Scooby-Doo Collection

About 12 years ago I got a Great Dane puppy. I named him Saltheart Foamfollower after the gentle giant in Stephen R. Donaldson’s books; but he was called “Salty” for short. Like most dog owners in love with their dog’s breed, I began to gobble up Great Dane collectibles. Being the parent of a then-six-year-old, I also had to include Scooby-Doo things. That is how & why I began collecting Scooby-Doo items.

Great Danes, like many giant dog breeds, are called “heart-breakers” because they live very short lives. After just six years, Salty went on to doggy heaven leaving me too heartbroken to get anything else with a Great Dane on it. That is how I stopped buying Scooby-Doo items.

Grandma’s bought the kids Scooby things, but in six years, I’ve not bought anything with another Dane on it. The clothing, all but one denim shirt with Scooby embroidered on the pocket, are all long gone — wash worn, faded, or if the kid out-grew it but it was still in great shape, donated to another child with a love of Scooby-Doo. There’s also one watch which, like the shirt, I still cannot bear to wear. But mostly what remains of my Scooby-Doo collection are the decorative and kitchen items, like the vase, milk jug, soap dispenser, and Wilton cake pan. Sometimes they still are hard for me to see & use. Boy, I miss my dog.

1999 Scooby-Doo Cookie Jar

You might have noticed that the ceramic Scooby-Doo cookie jar is damaged; he’s missing one of his ears. As a collectible he would seem to have little-to-no value, right? But in this case it’s just the opposite. That missing ear is the very reason I love that cookie jar.

As any Dane owner will tell you about the breed, Salty was a gentle giant like his namesake. But, as any pet owner will tell you, Salty also had his own personality. One of this dog’s quirks was that he had a thing — a hatred — for images of Great Danes with cropped ears.

At first it seemed coincidental when he chewed all the upright ears off the rubber Scooby-Doo dog toys. They are the parts which stick off the toy and are easily chewed away, right? But then Salty learned to flip his toys into my other Scooby-Doo collectibles, eventually, after much loss of other ceramic & glass items, developing a remarkable knack for hitting them just right to remove one ear at a time. I have to say, for the record, that the dog never broke anything but Scooby items, and always the cropped ears. As fascinating as his statement on the cropping of dog’s ears was, it became too expensive to keep those anyplace other than in a cupboard or on top of them, way out of sight.

Now, whenever I see the one-eared cookie jar with lolling tongue goofily peering at me from atop the refrigerator, I smile a sad, wistful smile for the dog who left the cookie jar thus. It’s like the dog is still speaking to me through that cookie jar.

While it’s true the cookie jar has no value as a collectible, I’m sure my eldest child will want it. She remembers the day that ear was swiftly removed from the cookie jar; she remembers the sweet, goofy, giant dog who hated cropped ears on Danes.

1997 Scooby-Doo Drinking Glass

I’m still not ready to get another Great Dane — yet. But, enough time has passed, my heart has healed enough to now consider getting more Great Dane and Scooby-Doo items.

I think I’ll need to start by replacing the Scooby-Doo drinking glasses; twelve years of use and washing has left them rather faded and with the image worn-off in spots.

I know they don’t make the same ones anymore — in fact, Scooby’s popularity as defined by availability in merchandise offerings seems to have waned quite a bit since the late 90’s. So I’ll have to really search for them. But it’s time I started being happy looking for those goofy gentle giants again.

I always keep a short list of cartoons that I’d immediately and happily collect on DVD; Men In Black, Project Geeker, Earthworm Jim and Freakazoid have always been the top four, but because of their obscurity and relatively small cult following, I always just assumed that it would be an impossibility. I deal with this by crying a little, eating my feelings, and going to bed feeling all bloaty. Well, I can finally knock a dozen or so pizza rolls off of the evening’s sad repast, because Freakazoid is here.

