Hanna and Barbera have much to answer for.

They took my beloved Scooby Doo, Where are You? and fucked it up in myriad ways. The original show came out when I was but a year old, and it shaped my childhood. What I mean is it taught me that it was okay to be cowardly, unless someone makes with yummy chow; then you need to suck it up and be brave.

After the original Scooby came the aforementioned fucking of up. The worst of this can be summed up in two words: Scrappy doo.

As much as he sucked, there was already a long history of sucking before they introduced this midget mutant Chihuahua with an attitude. Do you recall the steaming pile of animated diarrhea that was the Laff-A-Lympics, which introduced us to some special-school reject called Scooby Dum? And don’t forget the “Southern actress” that was Scooby’s hot distant cousin. I guess they made sure to refer to her as a distant cousin so that it would be okay for ol’ Scoob to have fantasies about humping her leg. Considering that she’s from the South the inclusion of “distant” before “cousin” seems terribly redundant.

Oh, I’m gonna get lynched, aren’t I?

There were many other Scooby-cousin-abortions of course, like the long-haired musician named Scooby-Dooby-Doo. One free guess as to what his favorite pastime was.

What I’m saying is, the Scooby franchise invented jumping the shark before the Fonz ever put his water skis on.

Then Warner Bros. came to a form of rescue of the too-much-chlorine-in-that-gene-pool franchise. They made a Scooby movie, and it didn’t completely suck. The reason it wasn’t a total CGA’d afterbirth was two-fold:

• They had that Buffy vampire chick in it, and she’s hot
• Scrappy was the bad guy, and at the end of the movie he was sent to dog prison, where I’m sure he spent the remainder of his days being ass-raped by a rabid Rottweiler named Tank

Enough intro; here’s where I make this personal.

When you can make money off one Scooby movie, then why not two? That’s what WB figured, and my son and his cousin of the same age really wanted to see the Scooby sequel: Monsters Unleashed.

So on a Good Friday in 2004 I found myself taking two five-year-old boys to see this cinematic masterpiece, the highlight of which was Thelma’s tits spilling out of her skin-tight red rubber dress.

I’m getting ahead of myself. There is a debacle in here somewhere.

I took the boys to see the movie. We junk-fooded up and headed for the last theatre on the right to catch the show. Unfortunately, I made a mistake as to which theatre actually was the “last one on the right.”

Trying to hold a gallon of popcorn and a few drinks while hustling a couple of hyperactive five-year-old boys in the direction of a Scooby movie can cause a person to become somewhat disoriented. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

We went into the theatre and grabbed some good seats and there was still plenty of time before the show started. In hindsight, some warning flags should have gone up about the lack of children in the theatre. Don’t get me wrong, there were kids there – young ones even – just not as many as you would expect at a typical Scooby movie. No one seemed to give me an odd stare of “What the hell are you doing here?” so nothing seemed amiss.

Then the lights darkened and the first preview began. The preview was for Two Brothers, starring Guy Pearce and a couple of tigers. Movies about two tiger brothers seemed rather kid-friendly, so there was still nothing that triggered thoughts of us being in the wrong theatre.

Then the movie started, which was odd. With a captive audience of kids I fully expected an orgy-like marketing-o-rama of summer previews and junk food commercials and ads for Toyota minivans. That didn’t happen though; it was just the one preview and then straight to a spooky scene in a foggy forest.

There, see? A spooky scene in a foggy forest. You can understand why I might think this would be the beginning of a Scooby movie, right?

It wasn’t, though.

I knew something was wrong when everyone started speaking in Aramaic.

Of course, I don’t speak Aramaic, but I know not English when I hear it, so I leaned over to the guy next to me and said, “What movie are you here to see?”

“Passion of the Christ,” he said.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: When I’m angry or injured, the first word out of my mouth is either “Fuck!” or “Shit!” However, if I’m surprised, startled or frightened, I almost always exclaim “Son of a bitch!” or “Jesus Christ!”

Being that I was startled, you have a fifty percent chance of figuring out which one I picked. If you’re still having trouble, then think blasphemy.

I hauled the kids up and said, “We’re in the wrong theatre.”

The kids started to protest and I cut them off. “This isn’t Scooby. We need to leave. Now!” I hustled them to the theatre that really was the last one on the right and we had only missed about 30 seconds of Scooby, and there were still some decent seats and the kids hadn’t seen anyone get their skin flayed off or have spikes driven through appendages so no harm was done.

We settled in to watch the Oscar-worthy performances and I became pensive.

It struck me as odd that no one had given me a sideways glance in the other theatre. What’s more, there were a number of other kids as young as five there who’s parents hadn’t chosen that theatre by mistake. It made me wonder what hell was going on.

Then I figured it out: Good Friday.

Duh. What better day for the ultra-devout to put the fear of God into the youngins? Or is it the fear of the Roman Empire? Fear of Jews? Whatever, I’m just glad my son and nephew weren’t exposed to it.

And I know what they narrowly missed seeing. My wife and I felt some warped sense of duty to rent that movie when it came out on DVD, and watching it was not a pleasant experience. People really weren’t nice to each other back then, were they? Not like today, with our Holocausts and Rwandas and Gitmos and Nickelback.

Come on, fellow humans, we can do better than this. We’ve been practicing at not being bigoted assholes for centuries, with only minimal success. It’s time to stop asking “Why can’t we all just get along?” and actually get the fuck along.

Whether you agree or not, I hope that you can at least appreciate that Scrappy Doo really does suck.

P.S. I know that I made fun of both Southerners and hardcore bible thumpers in this post. It’s called hypocrisy, and I'm not immune to it.