Looking like it’s had a huge keg of St. Patrick’s Day lager dumped all over it (though “rotoscoping” is claimed), “The Scooby-Doo Conundrum” presents a few problems within its time span. Two guys are sitting in a restaurant having lunch and one of them (Joe Teeters) is complaining about a woman at his job who manages to pawn her work on a co-worker and not get fired.
Meanwhile, the other (George Caleodis) is listening and soon his attention turns to a TV in the restaurant, which is showing “Scooby-Doo” (the TV version). He questions his kvetching-about-work friend about whether the show is for kids and then launches into talk about the subtext of the show that’s been heard before. “There’s Shaggy who’s so stoned, he’s eating the dog treats,” Caleodis’ character says and then goes into Fred and Daphne always going upstairs wherever they are to search. “Yeah, getting it on,” he explains.
To me, the subtext of the show seems quite valid. America’s first exposure to Scooby-Doo began in 1969 and there’s no doubt that the influences of the ‘60s were absorbed into it. Just because the show sported the highly respectable name of “Hanna-Barbera”, doesn’t mean that those references couldn’t be in there. This wasn’t Disney after all.
What would have been more interesting would be to extend the conversation found in the beginning of the short with the guy bitching about his job. He’s talking about it and then stops to take a bite of something and that’s when the conversation about Scooby-Doo starts. I’m sure there are a lot of us out there who hate our jobs like we hate dealing with IRS forms in April, and this guy’s conversation seemed somewhat intriguing as it were.
To be fair though, Caleodis’ performance is a spirited one as he really gets into what he’s talking about. It reminds me in some way of Jack Black talking to Todd Louiso in “High Fidelity”, though Caleodis has no intentions of being quite that insulting. “The Scooby-Doo Conundrum” may have that performance (and a variation on the Super Mario Bros. Theme as its music), but there really is no conundrum here, just stuff that’s been heard before.
