Sometimes you run into sheer brilliance in the most unexpected places. On the Comics Alliance blog, Chris Sims writes about Scooby Doo and secular humanism in a piece that I consider a masterpiece.
I know. It sounds crazy. Like baked beans and iron filings. It’s difficult to imagine the two working together.
But Sims pulls it off pulls it off in a big way.
I love it as a parent. I love it as a teacher. I love it as a writer.
It’s ingenious.
There are so many outstanding paragraphs that I could have quoted here, but the one that I think serves as the heart of the piece is the following. Read it, and if you are as impressed as I am, go to the blog and read the full piece.
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Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo:
The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.
I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.
