime terrors had human faces, and could be, exposed, given names, and taken to jail.

Most importantly, the human monsters were almost always motivated by profit. The series had a subtle political message, which I didn’t understand for years, that money distorted human values and turned ordinary people into monsters. While it wouldn’t be accurate to call the series anti-capitalist (the human monster usually terrorized a small local business owner in hopes of pushing a cheap buyout), the show was certainly anti-greed, and held no love for large corporate conglomerates.

To suggest that monsters might, even occasionally, be real, initially seemed a severe betrayal of Scooby-Doo’s legacy. Letting the truly, ahem, supernatural into that universe undermined the message Generation X learned from Scooby-Doo, that the terrors which stalk the darkness can be exposed by shedding daylight on them. Except, as I remembered the series run, I realized: that wasn’t always the show’s moral. Its real message changed over time, and became more tolerant of sectarianism.

When the original series ran on CBS from 1969 to 1976, the anti-fear moral remained consistent. (In fairness, the monster wasn’t human; I remember at least one episode where the “evil” was malfunctioning technology. However, the underlying problem was always created by human venality, and could be solved with honest ingenuity.) With the show’s move to ABC in 1976, however, it introduced storylines where the monster really was a monster, or anyway not altogether human.

Promo still from the Supernatural episode “Scoobynatural”

This marked a change in the underlying culture. The show, which began during the Nixon era, when an increasingly unpopular war dragged on for years, originated in a time when adult writers increasingly distrusted government, religion, and capitalism. But as the show endured, as Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and nothing got better, the show increasingly included storylines where the story MacGuffin couldn’t be dismantled by exposing its human face. The monsters started becoming monsters.

This became overwhelming with the introduction of Scooby’s nephew Scrappy-Doo, around 1980. Writing out the human characters, except Shaggy, the show shifted focus to adventure over mystery. Importantly, many monsters the characters faced were ultimately revealed as monsters: in particular, I remember episodes featuring a rampaging Polynesian tiki god and a reanimated Chinese dragon statue. These storylines weren’t only supernatural, they contained poorly sublimated racism, as “foreign” monsters needed put back in their natural place.

Scooby-Doo went from believing evil could be countered by giving it a human face, to believing evil was intractable and could only be beaten through force. This paralleled the cultural arc of its Boomer-generation writers, going from Flower Power to the Reagan Revolution. After late 1985, Scooby-Doo stopped being a meaningful barometer of present-day trends, transitioning to a nostalgia property for Gen-X audiences, roughly equivalent to Classic Rock Radio. Which is where Supernatural comes in.

Supernatural turns on the idea that evil exists objectively and materially, as a physical force in the outside world. It presents our world as an actively malevolent place. In some ways, this suggests a throwback to medieval presentations of angels and demons; but, considering Global Warming, ICE concentration camps, and Fascist marches on American soil, maybe believing in active evil isn’t unreasonable today. One could argue that Scooby-Doo, not church, is the actively naïve model.

Which makes Supernatural’s response perfectly reasonable. Scooby-Doo becomes a playground for extended adolescence, a chance to chase girls and binge Scooby Snacks. Facing our world’s constant evil becomes quickly overwhelming, and even full-time professional resistors face the prospect of compassion fatigue. To put it another way, evil is simply tiring.The episode’s comedy approach reflects that Sam and Dean need relief from constantly battling literal monsters.

Which, isn’t that something we all need right now?