An Instagram account focuses on Scooby-Doo's background art -- and the destruction of America’s Victorian heritage

Bloomberg

"An 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," says Citylab's Feargus O'Sullivan. "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. Looking at the scene backdrops with the characters removed, however — as the Scooby-Doo Scenescapes account by a recent U.S. high school graduate does — and you’ll see that they could function as an encyclopedia of the American uncanny. Typically drawn in surprisingly elegant shades of moody, Hopper-esque blue, they return time and again to that classic signifier of sinister decay: Victorian architecture."