Gather 'round, young 'ns, and let me tell you of a simpler time. Twas the late '60s to early '70s, and Saturday mornings meant cartoons. American-drawn cartoons... I'm pretty sure Korea hadn't been discovered yet. Back in the day, our cereals were 90 percent sugar and proud of it, too. Golden Crisp? Honey Smacks? WTF! We ate Super Sugar Goddamn Crisp and Super Sugar Smacks with a bowl of the white stuff on the side for sprinklin'! And we needed all that sugar to watch cartoons for, like, six hours straight. Remember, back then you had to get up and turn the knob from channel 12 to 24 to 35.

We watched cartoons for one reason... they were on. I wish I understood why Scooby-Doo was lasted as such a beloved property. Yeah, I'm old enough to have watched the original run on CBS. And even though it was broadcast once a week, I swear it was the same episode every week. Now as a kid I loved monsters, and the opening credits promised some good ones. So why the hell was it some stupid pirate every single week? Ooo, Blackbeard! Oooo, Redbeard! Oh, snap!!!! Bluebeard! Come on! I'm five years old and I've just eaten my weight in refined white sugar and you're still putting me to sleep. At least ABC hadn't taken over yet and begun forcing Scrappy Doo into kids' eye sockets.

So, yeah, looking back I never liked Scooby-Doo, but I remember disliking it least back in the day. At least the theme song holds up... my last band's punk covers of the Scooby-Doo and Underdog theme songs were surefire crowd-pleasers. I think an audience of our contemporaries found it therapeutic to "come out" and admit how much stress our collected minds had undergone and survived at the hands of our animation overlords.