let’s call it rotoscoped zizek
plainly i am pro all the scooby doo movies (at least till such time as i have to sit through one of them, perhaps), but it occurred to me as i sat watching an ancient ep of the cartoon last week (while waiting for a phonecall abt my mum in hospital) that i had totally overlooked one intriguing therefore positive quality of a show i never liked as a kid
i. yes you could say that the meme of internal repetition (ALWAYS the same storyline; plus also the loopqualities of the backdrop in running sequences) is “foregrounded” to the point of um “self-deconstruction”, but i don’t think that makes it any more interesting to watch, and
ii. yes you could say that the meme of “crimes that only kids can solve” is (despite its blytonesque roots?) entirely consonant with the Children’s-Crusade dynamic of the radical 60s as a whole, but i am in fact rather suspicious of this dynamic (cf dr vick on a similar issue)
but what did suddenly occur to me though – and i genuinely do think this is unexpected, given america’s political unconscious then and since – is how resolutely and pitilessly materialist the storyshape is (in a marxist sense!): viz however monstrous the phantom and weird the tale, the explanation for events is always nuts-and-bolts toolshed trickery, and the motivation is always a shortcut to money