How did Scooby-Doo, of all possible properties, manage to survive for so long? Over the years it’s had countless soft reboots, hard reboots, reimaginings, and live action adaptations. Hell, there was a (surprisingly good) Lovecraftian-lite reboot with Harlan Ellison as a major character, and the characters playing even more ridiculous caricatures of themselves. But how did it manage to survive this long?
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is not a particularly great show. It’s not irredeemably awful, and it’s honestly probably better than most cartoons of that era (and almost certainly one of the better Hanna-Barbera cartoons), but it was an extremely formulaic show with mediocre execution. When you watch it, nothing really says “classic” like a lot of old Disney or Warner Bros cartoons do. There’s nothing particularly memorable or quotable from any given episode.
It’s not even particularly merchandizable, at least not compared to any other mascot-driven franchise. There’s Scooby Snacks and then maybe some umbrellas and shirts with a dog’s face painted on them. Nothing that lends itself especially well to gluts of overpriced memorabilia marketed to different demographics and personalities the way Disney or WB can swing. Especially not when they fail to give their monsters of the week any sense of identity, instead opting for mostly interchangeable bad guys in masks in a slightly different location. Like does anybody really care about the difference between the Miner '49er and The Creeper?
Even The Flintstones is more merchandizable with the myriad of stone age gadgets and dinosaurs they can make toys of, and the Flintstones hasn’t survived in nearly the same way. At best you see a few re-runs now and then, along with the standard “babies version” they made in the mid '90s (which was a curse that afflicted a startling number of old franchises around that time, including Tom and Jerry, Loony Tunes, and, yes, Scooby Doo as well).
Yet, it got rebooted, and rebooted, and got weird movies and spinoffs where the monsters are real, and the shows with only Shaggy and Scooby, the ones with Scooby’s stupid cousins, the one with all the guest stars like Don Knotts, Sonny and Cher, and the Harlem Globetrotter, the ones that take place at a school for young monsters because ???, the live action film where Buffy is Daphne, the other live action movies where they played up a Shaggy/Velma romance only for them to kiss and declare there’s no chemistry, and all around a bunch of weird as hell series that are only tangentially Scooby-Doo and yet seem to embody its spirit at the same time. But it all still leads me to ask how this one mediocre, formulaic show for 1969 survived when none of the other properties really survived the same way. (Like, yeah, there’s that Flintstones comic, but it, like most other cartoons from Hanna-Barbera and that era, don’t get rebooted nearly as much. It’s not like we’re on the 25th Top Cat series which aims to be a gritty critique on the homeless crisis in America)
