Off to cartoon Heaven

January 13, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

This post doesn’t deal with politics but might strike a chord in those of you of a certain age.
This week, Iwao Takamoto, the animator who created Scooby-Doo, died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was 81.

I watched Scooby-Doo regularly when I was kid, yet I had never heard this man’s name until I read his obituary in the paper the other day.

There are a lot of ways to spend you life. Creating a cartoon character that brings laughter and joy to generations of kids is not a bad one. Sure, we all know Scooby-Doo wasn’t always entertaining. Some of the more recent incarnations fell flat, Scrappy Doo is appalling and the live-action movies are a waste of time.

But classic Scooby-Doo, the Scooby-Doo Mr. Takamoto created, always bring back a flood of pleasant memories for me. My mom usually had a hard time getting me out of bed for school in the mornings, but on Saturday I had no problem rousing myself to watch the gang with the Mystery Machine discover that the ghost haunting that abandoned goldmine was really mean old Mr. Henderson all along. (You know what? He would have pulled it off if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.)

Mr. Takamoto is no longer with us, but if he were, I could only say to him, “Like, thanks a lot, man!”

You must be a good deal younger than me (I’m 50). Don’t mean to disparage, but when was growing up, Bugs Bunny, the OLD Popeye (the ones from like the 20’s or so I think), and the wit of Woody the Woodpecker, Wily Coyote, etc. set a standard that I got used to. When “Scooby” came on the scene, even as a kid (WHEN did it, by the way, start?) I couldn’t make it through even one whole episode. It never made any sense to me. I couldn’t understand who these people were, if the dog was smarter than them all, etc.

  • Tom – I agree Bugs was my standard as a kid. Bugs blows anything by Hanna-Barbera out of the water. Hanna-Barbera have engendered a lot of undeserved good-will in my opinion. People equate Hanna-Barbera cartoons with pleasant childhood memories & forget how truly crappy they were — the art was slap-dash & the writing was paper-thin… rehashing cliche after cliche (how many times did the Scooby Doo gang have to find out the monster/ghost/whatever was a guy in a suit before they started to clue in?).

    Hanna & Barbera were devoted to one thing only… mass producing crappy cartoons as quickly & cheaply as possible. For example, there’s very little original artwork left from their studio because they used to clean & re-use the acetate cels (repeated cleaning would also degrade the quality of the cel), that’s how cheap they were.

    Not to piss in anyone’s cornflakes on a Saturday morning, but that’s my two cents.

  • I’m older than you (55) but I loved Scooby because it was so corny and so trite. Every episode was basically the same. And in “Wayne’s World”, the reference to the Scooby-Doo ending was perfect. I even got my kid hooked on Scooby. (That’s some of the best part about being a dad; you get to watch cartoons again without shame.)

    The first Scooby movie was amusing, the second suffered from sequel problems. And don’t get me started on the new show; it doesn’t even sound like Scooby and Shaggy. Alast, another nother lost icon of childhood. (Even though we don’t want to admit it, we’re still kids in parts, just somewhat bigger in size). And some of those parts, of being a kid, we should never lose.

  • Scooby-Doo first aired on CBS, 1969. In 1976 it moved to ABC which cancelled it ten years later. Since then it has experienced a variety of mini rebirths through several venues, as well as mere rebroadcasts.

    I have always rregarded Hanna-Barbera Productions as the Evil Empire of cartooning. Having poorly drawn characters, without shadows or shading, apparently floating above ground, moving repeatedly through the same stale background repeated over and over again, with barely any changes in facial expression other than the lip line, portraying morons as “heroes”, presenting nothing to puzzle over or learn from … a total package of profitable banality, ideally suited for Americans’ tastes of late. An excellent instance of Gresham’s Law and the Lowest Common Denominator.

  • Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry, to me, were the benchmarks for Saturday morning cartoons, but there was just a goofiness to Scooby Doo that made it fun to watch. Like Godzilla movies.

    But don’t get me started on that stupid Scrappy. He never existed in Scooby-world, as far as I’m concerned.

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