It soaked up psychedelia as blotting paper soaked up LSD. The American television of my childhood was permeated with now-bewildering allusions to the just-expired counterculture. The creators all expressed bewilderment about the subsequent associations drawn by stoned students It’s almost as if they were in the grip of something the uninformed ACT wouldn’t balk at hearing described as “the munchies”. Both he and Scooby, apparently a great Dane, were always hungry. Voiced by popular DJ Casey Kasem, Shaggy spoke in, like, the unmistakable patois of the dope fiend, man, and moved with a lobotomised languor that suggested he should stay away from heavy machinery. But Shaggy and Scooby were something else. ACT had, in the era of the Altamont rock festival, no problem with a bunch of young weirdos travelling the country in a brightly coloured van.įred (cravat), Daphne (damsel in distress) and Velma (intellectual with Agnes Varda’s haircut) bounced off outer levels of the counterculture. Which brings us neatly to the 50th anniversary of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The Hanna-Barbera show was conceived to fill a gap after Action for Children’s Television (ACT), one of those endless busy-body organisations concerned with filth on telly, forced the cancellation on US TV of several cartoons deemed too violent. That was, after all, an occasional nickname for MDMA. If the shows got truly daring they could make reference to Scooby Snacks. The Adventures of Mandy and Molly ends with the heroes, bears in hooded tops, blowing whistles while dancing on a podium in rural Hertfordshire. Imagine an alternative universe in which children’s television of the early 1990s was taken up with references to ecstasy.
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