In the other room, my children are watching an episode of The New Scooby Doo Movies with Davy Jones in it.
The program originally aired on December 2, 1972, so I probably didn’t see it when it ran first. A couple years later, I watched it with my mother and brother, and I remember distinctly the joke that Davy Jones makes “I’ve never sung for frogs before, just monkeys.” She explained that he used to belong to a band called the Monkees.
Of course, the Monkees were most active between 1966 and 1968, when the television show appeared, but a decade later when I watched the cartoon, Davy Jones was a has-been, if a little boy thought of such things. Regardless, he was off my cultural radar, if I had such a thing at about 10.
Of course, a couple years after that, in 1985, MTV started airing the television program and brought about a brief Monkees revival. The shows played on MTV and Nickolodeon, the band toured, and I even ended up with a greatest hits album.
When the children heard that Scooby Doo was meeting Davy Jones, their only knowledge was of the guy with the locker. Although this reference precedes any of the pop-culture musings above since it’s a nautical term for the undersea place where drowned sailors go, the boys only know of it from what they’ve heard about the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series.
That’s a lot of generational history wrapped into a single episode of a forty-year-old cartoon.
