Scooby-Doo (animation)/YMMV


  • Awesome Music: In a Halloween Special they got the band KISS!!!!!!! playing Shout it Out Loud.
    • To be honest, most chase scenes have one of these playing in the background. Several great singers have contributed to the series during the last years.
    • The Scooby-Doo series has been nominated for an Emmy twice. The first in 1989 for A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (daytime Emmy for Outstanding Children's Animated Program) and in 2005 for What's New, Scooby-Doo? (primetime, Outstanding Voice Talent--Mindy Cohn as Velma).
  • Complete Monster: While rare, these types of villains have showed up throughout the franchise: there's Mr. Greenway a.k.a the Snow Ghost from the original series, Jacques from the Zombie Island movie, and The Nibiru Entity from Mystery Incorporated.
  • Dork Age: Varies, but around the time Scrappy shows up the show switched from the standard 5 characters. First Velma and Fred disappeared, then Daphne left just Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy to bumble around for about a decade. Even for Scooby-Doo, it lost a lot of the original charm until the made-for-video reboots.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: The Scooby Doo Movies in the '90s and beyond definitely suffered from Sequelitis, but the Hex Girls have remained popular with the fans. They even became a Canon Immigrant in Scooby Doo Mystery Inc.
    • Shaggy when compared to the rest of the gang (with the obvious exception of Scooby). Viewers preferred the comedic hijinks he got mixed up in with Scoob, as opposed to the basic mystery solving. He's the only other one to appear in every part of the franchise.
  • Epileptic Trees: Scooby-Doo YouTuber, NerdSync, suggests that both the 2002 movie and Monsters Unleashed are told in Anachronic Order, with the latter being the true first movie, and the former being the true sequel. His arguments include Monsters Unleashed taking place in the familiar town of Coolsville while the original film takes place at a theme park the gang has never visited before, monsters being created in Monsters Unleashed followed by real monsters appearing in the 2002 movie, and how Scrappy being the surprise villain in the 2002 film makes more sense story-wise if one were to watch the 2002 film after Monsters Unleashed.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Daphne/Shaggy. Noticeably in the final seasons where they traveled together with Scooby and Scrappy solving mysteries or battling ghosts, visibly aging and changing clothes, appearance, and van in the final season with no explanation. Surprisingly, (and likely in part to no one willing to admit a Scrappy season had something worth mentioning in it), nobody brings up that the two were together. Seth McFarlane also has an unhealthy fixation on Daphne/Scooby, as heard on the Family Guy album.
    • A 1991 article in Wild Cartoon Kingdom theorizes that not only is Velma a lesbian, but she's living her alternative lifestyle with Daphne.
    • Alternatively, there's Shaggy/Velma. The reason Fred got no love(in') is that he was... well... Fred Jones. The only person in the world with less personality than him is Keanu Reaves. Daphne was kind of flat too, in the original, and besides Shaggy and Scooby, Velma was the only one with a semblance of a personality.
  • Gannon Banned: Referring to Scooby-Doo as The Hero.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: At the end of Scooby-Doo: Pirates Ahoy, Fred's dad mentions they should give them a trip to the Himalayas for Fred's birthday next year, which Shaggy quickly passes on because he doesn't want to risk a run in with the abominable snowman. The next year's movie, Chill Out, Scooby-Doo, saw this happen as the main plot.
    • The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries Halloween Episode "A Halloween Hassle at Dracula's Castle" saw Shaggy attend a costume party as a werewolf. Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf aired four years later.
    • The episode where they're trying to stop the Monster Clown. Said clown hypnotizes Shaggy into being a lion tamer. Shaggy is found in there yelling "Back up there, Simba!"
  • Ho Yay: The last scene of the What's New episode "Pompeii And Circumstance." Supping on a plate of spaghetti, Shaggy and Scooby are sucking in the same noodle, and... well, you know what happens next.
    • Wouldn't that be Interspecies Romance?
    • Not necessarily, since Shaggy and Scooby were repulsed by the result.
    • In the Valentine's Day special of What's New, it's heavily implied that Fred and Shaggy share a house, Fred looks very... domestic cooking breakfast for the two of them, and then we see them locking eyes while holding the "secret admirer" valentines they just received. Not to be outdone, this is immediately followed by Velma and Daphne sharing morning coffee in a home decorated in shades of lavender that just happens to have a fully-equipped chemistry lab in the living room. Not to mention that when Daphne says she loves Valentine's Day, Velma asks if that's because of the rampant commercialism or the pressure to identify oneself in the context of a socially-acceptable couple...
    • And then there's the way Velma and Daphne hold each other in the cave in Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword.
    • In an episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Daphne told Velma to hold her hand. But there was a monster between them.
  • Ho Yay Shipping: Mystery Incorporated had a recent recurring sub-plot that had Scooby being jealous of Velma as Shaggy's girlfriend. This is retconned in Curse of the Lake Monster: Shaggy develops a crush on Velma and it has Scooby feeling a bit left out at times.

