Scooby Doobie Doo: Cannaphobia in Animated Media
By Leo F. Mega
The psychology of animation is full to the brim with bias, negative associations, and the pushing of political agendas. Oftentimes, even our beloved cartoons can be a corrupt cake of corporations.
Generationally beloved Scooby-Doo hit the airwaves in its animated debut in 1969 and finished the first season by 1970, sharing societal space with Woodstock, Timothy Leary, and the resurgence of other entheogens supposedly threatening to upend society. This ground-breaking animated show is known for its quick antics, its neurodivergent characters, an unshaved stoner who is always a bit slow to the case due to diligent paranoia, and a dog walking upright on two legs, constantly freaked out and hungry. Ruh-roh.
To some, Scooby-Doo is a cartoon about teenagers and their mystery solving hobby, Mystery Inc. While Fred has a tangent focus on creating traps as a outward symbol of his pending narcissism, the rest of Mystery Inc. is primarily focused on solving mysteries and throwing evil rich folks in the clinker.
To the trained animated observer, Scooby-Doo has much to say about altered states of consciousness and the folks that choose those states for themselves, i.e. Shaggy (and his best canine bud Scooby-Doobie Doo).
When analyzing the show for the role of the high pair, the show’s odd couple, of Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, one might notice these two characters are often the butt of the show’s jokes, often disoriented and needing parenting, rarely contributing to the goals of Mystery Inc. The odd couple are hungry throughout entire episodes, even after eating sandwiches that would be impossible to actually make in an average kitchen in our objective reality.
Shaggy wears a dank shade of green, has a thin beard with a constant shadow, and generally looks unkempt, making it difficult to look away at what creators had in mind when designing his perpetual appearance. Unfortunately, these are the marks of the beast known as cannaphobia, and result of the decades long war on drugs dripping into animated media.
However, this type of angle on Scooby-Doo and Shaggy is unfortunate as it is clear these characters have the potential for the most nuance amongst the teenagers. The group known as Mystery Inc. is a group of mal-adaptive young people coming from mixed-class status families and backgrounds coming of age while solving mysteries that police cannot.
Taking this into consideration, it's fairly easy to see the differences: the show’s audience doesn’t meet Shaggy’s kinfolk, and he doesn’t seem to have the familial support of the other characters (Fred’s dad is still an asshole, but a rich one who supports him). This seems intentional paired with the fact that Shaggy is paranoid in nearly every episode, and behaves in a way that would lead the audience to believe he is consuming marijuana, based on unfacts not validated by compound science.
By pairing Shaggy’s socioeconomic factors together, it seems the creators of the animated iconoclast wanted to present Shaggy in a light that would douse his character in the fire of stigma and misunderstanding–thus, Shaggy is misunderstood as a stoner with nothing to offer to the mysteries solved and no ambition to match the others’.
Stoned Ape Theory & Scooby-Doo
The Stoned Ape Theory rests on the hypothesis that humans evolved from biologically related mammals who eventually ran into entheogens in the wild. Terence McKenna first hypothesized this theory with a specific entheon. This is the start of human evolution, an early quantum-leap of the brain in these mammals, and also the beginning of the robustness of the brain’s computation skillset.
Scooby-Doo, who is canine in nature, talks, walks upright on 2 legs, styles in dresses when he pleases, and seemingly is a dog only by aesthetics and appearances. This could lead audiences to believe, as art gives way to art and makes its own life, Mr. Doobie himself, is the representation and result of a quantum leap in the animal kingdom. This makes sense, since through scientific research by citizens and lay scientists alike, audiences can access the information allowing them to understand that quantum leaps occur at a random point, but they complete over a long series of time.
Scooby-Doo, the animated series, has been running since 1969 with more recent versions starring long-time entertainment legends like Vivica A. Fox, several cinematic affairs, and a Velma-only spinoff that gives audiences a long-awaited gay look at Velma and Daphne. While the intentions of the original animated series as it concerns Shaggy and Scooby may be a misunderstood for what it is trying to postulate, when audiences see Shaggy and Scooby these days, with the amount of entheon research and legislation validating the claims of Timothy Leary, Stamets, and the lot—the characters’ older symbols and intentions will evaporate via the transmutation of stigma, an ironic alternate intention, their off-color behavior now a fertile ground for the fruiting of entheon-based potential–solving the greatest mysteries of how humans can use these compounds for a more kinder world.
What audiences should also notice about Scooby and his care-taker Shaggy, is that of all the crew of Mystery Inc., these two are the most fun, have the more abstract ideas that critical thinking actually rewards, and are the least self-absorbed. These two are having a great time amidst the chaos of life. Isn’t that the goal?
