I’ve heard the original Scooby-Doo series described as the “anti-X-Files,” in that every mystery that appeared supernatural at first turned out to have a prosaic explanation at the end. As such, it performed a valuable service by teaching kids (well, some kids, anyway) to think skeptically.
Most of the later versions (The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo being particularly offensive) took a firm stand on the side of the believers. Maybe that ultimately made it more popular, and so it survived longer. I don’t know. But formulaic as it was, the original was a decent series.
Which reminds me of a gag panel I read about 20 years ago: Mulder and Scully are interviewing the Mystery Machine gang. Mulder asks Freddy, “Now let me get this straight. You say you know it wasn’t really a ghost because your *dog *told you so?”
“If someone says a dog can carry on a conversation with you, it might be one of those talking dogs who’ll fix himself a sandwich after dressing up as an Italian barber.”
The drive-up burger hut down the road from my house has a classic full-length sedan done up as the Mystery Machine, which the owners and family drive around town for promotional purposes.
Agreed with MrAtoz, as a kid (in the 70s) I loved this show because it was genuinely creepy. Even though it was obvious it was never really going to be a ghost, but always a real estate scam! And Mystery Inc was awesome, even for adults because it was so meta (although a weird combo of “random guys pretending to be a supernatural creature” and an over-arching actual supernatural plot).
Scooby Doo has been a favorite of my daughter, who is now five, and she probably started watching about around three years old, which seems way too young but apparently we don’t supervise her screen time well enough because she showed up one day with an expert knowledge of the basic Scooby gang set-up. She loves anything with Scooby Doo, in a way that she’s not interested in a lot of older cartoons.
One thing that always perplexed me about the original is that usually Fred, Daphne and Velma went one way (as already mentioned, ahem) and Shaggy and Scooby in the other … but maybe 1 in 10 times, Velma got switched to Shaggy and Scooby. Why? Is there a pattern? Does it mean something?
I don’t know how I know this trivia, but I’ve heard that the writers tended to send Fred and Daphne off together because they were kind of boring and didn’t really know what to have them to do. So they would send the ones they found more interesting in the other group, usually Shaggy and Scooby (since they had an easily exploitable quirk), but also frequently Velma.
IN answer to the OP. Scooby was popular for a few reasons.
It was one of the few HB shows that weren’t derivative of other mediums or comedians acts.
The characters were memorable. When HB did all their knock off shows all the human characters were very forgetttable. Seriously, can you name a human member of the JabberJaw or Speed Buggy team without looking it up?The only reason I even remember what some of them look like is because of guest appearances on Harvey Birdman AAL.
The mysteries, while cliched and often ridiculous, did have a rational explanation. A lot of HB knock offs didn’t really do mysterys but just had the characters have adventures. The Mysteries gave everyone a role (except maybe Daphne).
"Danger-prone Daphne"s role was to f*** up whatever plan they concocted to catch the bad guy.
It was from Scooby-Doo that I learned an infallible law of narrative construction that has served me well ever since:
Whenever Our Heroes think up an elaborate scheme, if we are presented with an explanation of the way the scheme is supposed to work, something will go wrong so that it does not work as planned. However if the scheme is not explained ahead of time, it will work according to plan.
It’s pretty obvious why this is the case, but still, it has enabled me to predict with remarkable accuracy whether or not any scheme in any story is going to turn out to be successful.
In the world of cartoons I personally find it really hard to hate on one that never ever pushed the supernatural as real. (well other than a talking dog or 3) Hell that show was probably educationally valuable to kids.
Yes. I don’t mean it was some kind of Opel Boxvagen - it was an Amurrican short-wheelbase van, finished and detailed well enough for on-screen use. But fairly worn. What it was doing in London, I will never know.
I might have a picture somewhere.
ETA: And I do. It’s a Ford van and the modeling is a little less perfect than I recall, but still pretty good. It looks from a bumper strip that it was associated with something called “The Movieum,” which appears to be a now-defunct movie memorabilia store in London.
The division of (narrative) labor was pretty clear. Fred, Velma, and Daphne would do the mystery solving. They would find the clues, puzzle about them, and say things like “Hmmm. Why would a ghost need a treasure map?”* Shaggy and Scooby’s role was to actually encounter the ghost, and be comically chased by it, to the accompaniment of a forgettable pop tune. The mystery solving scenes were narratively necessary, but the chase scenes were surely more fun to write and animate.
It is true that Velma occasionally (I wouldn’t say frequently, myself) accompanied Shaggy and Scooby, rather than Fred and Daphne. I don’t see any clear reason, unless it was that the writers had an idea for something funny for her to do in that particular episode. Probably involving the loss of her glasses.
I gather that in some of the later versions, Shaggy and Velma have been paired up romantically, which just seems kind of weird to me.
*One curious thing is that the gang never seemed to learn from experience. Even though it’s been a guy in a costume on every previous occasion, they always start each new mystery with the assumption that it might be a real ghost this time, and always act surprised when they start to uncover evidence that it’s not!
Not to drive a joke into the ground, but it’s possible the first case they investigated was the apparent hoax of a talking dog [del]who can fix sandwiches and dress up like an Italian barber[/del], and they looked for a weird old man using electronic equipment and stage magic to pull off the effect, only to learn that, nope, that just happened.
A few years ago I went to a Lowell Spinners game (Red Sox Class A minor league team) on “bring your TV car to the game” night. 3 Mystery Mobiles, 2 KITTs, and 4 or 5 Herbies. One of the Mystery Mobiles is there most games - they drive it around the field between innings with a guy launching T-shirts from the roof. Good times.
(This was when the two were engaged). It’s hard to tell how much of this is bullshit PR speak, but it seems she thought it might be fun. She was filming it before Buffy had even ended, though. In fact, I think she was co-filming the sequel to that movie and Season 7.
