Was his real name Scooby Doo, or Scooby Dooby Doo?
This was kind of a weird thing to be thinking about insofar as I never really cared all that much for Scooby Doo, and insofar as by "never really cared all that much" I mean never cared at all. But that is how my brain works, and I therefore had to immediately go read about Scooby Doo on Wikipedia, where I learned a lot about Scooby Doo, like how he is destroying America, and also a lot about monkeys and things.
Here's what you'll need to keep up with water-cooler talk about Scooby Doo:
-- Shaggy's full name is Norville "Shaggy" Rogers.
-- Originally, Scooby was a dog named "Too Much" who played the bongos. Sometimes he was a sheepdog. Other times he was not. The name changed between the first time the show was pitched, a bid that failed, and the second time.
-- Scooby's name comes from Frank Sinatra's song Strangers In The Night, where he sings doo-be-doo-be-doo. I would put a video of that song in here but I don't really care for that song, and besides you know how it goes, and also I'd rather put in this video for this song that I really like and have been listening to all week:
-- Scooby's character is based on the roles Bob Hope played in horror comedies.
-- Scooby, unlike other dogs (?) has opposable thumbs and a fully prehensile tail.
-- Animals with prehensile tails are predominantly Western hemisphere animals, with most of them in South America. Some scientists think this is because the jungles of South America are more dense than elsewhere.
-- Porcupines and opossums have prehensile tails. I thought the scariest possible thing I could imagine now was the idea of a porcupine dropping down on me from a tree while walking in the woods at night, but then I read that in other jungles where animals with prehensile tails are less prevalent, there are flying snakes.
-- Flying snakes can climb trees, and when they get to where they want, they push off with their tail and reshape their rib cage to form a pseudo-wing which helps it fly the same way frisbees fly, and I really can't read any more of that without starting to think things like "Seriously WTF God?" But it is amazing, and terrifying, stuff:
-- Scooby, perhaps presciently predicting what would happen to 'traditional values' (i.e. they would go to Hell) once gay marriage became the law of the land, once fell in love with a "large blue reptilian creature with a beak-like mouth," but he can be forgiven for that because the creature, an alien, was disguised the whole time as a golden retriever wearing a red bandanna.
I'm going to maybe alienate some people here when I say that if you put a bandanna around your dog's neck I judge you (and not in a good way, the way judges might judge "Obamacare," which is now the law of the land and which means we won't actually get a fix to our healthcare system, ever, because Republicans hate fixing things and Democrats think health care is fixed. It is not. People still cannot afford health care and now they cannot afford health insurance, and most insurance plans range from "crappy" to "really very bad it's not even 'insurance' at all." Judges, or at least the ones that count for now, think this is okay, because Congress intended this to be okay. Which is how the legislative-and-judicial-review process works, but in this case it worked really, really badly, and the key hallmark of Obama's tenure is not a very good one.)
The kind of people who put bandanna's around dog's necks are the kinds of people who will stand, knee deep in the water at the beach, drinking their 'hard cider' and wearing baseball caps that don't look quite right and play a game involving a frisbee and knocking beer cans off into the water, and I will have to keep Mr F away from them because he will want to see what they are knocking over, and really can't you leave that stuff at the frat house?
(Note: that was based on a true story yesterday at the lake. Also true: there were tadpoles in the lake and when people went by in their stupid boats and on their stupid jetskis, the resultant waves would toss the tadpoles up onto the beach, where a bunch of little kids noticed them and began what can only be described as a massive and heroic effort to save these tadpoles, pouring water around them and picking up clumps of sand with the tadpoles on them to carry them back to the water. These kids did this for 30 minutes or so, and Mr Bunches even joined in:
-- That was not Scooby's only assault on 'traditional family values.' Scooby Doo attacks traditional values the way jetski-owning jerks attack tadpoles: often, and for no reason. This one time, Scooby-Doo competed with one of his cousins, Scooby-Dum, for the "affection" of Scooby-Dee "who is also their cousin."
-- This other time, Scooby got Sandy Duncan to fall in love with him. That Sandy Duncan, who once pretended to be a boy who abducted several young kids from their homes.
-- Antonin Scalia predicted exactly that kind of behavior and never has one man been proven so right so quickly. Jiggery-pokery indeed!
Oh, and his name is neither. It's "Scoobert Doo."
