Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?

Our Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes To You

1. I can picture it easily in my mind: gleefully sliding across the linoleum in footed PJs toward the fridge in search of milk to pour on top of an overloaded bowl of sugar, corn syrup, corn starch, dextrose, and marshmallow bits. Then I turn on the tube and watch hours of exploding cartoon violence and adventures.

   

   I need an anthropomorphic rabbit from Brooklyn. I need cat-like humanoid aliens. I need a cyborg detective with bionic gadgets built into his body. I need more than meets the eye, the power of Greyskull, and I definitely need America’s daring, highly-trained, special mission force. (Yo Joe!) It was a great and wondrous time. Comic books spawned toys, and those toys spawned cartoons. Sometimes vice versa. Then there were cross-promotions in fast food restaurants, and blockbuster movies, both animated and live-action. We got special cereals (with even more sugar in the form of chocolate), and limited-edition cups from the movies.

   

   For the sake of fuck, the Sly Stallone arm-wrestling movie Over the Top got a line of action figures. I cannot make this up.

   We were treated to a never-ending merry-go-round of sweet, sweet capitalism and marketing geared specifically to us kids that essentially mandated we tortured our parents with ask after ask at the toy store, tugging on their coats with a sputtering “Puh-lleeeeaaaaassseeeeee…” Oh shit… THAT’S RIGHT! We also had toy stores. We had enormous buildings that could have doubled as airplane hangars lined with shelves two dozen feet high loaded with racecar tracks, tanks, dolls, action figures (you had BETTER not equate the two), the greatest building blocks in the entirety of human history, and every board game we could hope for. Frankly, it was overwhelming, but goddamn what a glorious sight. Those Saturday mornings were a holy thing, except for one issue: they didn’t happen like that.

2. Some years ago I was talking with a friend about the Hardy Boys books. We remarked how exciting and enjoyable they were and what fun we had imagining ourselves as either Frank or Joe (He was a Joe guy. I was more of a Frank). Then he hit me with a staggering uppercut: “I don’t suggest going back and re-reading them. I picked one up recently and it’s TERRIBLE.” I recently purchased the first three seasons of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. It’s… bad. It’s hilariously bad, but still quite bad.

   And those Saturday morning cartoon lineups? Not at all what I remembered. In 1987, ABC was serving up The Care Bears Family, Little Clowns of Happy Town, All New Pound Puppies, Little Wizards, The Real Ghostbusters, The Flintstone Kids, and The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show, in that exact order from 8 am to 1 pm when college football took the wheel. Other stations were showing things like The Muppet Babies and The Smurfs (CBS and NBC respectively, but competing against each other in the 8:30 to 9:30 slot). 1984 was a decent year with Superfriends, Schoolhouse Rock, and The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries, but the programming didn’t make sense and the time slots were filled with other junk like Turbo Teen and The Littles. My favorite stuff aired either just before school or immediately after it, on syndication, Monday through Friday. Fox 50 in Detroit would air the 1960s live-action Batman and follow it up with Duck Tales at about the exact time I got home from school. Before that, it was G.I. Joe and a bold cartoon that was essentially a Western set in space called BraveStarr. None of the shows were ever aired in order, so I never got to see consecutive episodes of Voltron: Defender of the Universe. Ever. If it was a “to be continued” episode, I was screwed. The USA Network had a fantastic cartoon run. So did Nickelodeon and they were also a blast, but not everyone had cable. That was a legit problem back then. What happened in my head is more curious than ABC’s Saturday morning programming. I think all of us adults who grew up in that era collectively stuffed all that network and cable programming into our minds and formulated each of our dream cartoon lineups that lasted from 8 am to dinner time because the reality of the situation was actually a bummer.

3. The word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, meaning return home, and algos, meaning pain. Nostalgia often fills me with wistful wonder and joy. I might see a toy or comic from the era and suddenly I’m awash in those halcyon days before the violence and the tears, before the responsibilities of service and obligations. And then the pain sets in, just briefly, but I let it go in favor of those joyful memories because those are the things worth hanging onto. Hell, I often buy things I don’t need for any reason except for the serotonin bump I get when I look at it. I bundle them under the umbrella of Saturday morning because branding fucking works. In 1997, columnist Mary Schmich, writing for the Chicago Tribune, wrote a hypothetical commencement speech often misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut. Toward the tail end of the hypothetical, Mary drops this gem:

   Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's worth.

   Now, if we’re talking about the toys from that era, MY GOD! Yeah…

   

   Snake Eyes was and shall always be THE MAN. There is no discussion and I will not be taking questions at this time.

I have come to grips that my childhood is essentially gone except for what remains in my mind. I have some toys left over from the era, some comics too, and they are a nice comfort. The lone remnant of the ballpark I loved as a kid is a parking sign.

The rest exists upstairs, in what Bart Giamatti, former Commissioner of Baseball, called “The Green Fields of the Mind.” Michael Bay and his acolytes have ruined Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for me, steroid users wrecked baseball for me, and there are no Saturday morning cartoons to watch anyone. The only innocence left for me is there, on the linoleum in footed pajamas gearing up to watch a Great Dane and the gang solve mysteries out of their machine. To be fair, I’m not that upset about the matter. What is past is prologue, and what’s coming next is more exciting than what has been.