Anarchy and Armor in Scooby-Doo

Scooby-Doo Review: What a Night for a Knight

The scope of this episode is impressive.  There are archaeological antiquities and natural history specimens.  Shaggy shows off some wild gymnastics skills.  An old-fashioned plane takes to the air – inside a building!  And there are cool creepy touches throughout – like the fact that the kidnapped professor is actually tied up and on display in one of the exhibits, or the armor sitting motionless in the driver’s seat of a van at the start of the show.  The episode manages to have a spooky vibe, despite a potentially mundane monster.  Add some brilliant sound design and an expressionist labyrinth of light, shadow, and iconography and you have a worthy beginning to the masterpiece saga that is the original “Scooby-Doo, Where are You?”

Have you ever noticed the anarchism of the gang?  They break into the museum without permission, Shaggy smashes priceless antiques, and Scooby “appropriates” a pair of glasses.  Some of it’s the anarchy of comedy – treating the world like a jazz tune or a playground.  But some of it’s a sense that the mystery trumps all else – that the quest for knowledge is more important than the rules.

 

Shaggy remarks several times that the “Black Knight” – a suit of armor – is alive.  The underlying assumption is that it is inhabited and manipulated by a ghost.  Of course, the defining the feature of a ghost is that it is not really alive.  Otherwise it would just be an organism, an exotic animal.  This is, I suppose, the paradox of the undead – the possibility that someone dead is returned to “life,” but in some alternative and usually monstrous form.  Yet this begs the question – in what sense is the Black Knight alive?  In the usual tradition of Scooby-Doo antagonists the armor just emits a kind of growl, so we know it isn’t establishing its life-force by means of language and communication.  Ultimately, it must simply be the motion of the knight – the movement.  And the whole question of how a living suit of armor functions is rather interesting, too.  There are, presumably, no muscles and bones in there – so we are left with either a metal construct that disobeys the normal laws of physics, or a spectral influence that emits no visible sign independent of the metal.  As Daphne says, it’s a “creepy hunk of tin.”

But to return to the question of life – if we accept Shaggy’s judgment on the matter – we must confront the possibility that life is not limited to the normal categories, but includes the fusion of the elemental and the ephemeral – the mixture of sullen substance and spectral urgency.  If the Black Knight is alive, then so is the earth, and the sea, and the whole of the unfathomable cosmos.  Our jittery hippie is probably just following a false lead provided by the criminal, who planted the story.  Even so, that’s pretty deep stuff from a guy who spends most of his time worrying about lunch.