I go through phases where I’m intensely interested in a random topic, and for whatever reason, this month it’s Scooby-Doo.  The beloved group of crime-solving teenagers and their talking dog made their first TV appearance in 1969, and they’ve been staples of pop culture ever since.  Scooby-Doo was a big part of my childhood thanks to constant reruns on Cartoon Network.  I got to see all the movies and incarnations of the show from the late 1960s to the early 2000s.  But revisiting those shows as an adult and comparing them to the last decade of Scooby media, I can’t help but notice that something feels off with the franchise’s recent offerings, and I believe more is at play here than just nostalgia.

I understand that decades-long enterprise such as Scooby-Doo often has to evolve as audiences and cultural attitudes change.  There are good ways to do that, ways that build upon the legacy of the original.  One example of this is the fan-favorite film Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, a darker and more intense story that chronicles the gang’s encounters with real monsters.  But there are ways of changing up a franchise that undermine what has come before, particularly when it comes to characterization.  Take a look at Fred, for example.  In the early days of Scooby-Doo, he was a strong, intelligent leader whose ingenuity helped solve mysteries and capture bad guys.  Lately he has been portrayed as a stereotypical clueless jock whose defining characteristic is an unhealthy obsession with traps.  Velma has always been the brainy one, but now her intelligence often gives her a sense of superiority that makes her condescending and bitter towards everyone else.

A common criticism of many sequels and long-running TV shows is that individual character traits are often exaggerated over time until they completely dominate the character’s personality.  This phenomenon is commonly known as “Flanderization” in reference to The Simpsons character Ned Flanders, who devolves from a multi-faceted character to a one-note Christian caricature in later seasons of the show.  This isn’t just a problem with shows that have been around for a while.  This seems to be part of a larger media trend of pushing character traits to the extreme, leading to a flood of messy, dysfunctional, and even borderline psychotic characters on the screen.

So what’s with all this character oversimplification and fixation on disorder?  Well, imagine things from the creators’ perspective.  Producing another installment in an existing franchise is difficult—you need to make things familiar enough for the audience to feel connected to the characters and environments they have come to love, but you also want to push the story into new territory to keep things from becoming formulaic.  In the pursuit of new plot points, sometimes having a complex, well-adjusted character with decades of history and character development becomes an impediment to making the story go where you want it to.  So instead of letting characterization dictate where the plot goes, the characters are simplified so they’re easier to plug into whatever story you want to tell.  But since you don’t want this tradeoff of depth for simplicity to make your characters boring, you amplify some of their most entertaining tendencies.  Pushing these traits to dysfunctional levels makes it easier to create drama and conflict, which in turn should make things more interesting for the audience.

All of this sounds good on paper, but it’s generally accepted that Flanderization is a sign of creative stagnation and decline in quality.  The moment you start compromising your characters—even if it’s done in service of the plot—you start compromising the whole story.  It’s possible to have an entertaining spectacle with one-dimensional characters, but it’s less likely to touch us on a deeply human level.  Characters are the heart of a story because they’re a reflection of our humanity, representing our universal triumphs and struggles in life.  When characters lack depth, we subconsciously perceive that something is missing.  To prevent these gaps, we need creative people who deeply understand the human experience and have the skill to translate that to the screen.  Maybe that’s too much to expect from a cartoon about a Great Dane with a fondness for snacking, but it certainly is food for thought.