Day: May 29, 2012

… Thusly a certain blogger named Chris Sims characterizes that most beloved of the “Saturday Morning Cartoons” from my childhood – Scooby Doo: “the lopsided rhombus of unrequited love orbiting a talking dog.”

He’s writing about the philosophical underpinnings of the original series, vis-a-vis complaints (valid, in his opinion – and mine, too) about the introduction of “real” ghosts and “real” paranormal events in later incarnations of the series. He explains that this later derationalization of the series and of its iconic characters is utterly against what the series originally “meant.”

He says it was originally about teaching kids to think. I very much agree. Looking back on it, I almost wonder if it had some kind of marxian agenda (remember, marxian is not marxist – it’s about the philosophical methodology of the dialectic, not about politics, per se). I recall a graduate seminar in which we were discussing liberation theology, and about the possible ways to leverage pop culture in a project of “conscientization.” This is it, a priori.

Near the conclusion, Sims states:

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them.

Amen. Or as Scooby might say, rrAmen. I’m so glad people out there are writing at this level about these kinds of things.
[Daily log: walking, 4 km; running, 2 km]