Scooby Doo Revisited
                Archival Excavations from the Child's First Brush with Human Mystery

Dan gets loose in strange company and tells people about a mythical episode of Scooby Doo, wherein the band Kraftwerk appear as the special guests.  It's his private version of the Life cereal Mikey dying of a PopRocks/Coca-Cola gastro-
intestinal rupture rumor.  Seldom does he let on that there's no truth to it.  People go out into the world feeling at least mildly certain that, if only once, they'll encounter that outrageous episode before passing on.  It's like unearthed Victorian texts in
A.S. Byatt's Possession, the rock band Spinal Tap, and 78RPM records of a song called "Doin' the Chameleon" from the 20's, inspired by a man named Leonard Zelig.  Probable as they all seem, they're simply not real.  Well, not conventionally.  Our friend Jorge Luis Borges scored a triumphant laugh at my expense--and at, I suspect, that of a great many others--which was alternately exhilarated and disoriented at the semblance of discovery he procured in his wonderously phony histories..
 

Isn't it always the case that we circumvent need in search of the remote and undiscovered, unscaled mountains and buried treasures alike.  You'd forget an orthodontist appointment without a second thought if only there was a mysterious black X on the earth, waiting for you.  If you find it you can leave everything else behind.  You'd never have to wear the apron again, never take Mandy's ego-tripping bullshit in front of the clients, where the flourescent light adds years to the look of you.  All you have to do is find it, that X, and dig.

As a species discovery is our primary lust.  Mystery, discovery, change.  What The Moonstone or the Hound of the
Baskervilles represented to Victorian readers, what The Maltese Falcon was to Depression era America, Scooby Doo
was to the young in us:  the Moonstones of our young naive selves.
 

Greed shaped post-industrial America into a mapless continent of ghost towns, haunted mansions, and abandoned amusement parks.  The Mystery Machine visited them all.  With enough Thai stick to sedate the Eastern Seaboard the gang meandered with innocence and determination, pulling the ghost shrouds from the dressmakers' dummies, and nabbing every last scheming prospector willing to employ mortal fear as a means of securing a stolen fortune.

Scooby Doo wasn't implicitly about drugs.  It was drugs.  Kids, greeds makes an ugly face of you!  You'll see every
last mystery evolve into something unmagical.  Formative lust will yield to greed if you're lucky.  If not it just
becomes undetermined want.  But who's to say greed is better than want?  The latter has its virtues, at least.
 

So you get these mysteries.  Each has a tidy, if slightly obvious, resolution in the end.  But the suspension of disbelief is a foreign concept to a kid.  You really wonder if this time it really isnt a ghost in that old ski lodge, without crime, or profane explanation, without all those real world problems that only convolute the sublime nature of seeing something that school and upbringing instruct you isnt real.  Isn't even possible.  So you remain vigilant until you know every ending, til that heartbreaking moment when it becomes all too apparent that the only character who didnt get to the spooky scene of horror via the Mystery Machine was invariably the guy behind the caper.  The images of ghouls crossing curtains of fog beneath a wolfman moon were just more fodder for the unravelling ruse of human mystery.

But while it lasts it's golden.  For some reason a haunted theatre in Nashville, in the basement of which Jerry Reed
uncannily, yet with comsummate altruism,  sings "Pretty Mary Sunshine" just makes perfect sense to you.  It really
does.  Most of us who still recognize that song, got it from that peculiar context, like knowing a Cole Porter song
by a variation of it used in a tv ad for dairy products, like not being able to hear "Strange Fruit" without thinking of
dying and America..
 

So if what really did happen in the Scooby Doo universe was so improbable then what about the truly probable stuff that really didnt happen?  Our imaginations teem with the lost episodes of Scooby Doo, the garden of senselessness where fear was something confined to thirty minutes, where "Showroom Dummies" would play while Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma, and Daphne would high tail it around an abandonned munitions factory in Koln with Kraftwerk, and evil Kraftwerk clones hot on their trail.

What I decided to do was put the shiftless Vulgar Picture interns to some use, sent them into the phantasmal
archives of lost Scooby Doo episodes to see what they could dig up of our youth's bizarre remainder.  A slew of
scuttled msteries came to light, anything from sentence fragment plot treatments to entire episodes that had never
been seen by the public.  Thousands of them.  The following list, having been scrutinized at great length by the
interns under my watchful eye, comprises the best of that obsolete legacy.

Episode # 45
Year:  1980
Special Guest:  Slade
Musical sequence:  Slade "Run, Run Away"

A formulaic treatment initially written for English metal band Slade.  It was shot down in a writer's meeting as
having too little relevance to the lives of young American audiences.  Writer, Henry Hassle defends his treatment,
"the music will change their little souls".  Hassle leaves the writing team within months.

