MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The animated Hanna-Barbera series Scooby-Doo, Where are You! debuted on American television in 1969. With a dash of horror and non-lethal slapstick, Scooby Doo was silly and slightly spooky, with a vaguely counter-cultural miasma. The series has been retitled, repackaged, and spun into feature films, games, and other properties. Over the last 50 years, Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and their dog Scooby Doo have solved mysteries and unmasked untrustworthy adults with a reliably repetitive narrative formula. From the outset, Scooby Doo merged vivid Flower Power aesthetics with Gothic elements. The gang frequently found themselves in isolated locations, decrepit mansions, abandoned factories, mines, and creepy caverns. They also knew an unusually high number of vulnerable heiresses under the hypnotic control of sinister older men. In the beginning, the series relied on denouements which debunked the supernatural. In the 1980s, the series pivoted away from this purely skeptical mode, adding ghosts and monsters to the villain lineup.

In 2016, DC Comics launched Scooby Apocalypse for a limited run 36 issue series. Working with Jim Lee, writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis and artist Howard Porter rebooted the series, introducing the gang as young adults meeting for the first time. The reboot traffics in nostalgia for the original cartoon series, but also nostalgia for Cold War horror motifs. As humanity succumbs to a nanite-mediated plague and turns into a horde of mindless monstrous zombies, these attractive young people and their cybernetically-enhanced dog race to stop the virus and save the world. Zombies aren’t the only monsters in Scooby Apocalypse’s narrative. Velma is revealed to be responsible for creating the plague and the series depicts her alternately as heroine, victim, and mad scientist exemplar of Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine. This paper considers gender, sexuality and monstrosity in a close reading of this horror text.