WARNING:
This webpage contains some naughty words and many very evil thoughts. Be over 18 or go away. And don't come crying to me if reading this material gives you nightmares for the rest of your misbegotten life and/or makes it impossible for you to have a normal sex life again. Or else I will punish you like you truly deserve, you filthy little slut.

Accused of a crime they did not commit, a rag-tag band of teenage heroes and their genetically-engineered sentient dog are on the run across the country, being chased by shadowy government agencies and a bumbling Southern sheriff with a grudge. Traveling from town to town, they fight for justice and teach important life lessons to those they meet along the way.

Back when we first saw this show as tots, we didn't appreciate the layered nuances of subtext behind the dark imagery, exploring the relationship between sex and death. Back then, we didn't know about necrophilia and the bizarre sexual drives of many serial killers. We didn't understand about the pleasures of auto-asphyxiation and ritual bloodletting during sex. Now that we understand these things all too well, there is so much more to discover about this harmless little "kid's show" we used to watch back when it was all about the funny puppy.

The beast within each of us striving to communicate with a hostile world. The instinctual back-brain craving to glut ourselves when directly confronted with our own mortality. Our intrinsic need to piece together some meaning from completely unrelated fragments of reality. The terrifying demons buried within our psyches, and the ultimate discovery that they are all merely fat, middle-aged real estate agents wearing latex suits and rubber masks.

Deep in the back of your subconscious, you have always known this.

Which is what Scooby Doo is all about.

Villians

Take note, criminals: when commiting any crime requiring a maximum of stealth and guile (particularly white-collar crimes) always put on a Halloween costume and run around moaning at people like you're an Alzheimer's patient trying to take a crap. This will drive them away, leaving no witnesses to your nefarious scheme. At least, that's the theory.

As seen above, it doesn't have to be a particularly good Halloween costume. If you're low on cash, even one of those plastic garbage bags painted like a Teletubby is apparently sufficient to do the trick. People won't avoid you because they believe you're a ghost. They will avoid you because they believe you're a dangerous lunatic dressed like a ghost. But the effect is the same.

Tests involving the neighbors in my apartment building confirm this. You can pretty much walk into anybody's living room and take their TV set without interference if you're dressed like a wolfman and continuously screaming at the top of your lungs.

Scooby

Scooby Doo is along for the ride for the following reason: when you launch a washing machine out of a catapault onto a balding bank manager, you simply must have a talking great dane in the driver's seat. Otherwise you don't get the extra "artistic interpretation" points from the international judges.

Oh yeah, and there's the minor fact that he talks! This just demonstrates the depth of insanity involved with these people. They are so wrapped up in their own psychoses that they completely take for granted the fact that their dog talks to them. If I had a talking dog, you can bet he'd be shipped off to a genetics research lab for vivisection before you can say "who wants to be a millionaire?" I dunno, maybe it's just me.

Fred

Look at the cravat. Yeah, he's gay. You know it, I know it, and after many dissapointing hours of sweaty groping in the musty attics of spooky old mansions, even Daphne knows it. The problem is that Fred doesn't know it.

Now look at the shit-eating grin plastered to his face. It never changes. The gang could be trapped in an enormous pile of shit with a horde of brain-eating clowns coming at them swinging chainsaws, and that fucking smile would still be plastered to his straining, sweating, look-at-me-I'm-heterosexual face.

One of these days he's going to snap under the pressure of maintaining that facade and just take Shaggy in his strong arms and make sweet, sweet man-lovin' to his broken corpse in the back of the Mystery Machine all night long. While wearing Daphne's blood-stained dress and screaming show tunes at a bloodcurdling pitch. It's inevitable.

I mean, just look at the cravat.

Clues

News flash: Neither Fred nor Velma are particularly all that bright - they're just smart enough to trick everybody else into thinking they know what's going on. It's a running inside joke, and nobody's gotten it yet. A typical "clue-finding" exchange tends to go like this:

Fred: "Look! Scooby found a steaming pile of dog shit! Good work, Scoob!"

Velma: "That dog shit matches exactly the dog shit that was on the bottom of my shoe last month. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Fred: "I guess this mystery is just about solved!"

Meanwhile Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby stare at them in stupefied shock, wondering just what the hell they could have figured out regarding swamp monsters and counterfeiting from some completely random objects they found laying around cluttered areas.

The truth is, neither of them have any idea what's going on. But they also know that it doesn't matter: by the time they catch and unmask the bad guy, it will be easy to work out the plot in reverse. Making it look like they knew everything all along.