Ironically following Hassle's departure the episode 45 treatment did surface once more before being permenantly
committed to the archive.  Feeling it might be the perfect in-road for a comparable American rock band, the Hanna
Barbara folks pitched it to Van Halen.  But in early recording sessions for the voice parts an uncooperative David
Lee Roth stormed out of the studio, calling his sides "some wack Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park horeshit".

Episode # 163 "Scooby Doo and Friends meet the Geto Boys"
Year:  1993
Special Guest(s):  the Geto Boys
Bushwick Bill's "Phantom of the Rapra", recut with additional Geto Boys verses

Ultimately it was Geto Boy, Scarface's insistence to stare down the evil Chuckie clone army  in a final showdown
scene, with the trash-talk, "I ain't a motherfuckin' gentleman!" Prior to this licensing setbacks plagued the troubled
plot development, when permission to use the Chuckie character was denied the Hanna Barbera studio.  According
to then HB exec Ramon Sterling, "they didn't want to let out the rights to one of their characters under the
conditions  which the episode called for.  As stipulated by fellow-Geto Boy, Bushwick Bill, Chuckie was to appear as
both a hero and a villain in the story, doing battle with clones of himself.  His reasoning was rooted in a Jungian
model which he consistently failed to demonstrate for the writers' meetings.  "The duality would have simply fallen
flat", one writer said.  "it was just too Gremlins."

Episode #25 "A Study in Scarelet"
Year:  1982
Special Guest(s):  Yoko Ono
Musical Sequence(s):  Lamonte Young score music, Ono's poignant "Goodbye Sadness"

This episode finally did materialize, though not however, until Hanna Barbera had washed its hands of it.  Yoko
Ono's proposed setting, a run-down cosmetics factory proved initially a profitable challenge to the Scooby writers.
It wasn't until later in storyboard development, when Ono elucidated a "system of menstrual symbols at work" in
the images of bleeding facory walls,  that misgivings were granted a voice in meetings.  A letter from HB vice
president, Camp Smarther, best illustrates the group's position with Ono's ideas.  Paraphrasing, Smarther
commends the Ono's concepts, but suggests they might be more appropriate for an off-broadway theater-type
environment, or a performance piece.  He asserts, "Let's keep this thing as far from menstrual as humanly possible.
The kids of this country are a mess already, without prematurely dumping the problems of adolescence in their laps
before they're good and ready.  This is just a little too probing for our demographic.  It's like I tell all my new
writers when they come aboard, inevitable things can wait til tomorrow.  Nothing in the Scooby Doo Mysteries is
inevitable but Magic and Good Times!"

Yoko Ono politely withdrew from participation, offering as  a gesture of goodwill, the unfinished material she'd
developed in writers' meetings.  Shortly thereafter , enlisting the help of playwright, Harold Pinter, Yoko Ono set
about creating the Scooby Doo Mystery she had envisioned, to the letter.  Her collaboration would prove to be a
cult sensation among the avant garde and hipster crowds, one and all.  At one particularly exclusive screening in
New York City in the late 80's John Waters was exposed, and duly genuflected before a work he stills refers to as
the high watermark of populist animation.  He raved, "Some of those Knitting Factory rubes were left scratching
their heads.  But I was in tears.  Before "Scarelet"  the very notion of a pornographic pathos was laughable.  This
really moved Shock ahead."

Then an assistant sound engineer for HB, Embeth Pisces, recalls the soud crew's first exposure to the Lamonte
Young score Ono had commisioned for the episode, while still collaborating with the HB studios.  "It was scary.
Even to adults."

Episode  #23  "The Levitating SI Football Phone"
Year:  1978
Special Guests:  Jim Brown, Terry Bradshaw, Bubba Smith

This farcical plot came about just as waning popularity for the animated series crossed paths with the unweildy
talents of these three NFL pros.  Writer, Steppenwolf Harrison recalls the tantrum thrown by Bradshaw, upon
finding Smith's character had managed to garner more speaking lines than his.  The unpleasantness, as relayed by
Harrison to our Vulgar Picture steno wiz, recalls a wounded Bradshaw stammering on the accusation, "The alacrity of you people!" Harrison, not just a little confused by the quarterback's utterance, asked, "could you please use alacrity in a
sentence?"  Bradshaw responded, "Yeah, Fuck motherfucking you!"  Though this marked the demise of the football
phone story, the humor of Bradshaw's outburst spread throughout the writers' offices, and, as many would later
recall, provided a much-needed morale boost in their flagging output.
 

Episode #30 "The Mystery of the Barmy Tadcaster" Year:  1979 Special Guests:  The Specials, Mark E. Smith, Shane MacGowan Musical sequence:  "Racist Friend"

On bank holiday in Northern England, Scooby and the gang embark on this rare adventure abroad with the legendary Specials.  The Mystery Machine comes upon a portentous brewery  which, according to the clever and capable sleuthing of the Specials, who were already hot on the case, was revealed to be a smokescreen operation for the National Front.  By night the seemingly harmless manufacturer of a popular beer became the think-tank for the racist miscreants who inch closer evey day to launching their race war against a "tolerant, diluted England."

