On the Importance of the Villains of Scooby Doo NOT being Supernatural

I hated when Scooby Doo started having actual ghosts and monsters. [Link]

[I] will fight tooth and nail over the idea that there should never, ever be even a trace of the supernatural in the world of Scooby-Doo. And as far as I'm concerned it's not a matter of preference, either -- it's so deeply ingrained into the premise of the show and the way the characters interact that if actual monsters do show up, the whole thing collapses.

Don't get me wrong, as I'm pretty sure the record will show, I love the supernatural as a storytelling element. In real life, I might be a die-hard skeptic -- such a Velma -- but when you're talking about stories, there's something undeniably appealing about Draculas and Wolfmans and other assorted monsters. They're the embodiment of all of our fears and anxieties, given a physical form and weaponized against us. There's an amazing kind of power in those ideas, especially when it comes to stories that show us triumphing against them.

I even get why it might be appealing to make the monsters real for Scooby and the Gang. After all, fighting real ghosts and monsters makes for a more exciting show, especially once kids have twigged to the formula the original series was built on, which inevitably and invariably led to the unmasking and grumbling about meddling kids that would become the show's signature element. When it's not done exactly right, it can be a monumentally boring way to kill an hour, even if Batman, Robin and Jerry Reed -- or as I like to call them, the Holy Trinity -- are involved. And to be honest, it falls short of that mark an awful lot, to the point where I'll be the first to admit that more often than not, I'm a bigger fan of the franchise in concept than in execution.

So on one level, I completely understand why the series has occasionally gone in that direction with stuff like The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo or the recent live-action movies on Cartoon Network. Adding in actual spooky threats makes things more, well, threatening. There's an unpredictability and a danger to the supernatural that you just don't get from someone's crooked groundskeeper trying to scare folks away from a ski lodge with a length of rope and a couple of pulleys, and putting characters that are already defined and beloved into a new sort of situation seems like it'd be a great way to shake things up.

And that would be great, if Scooby Doo was a cartoon about kids fighting monsters. But despite appearances to the contrary, it's not.

Scooby-Doo is a cartoon about kids looking for truth.