Daphne

Daphne is that chick from high school who all the boys wanted to fuck so badly that they prayed fervently to God every night that someday they would get in to her flowered, lavender-scented panties for just one moment of divine glory. And the girls prayed equally fervently that they could get through another day without the bitter self-hatred that inevitably comes with comparing themselves to Daphne's standardized magazine-cover "perfection." Everybody wanted to be her or fuck her. Or both.

Yet by day nobody ever took the time to actually talk to her or to even look her in the face, so intimidated were they by her "June Cleaver: the Fuckable Years" image. So in secret desperation she signed up for every extracurricular activity in existence and ran for class president. While putting herself under enormous pressure to get straight A's. Wondering the whole time why if she was so popular, how come she didn't have any friends? It's a common trend, one which usually ends in suicide.

But give this girl some credit - she didn't just go the pills and booze route for her "final exit." No, Daphne's personal form of megalomania has driven her to commit suicide in the most grandiose and bizarre fashion imaginable: by recruiting a bunch of losers and freaks to go on a world-wide expedition, trying their damndest to get themselves splattered by serial killers.

And she's good at it, too. On more than one occasion, Daphne has been singled out and abducted by the bad guy for absolutely no good reason at all. Other than the fact that she likes to stand in front of bookcases with hinges on the sides and look cute. They know she wants it.

She's begging for it.

Scrappy Doo

I'm giving Scrappy a mention here due to the fact that, after a long and thorough search, I was completely unable to find any pictures of him on the entire world-wide-web that didn't have big "NOT" symbols pasted all over them, or animated daggers being driven into the back of his cranium. That's how much people hate this annoying little shit. Even the strange little gnome people who spend all their free time building shrines and "super-kewl" webpages "devoted" to the show cannot stomach the foul creature.

Now that's a tribute.

Shaggy

I'm not even going to talk about the drugs. There's really nothing to add on that point that hasn't been said already. Just check out his performance in "Trainspotting."

Shaggy doesn't want to be here. There's no good reason for him to be here. His so-called "friends" drove him thousands of miles away from wherever he lives just to endanger his life, and he's too chickenshit to hitchhike or to call his parents to take him home. To force him to do their bidding, the gang continues to supply him with the "medicine" he needs to make it through another day.

The reason everybody keeps him around is to use him as monster bait. On repeated occasions, Velma has all but told him to his face, "look bitch, all you're good for is tempting the psychopathic killer into stepping into this hydraulic press. Now stand there in the pit and scream like a little baby until we tell you to stop!"

And he does it. Classic junkie behavior.

Traps

At some point during every episode, Fred is going to come to the command decision that the best thing to do is build the most complicated Rube Goldberg device they can manage out of whatever's laying around. The rest of the gang generally go along because they're in mortal fear of Fred's state of mind (see above) and try to indulge his delusions whenever possible.

Naturally the traps never perform as intended, for two very good reasons: Firstly, Rube Goldberg devices are supposed to fail. The second problem they run into is that, like the U.S. military, they always put a talking dog and the stoned guy in charge of the most critical part of the thing.

Nevertheless, they generally manage to catch the bad guy. However, this has less to do with the effectiveness of the trap than the fact that they have at this point stopped being afraid of him and running like hell because he makes scary noises and chases them. At about the point the trap goes to hell, the gang realizes its four young, healthy teenagers versus one fat, old real-estate developer and kicks the fucker's ass. However, those parts generally get edited out.

Velma

I saved Velma for last, because it's hard for me to type coherently while looking at a picture of her.

At the tender age of 14, Velma is what we in the Internet community commonly refer to as a "Lolita." She is also one of the most underrated pieces of ass in all of cartoon history. Sure, once she figures it all out she'll end up as a confirmed lesbian, but until then she's mine! Check out the pleated miniskirt and knee-high socks; can you say "Catholic schoolgirl fantasy?" If it weren't for the enormous orange tent she habitually wears, nobody would even look twice at Daphne.

Because you just know that underneath that big wooly sweater are two of the most glorious fleshy orbs God ever placed on the front of a woman. I can just see her nipples rubbing wildly against the rough fabric as she runs screaming from some dark stranger out to abduct her and take her to his underground lair to perform unspeakable deeds with her.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go put on a rubber pirate mask and smuggle 60 tons of Guatemalan hashish out of a spooky old barn.