I was the recent recipient of Scooby Doo, Where Are You? The Complete First and Second Seasons for my birthday (May 18th, for all you belated well wishers). The nostalgia juiced through my senses as I popped in the first DVD to experience this Hanna-Barbara masterpiece (second for them, of course, to the Flinstones). As I began to watch, although entertaining, I began to wonder: what exactly was the appeal of the Scooby Doo myseries?

Were they an ego stroke for the seven- to nine-year-old aspiring gumshoe? For children accustomed to Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew (not to mention her knock-off Trixie Beldon), the Scooby Doo mysteries were too simplistic. For instance, if the gang meets one townsperson who lives near the swamp, and this person is the only non-haunted being they meet in the entire episode, or if there are two townspeople and two villians, well, it's not hard to figure out that Ned and Zeb are the swamp witch and her counterpart the zombie.

And the motive was always the same—to scare law-abiding citizens from or off valuable property so that the no-goodinks could have it all to themselves. (The modern-day possibilities are endless for this plotline—the ghost junkie of the housing project created by hustlers to scare police away, the ghost of the corrupt energy company invented by the CEO to scare away regulators or book snoopers.)

Perhaps the appeal lay in the second-tier superstars (many of whom didn't show up until the mid-seventies, after the original two seasons had run its course). The Harlem Globetrotters I could stomach, but who the hell was Jerry Reed, and what purpose did he serve, other than to have me tunelessly hum "Pretty Mary Sunlight" while in the grocery line? In order to line up the same caliber of stars for a Scooby Doo mysteries reunion would call for some serious animation of Bob Saget and Michael Bolton or some other washed-up star reduced to voiceover work, doncha think?

And for goodness sake, to have a television series that is successful, one has to have a charismatic superstar. I'm sorry; does anyone really like Scooby Doo? I didn't like him when I was eight, and I sure as hell don't like him now. The only time I did like him was when the brains at Hanna Barbara decided to trot out his third-rate cousins, Scooby Dee and Scooby Dumb. The sexual tension that Scooby Dee brought into the mix was understandable (and a tad incestuous, being that they were cousins), but Scooby Dumb? Isn't Scooby Dumb just Scooby Doo with an even more watered-down set of genes?

Seriously, Scooby was dumb. He was the Maxwell Smart of cartoons. And for a kid accustomed to never outsmarting Encyclopedia Brown, for Scooby to continually luck into solving a mystery was just, well, cheap. And to admit that admits that the whole Hanna-Barbara empire—from their animation to their inbred-looking characters to their book-corner animation—was the Microsoft of the industry. It was the Bazooka of the confection business—pure crack. And we all know crack does the job it's supposed to do.

And so did the Scooby Doo mysteries, I suppose. After all, they were so successful for Hanna Barbara that they created numerous bastardizations of them during the seventies—Jabberjaw (Scooby Doo in water), Dune Buggy (Scooby Doo at the beach with a nice transmission), the weird genie Babu (which was more of a I Dream of Genie/Scooby Doo hybrid), and so on. Yet none of these were as popular as Scooby Doo. There was something about the comaraderie of a bunch of clue-finding stereotypes—the jock, the beauty queen, the brain, the stoner and, well, whatever Scooby was—that captured our imagination like no other show did, made us want to be part of the fun. They were like the Breakfast Club without eighties music. They represented freedom, but a wholesome freedom. They represented the other, dark world that sends many of us on our way to wicca, divination/Tarot, etc.

And they did make us laugh every once and awhile, a good dose of happiness, kind of the way the pet rock and the chia pet and the knockers and the sex bracelets (hmm, wrong decade) did. And unlike those, the gang still has a place in our hearts. I just wish I had a better understanding of their power over us.

And I think I have it: the subliminal message department at Hanna Barbara.