Scooby-Doo's New Adventure

Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you going with the Wiccans?

The venerable cartoon character and his friends put in a good word for modern neo-pagans in the latest Scooby movie, "Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost."

As Scooby's longtime pal Shaggy might say: "Zoinks!"

The cartoon movie departs from 30 years of Scooby-dom to deliver a nugget of education about Wiccans--a modern resurrection of pagan traditions and beliefs.

The video has been on sale since October, and it was shown on Cartoon Network for the first time last month.

Anyone who turns to Scooby-Doo for religious education probably uses Star Wars as a science reference. Even so, the new Scooby movie has raised some reaction among Wiccans and at least one conservative foundation that evaluates television shows and movies.

"It was totally out of context, there was not any other side presented, and it was basically presented as instructional fact," said Dick Rolfe, president of the Dove Foundation. "You don't expect to get theological explanations in Scooby-Doo."

Brian Lankford, on the other hand, was a more appreciative viewer. Mr. Lankford is an Elder Clergy of the Covenant of the Goddess, an international Wiccan education organization, and is on the board of directors of Betwixt and Between, a neo-pagan community center in Dallas.

"It was a really good effort," he said of the portrayal of Wiccans in the new Scooby cartoon. "It could have been a lot worse. It typically is a lot worse."

Scooby is one of America's most successful cartoon characters. Since 1969, he's been a lead character in 19 television series, one television special and a handful of films. The classic Scooby plotline was as unchanging as the pyramids:

Scooby and his four human friends--Shaggy, Velma, Daphne and Freddy--arrive at a town where a monster is terrorizing the populace. They get chased by the monster (who says "ARRGGH!"), collect clues, catch the monster and discover he's really a guy in a costume.

The only "real" supernatural element in the show is Scooby himself--a Great Dane who inexplicably has learned to talk. (His name was snagged from Frank Sinatra's warbling in the song "Strangers in the Night": "Scooby-dooby-dooo")

The original Scoobys were hardly high art, even for the cartoon shows of the era. The theme song was a bit of, um, doggerel that rhymes the words "willing" and "villain." And the stories had no particular connection to social or cultural issues of the day. During the tumultuous early late 1960s and beyond, Scooby's pals never worried about racism, youth protests, civil rights, teen sex, or drugs.

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