Scooby Doo - Where Are You?

Currently watching Scooby Doo Where Are You? Case of the Spooky Space Kook on Boomerang.

You know what is disturbing? The universe in which the Mystery Machine gang lives and operates. Every place is run down (like the farm house where the gang stops to try and buy some gas after the Mystery Machine runs out). Their whole world is filled with abandoned amusement parks, camps, factories, air fields and all kinds of similar places. Even the Spooky Space Kook's spaceship looks rundown and awful.

And then there is the fact that the early ones (the Spooky Space Kook episode is copyright in 1969) feature villains whose idea of scaring people off to run some kind of scam involves dressing up like some kind of ghostly or supernatural creature. And that people go for it - meaning they believe that it is actually possible.

I just do not know if I can buy that. 1969 must have been a VERY different time. VERY DIFFERENT.

I read somewhere that Carl Sagan once praised for Scooby Doo for debunking the supernatural and inspiring children to critical thinking. It is too bad in later years as they messed with the show formula for different incarnations that they actually pushed the supernatural agenda. Sometimes they got it right - but often times they did not (or had something allegedly supernatural happening in concurrence with the attempted scam).

My kids like the old Scooby Doo shows a lot - and I would prefer they watch them. They show regularly on the Boomerang channel. And we actually prefer the kids watch the cartoons on that channel -- the old Jetsons, Flintstones, Scooby Doo and all those kind of cartoons (primarily from the 60s & early 70s) are so much better than most of the new cartoons out there.

Already Dead

Currently watching: The Twilight Zone on Chiller Network.

I am already dead.

Here's what led up to it: back on November 20, 1983 I watched a television movie aired on ABC called "The Day After," about the after effects of nuclear attack on the United States. It was followed by a discussion with Carl Sagan, who used the term Nuclear Winter for the first time I can remember.

The film is REALLY intense. (Check out this evaluation and review HERE)

Leading up to the broadcast of this show, my school had been inundated with materials about nuclear war - including a map posted on the wall showing quite clearly that the town where I grew up (Greenville, OH) was well within the blast range of the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is assumed to be a preferred target. So, pretty much, right off the bat we we were informed we were as good as dead when the shyte went down.

Then, a couple of weeks after watching the movie, I was lying in bed reading a book, listening to a broadcast from WTUE 104.7FM in Dayton - when it all of the sudden cut off... As in absolute dead silence. The bomb(s) had fallen - and the blast was on it's way to wipe us off the planet.

I stayed there - waiting for the world to end... And I'm still there.

Did you ever read the story by Ambrose Bierce, or see the short film directed by Robert Enrico, "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge?" In the moments before the onset of death while he is being hanged, a Confederate sympathizer "lives" a dream where he escapes hanging and continues his life... until the rope snaps.

In my "life," the stereo's tape player clicked off - I had been listening to a tape recording I made of a radio broadcast. Sweating, pale and shaken, I continued on... "living" on borrowed time until the blast reaches me, still lying in that bed in the house in Greenville with that book.

It was "years" later when I came across in my research of the tenets of Bushido that a Samurai accepts that he is already dead, and therefore is free from fear to live his life. More on that another time --

If I believed that I wasn't still lying on that bed awaiting final destruction, then I would live my life that way, too - free from fear. It is how I continue to live this dream...

How are you living yours?