When I was a kid, I watched old Scooby-Doo shows on Cartoon Network and Boomerang. I remember being on the internet and being deeply confused by the hatred for Scrappy Doo. I didn’t find Scrappy annoying at all when I watched the old shows. Is it just a generational thing?
Scrappy Doo was the Cousin Oliver of the Scooby gang. Of course everybody hated him.
The Hellscape that is Scrappy Doo.
Since you merely found him “not annoying” , six months in an appropriate Institution should cure you.
If you had enjoyed him, however….well then.
The Ancient Aztecs had Sacrificial Altars, suitable for fans of Scrappy.
I’ve never watched The Brady Bunch, so I only have a vague idea who that is.
Fans of Scrappy don’t have a heart to tear out.
For an extended time the 3 most hated TV characters (in the US at least) were Scrappy, Barney the dinosaur and Wesley Crusher of Next Generation.
The why of Scrappy is along the lines of he changed the tone of the Scooby Doo franchise by making it a lot sillier. His voice and words were highly annoying. But that said, if you were not old enough to not have started with pre-Scrappy Scooby Doo, his impact was a lot less and he had fans among those kids who had Crappy as their intro to Scooby Doo.
To this day, TVTropes has an article on The Scrappy named for Scrappy Doo.
From thier description of Scrappy:
The main reason Scrappy is so associated with unintentionally hated characters is that the show’s existing fanbase didn’t like him. And those that didn’t like Scrappy really didn’t like him.
There’s a certain age, like 15 or 16, when the trappings of childhood become fraught. The things you loved as a kid, you still secretly love, but you’re ashamed to love them, because it makes you feel childish. Instead of rejecting those things, you performatively reject childish things that came after your time.
I’ve definitely seen that happening with other characters (o hai Jar Jar), and suspect that’s a big piece of what’s happening here.
I hates me a Scrappy-Doo!
His irritating voice and annoying personality was bad enough. But that they had to make him out to be a superstar character and appear in most episodes ever after was just salt in the wound. A rare appearance now and then would have been bad enough.
I had no idea Jar Jar was hated either when I saw Episode 1 in theaters as a kid.
Could it be cause I didn’t watch the Original Trilogy before?
He wasn’t just hated, he was offensive to some.
This is a big part of it.
Imagine you’re part of a friend group. You all get along well, you each have your part in the group—you gel.
Now, imagine a new person joins the group. This person is loud, juvenile, full of himself, and insists on being the center of attention. How do you feel about this person?
I’m not even a Star Wars fan and Jar Jar was jarring and seemed like a weird racist “Alien” Jamaican character.
I mean I didn’t like Wesley Crusher or Dr Crusher for that matter, but I didn’t hate them and I was a big time fan of Star Trek (TOS). They weren’t offensive, neither was Scrappy, he was just grating, annoying and the like. Thankfully I was pretty much done with Saturday Morning cartoons at the time, but Scrappy remained annoying anyway.
Scrappy’s voice was irritating and he just made the show obnoxious instead of fun and relaxing. He changed the pace, and the tone. I stopped watching after he came along.
I’ve never understood the Wesley hatred. He was a kid growing up in this weird situation. He’d lost his Dad, his Mom was an incredibly busy executive on the ship, and he didn’t have a peer friend group to hang out with. Not to mention his only intellectual equal was an android. Of course he had angst. I liked him, felt a little bit sorry for him, never found him whiny as so many people complained.
Honestly, I think a lot of teen guys wanted a character they could identify with, and wanted it to be a cool athlete, not a nerd like them. They wanted to live vicariously through him; but he just volunteered for extra homework.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that Scrappy Doo was the reaction to plummeting ratings and his appearance in 1979 actually garnered new viewers. People who grew up with the show weren’t watching Saturday morning cartoons anymore and the show had to appeal to younger audiences. And it worked. I was 16 and the show wasn’t being made for me, just like The Phantom Menace wasn’t made for someone who was 13 in 1977.
This is true and I was a little younger and at the end of my Saturday morning cartoon watching. Scrappy probably helped it along.
I think that started when I was eleven or twelve. I still liked my GI Joes and Transformers, and I was happy to watch GI Joe: The Movie when it came out, but I stopped playing with the toys anywhere someone could see me for fear of being made fun of. The last year I received toys for Christmas was 1986. I got a GI Joe Tomahawk helicopter and some others I’m hard pressed to remember now. But it wasn’t like there was an off switch. I still watched cartoons well into my teens as the 1990s had some bangers like X-Men, Spider-Man, The Tick, and the surprisingly excellent Mighty Max. I sure didn’t advertise the fact that I still watched cartoons though.
Anyway, Scrappy-Doo made his debut when I was three. He wasn’t a character I particularly cared for but he wasn’t one that grated on me either. I do think the cartoons produced before Scrappy were superior. But then I’m a big fan of the early period of Scooby Doo where all the supernatural nonsense have rational explanations.
How else? You elect him President.
Good enough joke, but no political replies please.
Thank you.
Barely Moderating:
As a (former) gifted kid I was one of the few that liked Wesley, tho admittedly his early appearances did go over the line in terms of his prodigy-ness. When he settled in as a regular character he became much more likable.
Note I never cared all that much for Scooby-Doo (the show) itself to begin with, even tho I was 8 when it first started airing; the formulaic plots soon grew stale for me.
As always, The Simpsons holds the answer to life’s greatest questions. Watch “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochy show” (season 8, episode 14) and get back to us.