Scooby Doo and Secular Humanism [link]

That version of Hamlet makes more sense than the standard one. Cui bono?

That is really excellent. But poor old Scooby doesn't get a line :( At least he could've said "Rowr?" when the ghost appeared.

The quote is actually considered by the end of the article:

"To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them".

Traditional fairy-tales tend to focus more on the idea that if you interact with strangers or do anything out of the ordinary, you will die horribly :P (At least that's what I noticed when reading Aesop's fables recently).

I vote #2. #3 gives them too much credit, and #1 not enough.

Although it may not be so much that real monsters catch more eyeballs as that messing with the formula (in a reboot) catches more eyeballs. By now, I've seen enough direct-to-video modern Scoobies that I expect them to be supernatural (as well as inferior in other ways), so maybe next time they'll go back to fake monsters?

Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost is probably the worst. It's not just that the witch is real, which as I said I expect now, but its (positive!) references to Wicca are so uninformed and trashy that it's actually an insult to Wiccans too.

Edit: Possibly Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is exactly this return to fake monsters. I don't know, I haven't seen it. Since it has an ongoing story arc, they may decide to make a monster real in the end.

Think of the individual members of the Scooby gang not as separate people, but as separate modules in the brain. Our inner Shaggy and Scooby never stop freaking out, no matter how convinced we are that there is no actual monster. But we do stop taking them seriously and trust our inner Velmas.

You might think this planet would update, and yet it doesn't. That part of the show is perfectly accurate as a metaphor.

Similarly, Wile E. Coyote never figures out that he can fly by harnessing the influence his "not looking down" has on gravity.

A friend of mine once suggested to me that fundamentalists hate Harry Potter, not because of the occult stuff, but because it teaches kids that books featuring witches and talking snakes should be thought of as fantastic.

There's a good scene in a fake commercial somewhere where it's pointed out that only Shaggy ever talks directly to Scooby, and Shaggy was stoned out of his mind the entire time.