Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

Scooby-Doo, What the Hell Is Wrong With You

Jessy Randall

I watched re-runs of Scooby-Doo in the 1980s. Who hasn't seen that show? I mean, if you were a kid in the 1970s or later, you are familiar with that show. Now my children watch the program, and sometimes I watch with them. This week, for example, we watched Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated Season 1, Episode 4, “Revenge of the Man Crab” (first aired August 9, 2010).

WTF, people. Scooby-Doo is no longer just a mystery show where villains would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids. It is now also an instructional program for heteronormativity. Boys and girls can learn from Scooby-Doo that girls only care about boys and romance, and boys don’t care about romance because they have their minds on other things, like solving mysteries.

Remember how, in the original show, it was usually Velma who figured stuff out and solved mysteries despite Shaggy and Scooby being obsessed with Scooby snacks? Well, now, instead, Velma is obsessed with Shaggy. In "Man Crab," Velma can’t seem to think or talk about anything but Shaggy. She sulks when he doesn’t respond to her advances. She looks different than the old Velma, too: her breasts are bigger, or maybe her sweater is just tighter. She also has a bow in her short hair – in case you weren’t sure if she was a girl or not. (I know these pictures don't look THAT different, but in the program you'd notice a change.)

Daphne’s main concern in "Man Crab" is whether or not Fred capital-L Likes her. When girls in bikinis play volleyball, the show calls our attention to the sexual side of things: Daphne thinks Fred is ogling the girls, so she puts on her own bikini to get his attention. She then, of course, has to spend a good chunk of the episode in the bikini. She’s wearing it when the Man Crab captures her and puts her in a hanging cage. (The Man Crab is only interested in females, by the way. After all, it's a man. Um ... and a crab.)

Thanks, Scooby-Doo, for going BACKWARD as far as sexism is concerned. If you’d just stayed the same, I could still plan to name my imaginary girl band The Velmas. But now I don’t want to any more. The Man Crab episode has made me crabby. (But at least it didn't give me crabs.) Scooby-Doo plots have always been repetitive, but now we also have dull, repetitive fake intrigue about ... romantic relationships? Really?

Luckily, Scooby fans still have their imaginations. When TV feeds us sexism and gender norms, we don’t swallow them whole. If you Google around you can find multiple interpretations of the Scooby gang, including a lesbian Velma and a gay Fred and, I’m sure, additional romantic combinations and crossovers, like Fred and George Weasley hitting on Daphne. So I will not despair: no matter how much heteronormative bullshit TV throws at us, at any age, we still remain our own whatevernormative selves and form our own diverse Scooby gangs of friendship and romance.

Oops, I Lied

Jessy Randall

Remember how last week I claimed that the Bernie Rhodenbarr books were the first mysteries I ever read? Well, as I researched that blog entry I discovered that Lawrence Block had published another burglar book in 2004, one that somehow slipped under my radar (maybe because I had a brand new baby that year, born right around the time the book came out). So of course I got it from my library and read it immediately: The Burglar on the Prowl.

On page 104 of the book, Bernie receives a call at his bookshop from someone wondering if he has a particular Joseph Conrad title. As I read this passage I realized that the burglar books weren’t the first mysteries I read at all. They were just the first adult mysteries I read. The first mysteries I read as a kid were Ellen Raskin’s middle-grade novels: The Westing Game, Figgs & Phantoms (in which Joseph Conrad’s novels play an important role), The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel), and The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues.

Oh my god those books were sooooooo good. If you’ve read them, you know. Maybe your teachers made  you read The Westing Game, which won a Newbery and is Raskin’s most famous book. My favorite, by far, though, is Figgs & Phantoms, with its big beautiful ampersands and other typographical niceties. The jacket of Figgs & Phantoms states that the book is “a mysterious romance or a romantic mystery” and says “if you want to read it as a mystery, a clue is: the bald spot.”

Raskin designed the book herself (she also designed the cover for the first edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time), and it’s full of kid-pleasing text-illustration meshes, including a number of signs (one character is a sign-maker) in Playbill font. How do I know the name of the font? Because Raskin includes a detailed note on typefaces at the end of the book. And this, dear reader, may have been the beginning of my personal love affair with the alphabet and typography and the book as object, which led me to my current position as Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College, where classes make things like this and like this.

As soon as I realized I’d read mysteries meant for kids, I also, of course, remembered the Encyclopedia Brown books, which Josh has already talked about. And for that matter, Josh has mentioned Raskin, too, and I think I may have given my final approval of him as a husband for my friend Amanda when he got as excited as I did to hear that there’s a posthumous Raskin novel coming out next year, A Murder for Macaroni and Cheese.  It can’t possibly be as good as Figgs & Phantoms, but I will certainly read it.