There’s a trope that happensx when a TV show was struggling, they’d introduce new characters to try and get back some of the show’s mojo. In the case of The Brady Bunch, they introduced Cousin Oliver as a cute little kid to get back some of that (I suppose) little kid energy. Same thing with Scooby Doo- when the ratings started to flag, they introduced Scrappy Doo as Scooby’s cousin.
Wow! This pretty much captured it completely!
If they ran out of cool mystery ideas, they should have stopped making the show, rather than introducing a character that changed the show completely.
In universe, very good dogs can almost talk, except for this new dog that, for some reason, can talk loudly and annoyingly.
That’s not how the breakfast cereal business works.
I’ve actually done some deep dives on this. And, surprisingly, at the time, people by and large didn’t hate Scrappy Doo. The ratings were sagging as things were getting stale, and adding him actually increased ratings. This is also true of the supernatural becoming real, and the entire formula changing. Scrappy was well loved enough that it made more sense to keep him than the formula.
It’s just that, well, that’s when the beloved formula changed, and so those who really enjoyed the formula, looking back, see him as the cause of the stuff they didn’t like. He is set up to be annoying for a lot of the reasons stated. He actually is intentionally an annoying kid character, who actually causes the gang trouble rather than getting them out of it.
It seems likely to me that those who liked Scrappy were kids coming into it new, while the fans who were devoted enough to stick around as the show waned in popularity were the more likely to be the more diehard fans of the formula.
Eventually it became a meme (in the original sense) that Scrappy Doo is bad, and that stuck even during the fandom resurgence. Now it’s just accepted that he’s always been hated and even that he was the one who brought down the show.
I personally don’t mind Scrappy in and of himself. But yeah, he’s associated more with the seasons I don’t like as much, when they removed most of the gang or got more focused on being a zany supernatural show. Sure, the 13 ghosts of Scooby Doo, or when they got mixed into a sort of Amazing Races thing but with ghosts were neat. But the mystery format is my favorite.
Scrappy-Doo was problematic for a few reasons. The biggest is, he bumped Fred, Daphne and Velma off the show, changing the dynamic enough that it’s really a completely different show, and not a better one. It extended the life of the franchise in the same sense that Hee Haw Honeys extended the life of Hee Haw.
The formula for most Hanna-Barbera shows was, take an existing property (in this case, Dobie Gillis), tweak it a little, and give them a dog. Scooby Doo already had a dog at the center of it, so they gave the dog a dog. This is the creative equivalent of eating your own leg an inch at a time. I think the culture would have benefited more from a completely different show, unrelated to the Scooby gang. (I understand show business just enough to know that pitching a completely new show to the networks is harder than pitching changes to an existing one, but…)
About 20 years ago, I stumbled onto some new version of The Pink Panther. The old show was a master class in movement, timing, and mime. In the updated version, he could actually talk. The ballet of the original was all out the window and it was just another crappy cartoon about a talking cat. Not exactly the same thing as injecting new life into the old show, and neither was Scrappy Doo.
For one, I think the answer is in your OP: when you were a KID you watched OLD shows. When I was watching them in real time as a kid the addition of Crappy DooDoo was an obvious instance of “jumping the shark”. Hence, our hatred.
Ugh, it was basically introducing an irritating, unnecessary character into a show I kind of liked previously. Olivier is a pretty good analogue, but I always kind of just tolerated the Brady Bunch. It was the canary in the coal mine that they were making Saturday morning cartoons for someone else besides me. I continued to love cartoons, but the Saturday morning variety were becoming something that wasn’t worth bothering with.
This, and the “mysteries” went from being about criminals in masks, to real ghosts and monsters, continuing into 13 Ghosts, which was better but still bad.
I think part of it is that it’s more fun to watch a stoner like Scoob try to solve a mystery inside a haunted house than a go-getter like Scrappy.
I just want to note that 2 other instances of shows adding a new, young kid, to “inject life” were Sam showing up on Different Strokes and Andy on Family Ties.
This was my objection. Shaggy and Scooby were always my least favourite of the five. Scrappy added no value, but he took away the best characters.
That may be a thing, but it’s not the driver for hatred of Scrappy. I had long since stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons by 15. More like 12.
@What_Exit nailed it. Scrappy changed the team lineup. The show was already pretty cheesy in humor (Scooby Snax, anyone?), but Scrappy made it dumber. Scrappy was an arrogant, annoying brat.
