Tag Archives: Scooby-Doo

The Only Mexican I’ve Ever Hated

I have some spiritual and other musings I’ll get to soon-ish, but first, a rant.

Little Girl Blue loves Scooby-Doo (she also loves Spongebob Squarepants, Arthur [and his friends], Teen Titans and many others)…and this is good. I, too, am a big fan of Scooby and the gang. I’m mostly a fan of the original couple of series back in the 1970s, and the more recent animated movies and the series “What’s New Scooby-Doo?”

Recently, our library got the two-disc set of “The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo,” a show I only vaguely remember from my youth (probably because it came out when I was in high school, and not really watching cartoons much at that time).

Now, I’ve been iffy about some of the Scooby-Doo series variations recently, like “A Pup Named Scooby-Doo” (fun, but silly, and not really in keeping with the overall Scooby-Doo canon) and “Shaggy and Scooby Get a Clue” (which was kind of surreal and trippy and felt out of place). But even those had their charms. But one thing I will say is that I have always…ALWAYS hated Scrappy-Doo, Scooby’s nephew.

That character was like the attempt in a flagging sitcom to breathe new life into the series by introducing a baby or some distant needy quirky relative. I think it killed all that was good in the Scooby-Doo franchise, pushing out not only Fred and Velma for a great many years but also signaling a drop in the fun factor, the humor and the charm of the earlier series. We wouldn’t see any of that energy or charm return until very recent years (the 1990s and 2000s).

So, one reason for me to not want to sit down and watch “The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo” for more than a few minutes at a time would be because Scrappy is in the series.

But it gets worse.

As much as I thought I’d never hate any Scooby character more than Scrappy, I got introduced to Flim-Flam.

This guy is a pre-pubescent kid who is a con-artist (and inexplicably wears a hooded sweat suit all the time, even in hot climes, that often looks more like like a cheap robe made by someone who was trying to outfit an Appalachian mountain-residing KKK member with a Gandalf fixation) and who, according to Wikepedia, is Mexican. I knew he was either Latino or Middle Eastern given his skin tone, though he has no particular accent, but despite having its flaws, Wikipedia is right more often than not, so I’ll trust them.

So, Flim-Flam becomes the one Mexican I’ve ever encountered whom I despise. Frankly, I haven’t even met too many Mexicans whom I even find irritating, which is interesting, considering how many other racial groups have routinely produced individuals who piss me off.  About the only other Mexican who’s ever been on my shit list was the guy who owned the barber shop my mom once worked at when I was a young lad, and who was a chauvinist bastard who screwed her over multiple times work-wise.

In any case, I’m not even going to argue whether there is a racial or social subtext to Flim-Flam…he’s just plain frickin’ annoying, and at least as much so as Scrappy-Doo, making “The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo” hands down the most worthless series ever featuring Scooby, not even redeemable with the inclusion of a character, Vincent Von Ghoul, voiced by the incomparable Vincent Price.

Screw you, Flim-Flam.

At least Scrappy provided one redeeming legacy: Providing a somewhat funny villainous twist on the first live-action Scooby-Doo movie.