This socially-conscious treatment promised total comittment by the Specials, along with Smith and MacGowan.  But as production pushed on Hanna Barbera executives questioned the "heavy-handed, and highly politicized nature" of the idea.

"Are they saying that beer is in some way complicit in racist enterprise?  Because I know, at least here in America that couldn't be further from the truth."  Notoriously arch-conservative HB vice president, Thrum Stompers calls the episode plot "a cage rattler", and "a thin pinko thread".  Under the considerable influence of Stompers right wing agenda the subordinate staff conceded, citing a newfound reticence.  "Perhaps", Jani Frankenscence, a then-head writer puzzled, "it was a little antagonistic.  Symbolically convoluted as well."  No further development occured until almost a decade later when the idea was transplanted with the departure of Frankenscence, when he went to work on the horror film, with a suspiciously familar storyline, Halloween 3:  Season of the Witch.  Cultural theorist, and free-lance film critic, Kikus Angre, called the transplanted plot "a moral betrayal of the socially conscious  seedling of the Barmy Tadcaster treatment."

An unusual bit of memorabila was commissioned by Angre.  It is a single, full-color cell depicting the foiled racists bound in rope as the Scooby gang and the guest cast stand waiting for the real Scotland Yard to show up and haul the evil-doers of to jail.  Smith and MacGowan were written in as the bumbling Lestrade and Greegson to the Scooby gang/Specials' Holmes and Watson.  Keeping with his analogous Lestrade role, a visibly intoxicated Smith stands boastfully above the captured National Front henchmen.  In the illustration Smith has, in drunkenly embellishing the means by which he single-handedly solved the case, dropped his last bottle of the Barmy Tadcaster into a duly grimpen mire.

Episode  #126 "You! Rat! Die!"
Year:  1991
Special Guest(s):  Crispin Glover
Musical sequence:  The Sonics "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark"

Believe it or not this outlandish bit made it into a fourth week of re-writes before being rejected.  The plot, in so far as it can be called one, concerns, in Glover's words, "myself and that animated Smiley Glove thingy from the Hamburger Helper television ads.  As vigilante former-FDA inspectors, we get to suspecting some illicit operations in an Omaha meat-proccessing plant.  When we arrive we find matters to be much worse than we previously believed them.  There are GIANT RATS!  And they're EVERYWHERE!"

The writers' staff irreconcilably objected to one of Glover's stipulations, after losing a particularly below-the-belt face-off regarding the inclusion of the Hamburger Helper iconl.  The final straw came when Glover insisted that the Hamburger Helper character, whom he called Ratkiller, would "speak in a thick Cajun dialect" and "have a deep, dark secret which would be revealed when the time was right."  This mysterious secret was so heavily guarded that not even after the dismissal of the whole story would Glover disclose it.  "They couldn't possibly have fathomed it", Glover said.  He did however insist that "French-speaking audiences would get it right away."

In a strained final attempt to salvage the unwieldy, and severely inchoate storyline, an emergency script meeting was held.  Writer, Dun Fowler determined to resign should the project get a green light for production had the following to say.  "Glover showed up really, i don't know quite how to put it, like a commando. And when he "briefed" the agitated staff as to the merits of rat extermination and extermination-related studies, as well as the "clandestine pertinence of the beautiful French language"  Fowler felt he could hold his tongue no longer.  "I was astounded that the very ideas he was tabling weren't outright laughed out of the writer's conferences.  He was coming up with a kind of pseudo-philosophical feces that would have made Ken Russell seem like Billy Wilder by comparison.  If Crispin wasn't freebasing cleaning products then I'm the goddamned Queen of Idaho."
 
 

While it was the shared priviledge of myself, and the Vulgar Picture intern team to have experienced the aforementioned rarities of Scooby Doo phantasmagoria, these guest stars shared Scooby fiascos that we all know and love.
 

Sonny and Cher; The Addams Family; Batman & Robin (2);
Josie and the Pussycats; Laurel and Hardy (2); Phillis Diller;
Sandy Duncan; Speed Buggy; The Three Stooges (2);
Cass Elliot; Davy Jones; Dick Van Dyke;
Don Adams (2); Don Knotts; The Harlem Globetrotters (2);
Jeannie and Babu; Jerry Reed; Jonathan Winters;
Tim Conway (2)
 

In the End...

Executive Vice President of Hanna Barbera, Jem Kirkpatrickane, offered our staff the following statement to bookend our investigation.

"What we gave the kids through the years was a little out there, to be sure.  Children desperately need that element of mystery to define what is valuable to them, same as you, same as me.  But what they didn't see, that is, what wound up on the archive shelves, or the cutting room floor, you know, those things we spared the kids over the years, well, that's worth its weight in gold a hundred times over for the trouble it spared everyone."