Being the devout Hunter S. Thompson fan I am, I don't normally take kindly to parody of the man or, especially, his writing.
That said, Fear and Loathing in the Mystery Machine might be one of the funniest damn things I've ever read. The premise, such as it is, is that Hanna-Barbera decided to include Raoul Duke as a guest in an episode of Scooby-Doo.
I don't know if I ever saw a Scooby-Doo episode where the guest wasn't either Vincent Price or the Harlem Globetrotters, but The Good Doctor seems like he would have been a good fit.
A couple excerpts:
The team heads down to Mexico on a special mission...
We were ten minutes south of San Clemente when the putrid green daisy walls of the van started closing in. I recall the fat four-eyed lesbian sweater girl saying something like "are you okay, Mr. Duke? We've got a mystery to solve..." when suddenly the gullet of the garish chartreuse steel beast began to spasm, as if a digestive track readying itself to vomit. I began clawing at my hamstrings and when I turned my head I was looking into the irridescent eyes of a grotesque animal screeching "Ruh Roh! Ruh Roh!" in a hoarse irritating dog-accented gibberish. That's when it things began to turn weird.
Check it out. Laughs all around.
Hanna and Barbera liked my story on hormone doping at the '72 Laff-a-Lympics and proposed that I cover a Harlem Globetrotters game at a haunted Aztec pyramid in Mexico. They called me to their offices in Burbank. "Jesus Christ, you're killing us here, Duke," Hanna complained when I demanded a $1500 advance for the project. "I've got expenses," I said. They relented and arranged for a chirpy entourage to escort me into the belly of the beast. There was the lesbian chick, the blond Palos Verdes neck scarf Nixon boy and his frigid miniskirt girlfriend, the gawky soul patch hippie kid and his paranoid Great Dane. Lost Manson kids all, Squeakies and Leslies and a canine Tex in a puke green van hoping for some Mexican helter skelter. All the better reason to pack a few guns, I thought.
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