A Lesson in Decaying Victorian Architecture From Scooby-Doo
The much-loved cartoon — or at least its backdrop — is really about the destruction of America’s Victorian heritage, a new Instagram account reveals.
A new Instagram accounts removes the goofy characters of Scooby-Doo to focus on the cartoon’s decaying Victorian mansions and other sinister backgrounds.
Source: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives/Getty ImagesAn abandoned gas station in the desert, a decaying sanitorium out among the pines, a raggle-taggle mansion with its shutters hanging off, old forgotten passages tunneled beneath a city — when viewed on-screen in a darkened room, you might expect locations like these to be settings for some classic American horror story. And in a roundabout sort of way, they are. All these images feature in a popular new Instagram account collecting backdrops from that classic pillar of 20th century gothic: the cartoon series Scooby-Doo.
Calling something as campy, kid-friendly and low-octane as Scooby-Doo gothic might seem to stretch the category’s definition. Despite having plots that invariably hinge on ghouls and phantoms, the show is better remembered nowadays for its pre-teen-targeted slapstick. Its characters too have stuck in the memory: not just proto-slacker Shaggy and great Dane sidekick Scooby — a rare celebration of those most human of impulses, gluttony and cowardice — but also bookish sleuth Velma Dinkley who, unusually for a female character, gets celebrated for being clever.