It was somewhat engrained in us as kids — probably through some clever and minute editing of some studio executive in the back office somewhere — that Scooby and Shaggy were the heart and soul of The Gang, but that Shaggy’s greatest real-world talent was just being the Yin to the other humans’ Yang. And that’s a reasonable bit of propaganda to promote, the last thing most any parent wanted from 1970 up to 2020 is for their kid to get a whiff of the truth and then shitcan his or her plans to join the Air Force, or the Corporate Force or the Government Force, and then take up doing what Shaggy and an imaginary dog did best.
An edit here or there, subtle-like, and next thing the varying viewing public knows, Shaggy is reduced to a weed-stoned food-whore.
It was a necessary change for the show to stay on the air if bothered to think about it. A bunch of potheads can still be relied upon to hunt for the ghosts, to install the drywall, to negotiate the contract with other potheads, to operate the machinery of the economy as intended. But that other little truth about Shaggy, it was the inconvenient truth.
Not that Shaggys of the world were destined for the Diplomatic Corp either, that still worked, peace is still the last resort industry when the Air Force, the Corporate Force and the Government Force can wring that last dime out of a collection of broken people. The Diplomatic Corp is still a reasonably profitable and forgotten child of The Triad, and truth be told, half of the Secretariat is jammed with a bunch of weed-stoned food-whores, you can see them lining up at the Delegates Dining Room, smuggling food home wrapped in napkins for their children back at the townhouse, not necessarily because those kids are all that hungry, but because the delegate gets to relive the moment of delight of getting a bit of food unwrapped from a napkin-wrapped delight, smuggled out of the party, as if they were children once again.
Shaggy could only be counter-cultural to the degree that the entire show could remain on the air, and that meant training all future The Gangs for their intended jobs; Egghead, Wife, Employee and Child … oh, and Weed-Stoned Food-Whore, that job too, for the kids weren’t smart enough to become an Egghead, pretty enough to become a Wife, lovable enough to become a Child, or cravatted enough to become a half-decent Employee.
Shaggy’s existence on that show had to hide the truth that most of the writers seemed to grok by the time they were allowed to air an episode, from 1970 up through the years of Scrappy Doo, Scooby Dum, Dixie Doo, and Yankee Doodle Doo … Shaggy could ride. And not just ride, Shaggy could rip. Scooby could ride too, but other than a few pugs in China, nobody worries much about a bunch of dogs riding boards.
But by the time the Gen-Xers were old enough to carve asphalt, surf, snow or air, the truth of the 1970 detente was plain enough; a massive number of children got the message anyway, and they couldn’t be effectively controlled by puzzles, sex, money or drugs. They either needed puzzles and sex and money and drugs. Given the shortage of any of these ingredients, they needed to ride so they could ignore at least three of these. Was it an animated Shaggy who inserted that little brain-rinse into those impressionable minds? Or was Shaggy just the representative of what happened when they finally hooked into their first wave, their first carve, or their first frontside axle stall?
It never helps to blame the pusher for the addict’s habits, but the pusher is the pusher, and Shaggy and Scooby managed to push that drug in more than a few episodes and through the decades; an uncatchable villain could be reliably caught with a sufficiently skilled board rider. It sowed the seeds, at least, for us to nail an old skate to a board, or score an actual skateboard or a surfboard and hide the thing from our parents.
There is inevitably division within the tribe. The ocean surfer sniffs at the river surfer that what he does is not really surfing at all. But landlocked with a few raging creeks, and the river surfer will find a way to ride that river wave that presents every bit of difficulty of balancing the breaking wave at Big Sur, maybe even more, with the rocks and the unstoppable thermodynamics of ninety cubic feet per second, that forces the river surfer to ride to the point of hypothermic collapse, then get out, drink hot tea from the thermos to warm the core up from the observed 95-degrees F, shiver uncontrollably in a hoody for a bit, and then surf the blessed hydraulic when the flesh is again willing.
For some reason, surf is always King. Yes, it’s difficult, but so is a Varial Heelflip, so is a downhill carve in traffic off a mountain. Yes, it’s meditational, but even the best breaking wave rides for not much more than a minute, while the river surfers ride endlessly, until their muscles stiffen with the hypothermia and can no longer reliably hold the board … the kind of meditational Zen achieved on a twenty-minute hydraulic carve with body rapidly disconnecting itself from the brain due to second-stage hypothermia is meditational too. Surf is King in large part because of the elite difficulty of catching a wave; one must have access to a half-decent board, one must have access to the ocean, one must have access to a community who is willing to let a grommet snake a wave. Compared to that, any other board sport is common and egalitarian; there are plenty of skateparks, and the nature of riding a board on concrete tends to scare away most of the old folks after they break their first knee or elbow. There are stretches of tasty asphalt over which the intrepid Snake Pilot can carve his or her Snakeboard into the glassy abyss. There are mountains of groomed snow, and even more ungroomed powder for the Pow Surfers, while the frigid air chases away most of whom rely on motorized chair lifts. Add a wing or a kite, and the wingshredders decouple from the planet itself, tough to find a carve with a lower barrier of entry.
Rick Yukon found an early addiction to the joys of moving quickly over concrete via the magic of urethane. And then he gradually added to his quiver the other forms of riding. Shaggy and Scooby were there in his mind, somewhere, urging the simpleton to move faster, move more dangerously, carve narrower, less surely, approach the Divine from the backside, and then romance the biggest stone of them all.
When the societal rejects discover The Ride, as Shaggy surely urged them to do, they discover that they only need to step off the treadmill to see the sunlight and the night. And that has always devalued the Global Client State Machine in at least a theoretical, if unmeasurable way.
We’ll miss ya, John Hartman, it’s been a helluva ride. And it’s never been without love, baby.