By Alycia Smith
Our generation has been called the middle child of history, without a place in time or soulful duty to call our own. Our fathers and grandfathers had wars and depressions to define their time, whereas we sit, numbly groping in darkness for a path, for a singular event, to classify ourselves as: warriors, thinkers, or artists. We need something, anything, to identify ourselves as credible human beings with a purpose to our lives, something to later remind us that we did something important.
And finally, I have discovered it.
I came upon this defining moment while sitting in my friend’s apartment, euphorically intoxicated, skimming through her hundreds of cable channels in search of something to keep me interested. Fumbling with the complicated remote, I stumbled onto something that has always been a center of inspiration in my life.
Cartoon Network.
In my state at the time, the idea of brightly colored animals acting to cheerful background music was greatly appealing, and so my friends and I decided to watch. We began to soak in the Scooby Doo experience.
Somewhere between the opening sequence where the sinister old Mr. Winsby told the Mystery Machine passengers to keep away from that dark haunted mansion, and the third clue that Velma discovered after feeding Scooby a handful of scooby snacks, I realized it.
Some call it enlightenment.
All I know is that instantly my life made sense. All our lives made sense. The warped and water-logged pieces of an old faded puzzle began to shift and move into place, forming a picture for our generation; the mangled and tuneless notes began to switch places and join together, shaping out our timeless song to prove that we are worth remembering after we’re dead.
We are, all of us, the cast of “Scooby Doo, Where Are You.”
Don’t worry, my boyfriend and two friends were also skeptical. But look and see for yourself; the four human characters are all around you, just waiting to be paralleled with the cartoon truth. Find them in your own circles.
Daphne: I find these girls nearly everywhere. They’re gorgeous, thin, and wear the perfect clothes, but always seem just one step behind the rest of us. They never really seem to contribute to anything, but they sure look great in a skirt. Sweet-natured, fashion-conscious, and boy-clingy, they’re the ones who always seem to go off with Freddie alone when the group splits up to cover more ground.
Freddie: These are the Abercrombie models that tend to hang out with the Daphnes of our generation. Always willing to be the leader and first into battle, but never really sure of why they’re going into that broken-down mysterious mansion in the first place. They’re driven by a sense of male duty into many venues, and are overwhelmed by a testosterone-driven idea of protecting their thin and gorgeous partners.
Shaggy: No one would deny that Shaggy habitually partook of the “evil weed.” His shaggy hair – hence the name – and sloppy dress emit a comforting slacker quality, which has influenced the millions of girls who are now in love with skinny lanky men. As a member of the rising population of the draft-dodger subculture, he is driven by his munchies and laziness into awkward encounters with frightening counterparts, and seems to always have that dopey friend around with him to agree with his odd and filtered perception of reality.
Velma: This is the class I fit into. You’ve all seen her: the nerd girl from your high school that, once she got to college, dyed her hair dark, got the thick dark-rimmed glasses, and donned short skirts, knee-high socks, and Mary Jane shoes. Let’s face it; Velma influenced a whole generation of cute alternative smart chicks. Rumors have it that she’s either a closet lesbian or bisexual, but there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that she is the brains of the operation.
Maybe it’s not the inspiration we were all searching for; maybe it’s not the defining event we were expecting; maybe it’s not our grandfathers’ World War Two or our fathers’ Vietnam.
But it’s all we’ve got.
Perhaps this is why we’re all driven by the goal to reveal the evil in this world. We all subconsciously – or consciously, for some – want to catch Osama Bin Laden in one of our traps, get the local Sheriff, rip off Osama’s rubber mask, and reveal – gasp! – George Dubya and his faithful father, who were after Middle Eastern oil the whole time.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.
Alycia Smith is a sophomore English major and columnistfor The Cardinal.alycia_smith@louisvillecardinal.com
