Things Worth Remembering: Scooby-Doo and the American Ethos For more than half a century, a cartoon dog and four teenagers have been teaching Americans a radical lesson: Evil wears a human face, and goodness is something we build together.
A scene is shown from “A Night of Fright Is No Delight,” from season 1 of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (Hanna-Barbera Productions)
Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Liel Leibovitz marks the spooky season with a tribute to Scooby-Doo—and explains why the classic cartoon offers one of the most enduring windows into the American soul.
True American classics are rarely celebrated upon first release. Moby-Dick sold shockingly few copies in its first four months, earned its author the measly sum of $1,260, and proceeded to hurry out of print, where it remained for the last years of Herman Melville’s life. Citizen Kane lost money in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, prompting one distributor in Emporium, Pennsylvania to muse that, “You can stand in front of a mirror and call yourself ‘sucker’ when you play this one. It does not have one redeeming feature. It will not draw; those that do come will not know what it is all about.” The Velvet Underground & Nico never made it past number 171 on the Billboard 200 chart during the year it was released. To this august list, add “A Night of Fright Is No Delight.”...
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