Warner Brothers has finally released the first season of Freakazoid on DVD, ten years after the show’s premature cancellation. This DVD set includes 14 episodes on 2 DVDs, while the inevitable Season Two set will likely include the remaining 10 episodes. I’m counting on that, WB! Do you hear me? Freak me.

Freakazoid represents a very unique time in Saturday morning cartoons, inasmuch as it was pretty much the last time they were consistently good and unpolluted. We were still in the halcyon days before Pokemon aired in the US, and Freakazoid was like nothing that had come before it. It was completely dadaist (and often surrealist) in its approach to comedy, pulling influences from decades of popular culture, throwing in a great deal of vocal improvisation and non-sequitur, some ridiculously exaggerated classic slapstick, and finishing it off with a bizarre variety show structure - in no particular order. Not too many kids shows were referencing Jack Valenti, F-Troop, Ed Wood, Jerry Lewis, and Tom Lehrer at the time (or ever, because honestly, these are ‘old people things’, like ointments and brunch specials), but Freakazoid did it, and with Steven Spielberg’s approval - something that the writers are still trying to figure out.

And it was hilarious. I was 14 at the time, and it redefined my whole perception of comedy, even if I didn’t understand many of the references. All I knew was that a 5-minute scene of two hands sloppily making out was comedy gold. I didn’t appreciate the Harlan Ellison cameo until five years later, and it’s taken even longer for many more jokes to fully marinate. I don’t know if this is the mark of madness or genius, but it works well for me. It’s the kind of show that I want to own on DVD so that I can share it with people who haven’t witnessed it, just to see how they react, or if they hit me.

Admittedly, the best parts of the show happen when Paul Rugg, the voice of Freakazoid as well as a writer for the show, is allowed to just go wild - off the script, improvising bizarreness - while the animators try to make sense of it later. Most of the first episode is Rugg’s raw audition tape, and it’s so full of energy that it can barely be matched by subsequent episodes - especially when Freakazoid is scripted. It’s the dada, say-whatever approach to Freakazoid that makes him endearing and amusing to watch.

Of course, there are other heroes (and villains) who make appearances, and most of them are completely ineffectual in their roles - which makes for even more humor, even when the show leans towards the ‘corny’ aspects of the WB cartoon repertoire at the time.

The DVD provides commentary on the first two episodes, as well as episode twelve (which is one of the very scripted episodes). I don’t know exactly why the episodes detailing Freakazoid’s origin weren’t worth commenting on, but the revelations provided in the existing episodes are enjoyable enough to make me want behind-the-scenes stuff on every episode. There’s enough running under each one to keep it entertaining, no doubt.

The other DVD bonus is a small documentary about how Freakazoid began as an action cartoon and slowly metamorphosed into a wacky comedy, with interviews with Paul Rugg, producers, writers, and the revolutionary designer Bruce Timm, creator the animated Justice League universe that I love to much. While nothing is too revelatory, and I’d have loved to see many, many more of Timm’s original character designs, it’s a pleasant watch.

There are a few instances when it’s clear that WB hasn’t tried to clean up the dusty prints of the show, as segments might appear blurry or with lines running across the sides, and in two instances, entire half-episodes are repeated as filler within other episodes - which is how they originally aired, but is it really necessary to have the same 30 minutes of video repeated twice on the same DVD when it could have meant more space for a Bruce Timm design gallery or something? I’d have been happy to settle for a 15-minute episode, understanding that that’s just how things work when an episode isn’t done on time. It’s a strange choice to include this duplication, but it doesn’t make the existing stuff any less awesome.

For me, Freakazoid isn’t a ‘want’ so much as a ‘need’, and it remains 98% hilariously absurd. The DVD is scheduled to be released on July 29th, and I think it marks a very important point in televised animation.

The newswires are filled with stories on the recent discovery of the remains of a Dodo bird found in a cave beneath bamboo and tea plantations in Mauritius, an island located in the Indian Ocean.