I would agree that contributes to the overall disappointment of the prequels in general. I’m not sure that accounts for the hatred of Jar-jar. I will admit that C3PO was sometimes more annoying than funny, especially as I’ve grown older. So maybe if he had been a new character in the prequels he works have been subject to similar levels of disdain.
But some of the humor of Threepio is that he is a droid. Somehow he was programmed to be annoying. I know, I know now we have neutral networks and adaptive learning AI that isn’t entirely consciously programmed. But in 1977 that wasn’t being discussed in the context of the droids. It was never explained or contemplated where the droid personalities came from, but it was expected that as fabricated technology, their identities were fabricated, too.
Anyway, Jar-jar hate is tired in with the perception that Lucas used rscial stereotypes to generate his alien character personalities. Or maybe it felt a little too Mel Blanc doing Looney Tunes voices - over-exaggerated with speech impediment. JJ was just too goofy.
So, this comment got me thinking.
There’s a story that J Michael Straczynski has told about when he was writing Season 2 of Babylon 5. The execs wanted him to add a hot shot fighter pilot character to the show. JMS pushed back, but the suits insisted. So he added the character, but basically wrote him as bland and uninteresting as possible. Then killed him off in the S2 finale.
So what if the Scooby Doo writers didn’t want to add Scrappy Doo, but were forced to? Then maybe he was intentionally lazily written just to spite the suits.
Then a failing series would have stayed failed and less Cap’n Crunch would be moved off the shelves. Scrappy was brought in to boost ratings and that is what he did. The suits were right. Artistic merit was never a factor . Writers who cared about that weren’t wasting their time writing for cheap Saturday morning cartoons.
The story I was told was that in the first season there was intended to be one “Wesley saves the day” episode, but they commissioned three scripts so they could pick the best one and merge in elements from the other two.
But then a writer’s strike happened, so the producers were short on scripts and they actually had to use all three to fill out the season. So Wesley saving the day became a frequent thing.
I’m skeptical. Writing for 80s kids shows was not Breaking Bad 
Everything I’ve heard about it, emphasizes how quick and cheap the whole thing was. The writers were doing a job for a pay check, no one cared that much about the art they were creating.
Let’s not pretend 80s cartoons were ever high art. Most of them were half-hour long toy commercials.
What toys, exactly, was Scooby-Doo pedaling? How about Hong Kong Fooey? Pink Panther? Inch High, Private Eye? Josie and the Pussycats? Star Trek? Fat Albert? The Osmonds? Underdog? Roman Holidays? The Jetsons? Around the World in 80 Days? Funky Phantom? Space Ghost/Frankenstein Jr? Archies? Jonny Quest? Sealab 2020? Tennessee Tuxedo?
Hot Wheels, sure. But you know what is the funniest thing about that? Us kids didn’t need a reason, a TV show, or anyone telling us, to buy Hot Wheels. We bought them because they were fun, cool. The TV show was just gravy.
In the case of Sandy Duncan and Sonny and Cher, they represented prime examples of TV network synergy because they had shows on CBS. Fred Silverman, who was in charge of programming at the time, was betting that having stars cross-promote on Scooby-Doo would attract a greater share of young eyeballs to their prime-time programs. Of course, there were limits on what they could cross-promote, which is why you never saw the Scooby gang investigating a grisly murder with Telly Savalas as Kojak or Bea Arthur’s Maude show up to debate abortion with Shaggy.
These changes actually happened gradually. Scrappy was introduced in 1979, voiced by Lennie Weinrib. He was added to the show, but the rest of the cast, including Fred, Velma, and Daphne, remained intact, and they continued to solve mysteries where the “ghost” was actually a guy in a mask.
The next season, in 1980, was when Fred, Velma, and Daphne were dropped. Scrappy was now voiced by Don Messick (who also voiced Scooby, and would remain the voice of Scrappy for the remainder of the series). Rather than a single story that took up the whole episode, each episode was now three 7-minute shorts, which were more overtly comedic and started to introduce real supernatural elements.
In 1983 Daphne returned, and now she was a reporter investigating the supernatural. This incarnation had two shorts per episode.
The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo came along in 1985, featuring Vincent Price as “Vincent Van Ghoul,” and a kid sidekick named “Flim-Flam,” who was even more annoying than Scrappy, if such a thing is possible. Stories were back to being one per episode, and it was now full-on supernatural, with not even a suggestion that these might be criminals in disguise. The animation was actually a bit better, but by this time the series was clearly on its last legs.