The Secret of Scooby-Doo's Enduring Appeal
The Atlantic|May 2020
Why on earth has the formulaic series, which debuted half a century ago, outlasted just about everything else on television?
By Christopher Orr
The Secret of Scooby-Doo's Enduring Appeal

I grew up watching Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! every Saturday morning. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon had launched in 1969, two years after my birth, so it was precisely in my little-kid sweet spot. Much as I loved it, though, the feeble animation and repetitive plots were apparent even to the young me. Whereas characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny seemed eternal, extending far into the past and future, Scooby-Doo felt like a show just for that particular moment, for my specific childhood.

Fast-forward 35 years or so, and to my astonishment, my children loved it just as much as I had. I probably wound up watching more Scooby-Doo episodes with my kids than I had watched as a kid. Evidence suggests that my experience is not unique. Scooby-Doo, believe it or not, has over the years been the subject of at least 19 TV series (on CBS, ABC, the WB, Cartoon Network, and Boomerang); more than 40 animated films; and two liveaction movies in the early 2000s, the first of which grossed $275 million worldwide. A new series featuring celebrity-guest voices, Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, premiered last year. And a new animated movie, Scoob!, starring Zac Efron, Amanda Seyfried, and Tracy Morgan, is scheduled to be released in mid-May.

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The Atlantic

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On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.

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It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.

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The Atlantic

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Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishments— his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.

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