Some years back — ’84, ’85, I’m no “pray TV” expert — this freaky religious nut named Gary Greenwald made a freaky religious propaganda program, Deception of a Generation, in which Greenwald invokes the name of God to denounce children’s Saturday morning cartoons as All That Is Evil.

It’s funny because he is not joking, and it’s not funny because he is not joking. (It’s also quite funny because Greenwald is quite hairy, but that’s beside the point.) Greenwald welcomes a guest — whose name I didn’t feel was important enough to write down, but he talks like a girl and wears glasses — who claims God told him to spend years studying cartoons to unearth the satanic elements within them.

So Gary and Guy (as I’ll call him) go back and forth chastising the likes of The Smurfs and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. For the whole, it unfolds something like this:

Greenwald: “Now we’re going to watch another clip from Scooby-Doo, is that correct?”
Guy: “Yes, watch how witchcraft and astral projections play a part in this clip.”
Greenwald (post-clip, flustered): “Well, I must say, this is not the Scooby-Doo I remember, what with all the witchcraft and astral projections!”
Guy: “Amen.”

They go on to imply that the writers for these shows are not under the employ of Hanna-Barbera or Filmation, but Beelzebub; in reality, it’s not likely they were worshipping the dark one with their quickly written scripts, but rather flying higher than a kite. —Rod Lott