In praise of.............................

 

.........................................Scooby-Doo.

The gang sticks together as only high schoolers, unburdened by the yokes of adulthood, can, and in doing so they create the sort of small, self-sufficient, and resilient community that would’ve made Thomas Jefferson proud.

All of this, really, should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid even scant attention to the franchise. For one thing, while so much of American pop culture situates itself in the cities or the suburbs, the Mystery Inc. gang always travels to remote places way out in the wilderness—an abandoned home on the bayou, say, or an abandoned mining camp—because they realize that these places aren’t abandoned at all. They writhe on, haunted monuments to the sacrifices, many of them terrifying, it took to build this great nation, and a reminder that while we may be through with the past, the past is hardly through with us.