Dodo remains are rare finds. The last time Dodo skeletons were discovered was in 2005 when a mass grave was found in the southeastern part of the island known as Mare aux Songes — but the hot, wet, acidic environment meant poor DNA survival. Before that 2005 discovery the previous Dodo remains were found in 1920.

What really thrills scientists is that this skeleton, named Fred, was found intact and, having been isolated in a cave, well preserved enough that ‘he’ may be an excellent DNA source. Julian Hume, a palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, said, “Then you can work out how it actually got to Mauritius, because it must have originally flown here before evolving into flightlessness and the big, fat bird that we know.”

While all of this is exciting, especially to a science geek like me, the reason the story’s been making the newswire rounds is because Fred was discovered just days after those wacky Kovels had mentioned the Dodo in one of their newsletters. Yet the Kovels knew nothing of Fred’s discovery because both he and the information of his existence were guarded until after he was safely removed.

In their newsletter, dated June 7, 2007, the Kovels told the story of a stuffed Dodo at the Ashmolean Museum in England:

It was in sad condition, and in 1755 the trustees decided to destroy it rather than spend the time and money to preserve it. The dilapidated stuffed bird was just tossed into a fire. Only a leg and the head survived the flames. Fortunately the parts were saved by another museum and we hear the relics have undergone DNA testing.

We can only guess what the value would be today of a whole stuffed dodo bird. So remember as you think about your collection: Never throw anything away just because it’s in bad condition. Sometimes it’s the only example you will ever find.

You know that I (as a hoarder, preserver of boxes, and mutant toy collector) agree with the Kovels. Don’t throw that out!

But this also reminded me of the expression, Dead as a Dodo, (and the similar or related Dumb as a Dodo, also discussed in Kovels June 14, 2007 newsletter), and of a conversation we had with the children just this past weekend.

We were discussing silent films and how many of these old films are gone forever because Hollywood actually reused the film. A combination of both conscious act (trying to save money by reusing celluloid) and ignorance (who knew that films which were no longer wanted by theaters would have any value?), film was recycled and thus we no longer have many of the old silent movies. The girls couldn’t fathom a universe in which movies and its related memorabilia weren’t valued and so they struggled with the concept, if not the actual losses in cinema history.

So Derek compared this to the original Disney animation cels which were dipped (just as Roger Rabbit et all feared!) so that the acetate could be reused for new animated films. This hit them hard, of course.

But all of this brings up the matter of technology. While Collin discusses, correctly, that vinyl has a short life and that one ought to preserve recordings digitally, what other advances render objects, collectibles, obsolete — as dead as Dodos?

Michael Sporn was similarly prompted by Dodos. Seeing the January 22, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, Sporn blogged:

This made me wonder if hand-drawn animation is going to go a similar way. Will they be able to find the bones a hundred years from now? Evidence seen in the past five years or so seems to give me little reason to doubt that it would be gone. MoCap will get better and the guise of animation will be front and center for the obvious future. There’s a good chance tomorrow will show us two of three nominees for Oscar’s Best Animated Feature will be Motion Capture. The animator as we knew it is virtually dead.

Still thinking of the issue, a week later Sporn revisited the issue with a deeper discussion of Motion Capture animation.

If technology threatens to render things obsolete, what will we do with all those things? They should be stored — and properly. But as recently as the 1960’s Warner Brothers destroyed nearly all the animation art they had in storage simply because they had no room for it. What will become of the things which exist now?

It is said that the Dodo died was because they were 1) fearless of people; 2) pushed out, made homeless, by humans cutting down their forest homes in the name of progress; and 3) flightless, so they laid their eggs on the ground where dogs, pigs and other critters ate them, dwindling their numbers.

As collectors we should learn from this.

We should be ‘afraid’ of what careless people will do with ‘obsolete’ objects. We should be sure to consider storage matters, make sure there will always be homes for items of value. And we should never leave our ‘babies’ where the ‘pigs’ can dwindle their numbers.