Scooby: Hmph. Velma, Velma, Velma.

    • Subverted at the end--Velma kisses Shaggy smack on the lips and Scooby takes pictures.
    • From Jeepers, It's The Creeper: At the school's barn dance, Shaggy is dancing with Velma when Scooby enters and asks Shaggy if he can cut in. To Velma's shock and disappointment, Scooby goes off dancing with Shaggy.

Velma: Well, I've been a wallflower before, but this is ridiculous!

  • Memetic Badass: Shaggy is seen as a godlike being who only uses a small percent of his power; this took off in particular after Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur, whose main plot involved Shaggy turning into one through the effects of hypnosis.
  • Memetic Mutation: "Scooby Snacks", Scooby's manner of speech, "You Meddling Kids", and (after unmasking the villain) "It was Mr. Jameson, the fairground owner!"
  • Memetic Sex God: Two, actually.
    • Shaggy, despite Fred being the Jock, has been paired with more women than pretty much anyone else in the Hanna-Barbera line, including: Daphne (in The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo), several forgettable one-off characters in the Direct-to-Video movies in the 80s, one in The Movie, and most recently (and probably dating back to the original where their were light hints) Velma. That's a short, short list.
    • The other is Velma. Especially the newest version. Really, you look at Velma, and the first thing that comes to mind is a librarian smacking a ruler on her hand.
  • Moral Event Horizon: There have been some villains that were people dressed as monsters that have actually attempted to murder or critically maim the gang in order to keep their schemes safe (The Snow Ghost, Mr. Hyde, the Ghost of the Red Baron, among others).
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Ironically, it's not Scrappy but Daphne who is rescued in adaptations, with her move away from being the capture prone Damsel Scrappy.
    • This has translated to some of the new animated movies as well, particularly Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword.
      • Daphne's old problem of being capture prone is lampshaded in Scooby-Doo and the Loch Ness Monster, with multiple references to the Blake family being danger prone.
        • Which is a Mythology Gag in and of itself, as during the original series, Daphne's nickname (both in-series and by fans) was "Danger-Prone Daphne".
    • Funny enough, Scrappy himself was rescued for several shows. He matured somewhat and showed capability to actually handle some of the bad guys, unfortunately this largely goes unnoticed, even by people who work on the show.
    • YMMV, this troper found Scrappy to be hilarious in the movie and loved him for once. Being the Big Bad actually did wonders for him.
  • The Scrappy: Need I say who? Also an example of a Leeroy Jenkins.
    • Before Scrappy, there was Scooby-Dum. Though generally speaking, people didn't seem to mind him as much, as he had a low key personality in contrast to Scrappy, who started out as high-strung and obnoxious. Barring a few cameos and reunions, he also turned up rarely in the franchise after his initial series.
  • Ugly Cute:
    • The girls in Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, especially Patty Maloney as the mummy girl.
    • "Fred Bat" in the WNSD episode "The Vampire Strikes Back"
  • Uncanny Valley: One episode that didn't feature a villain in disguise had the heroes help an inventor capture a runaway robot he built for an amusement park. It turns out the inventor's sister sabotaged the robot to persuade him not to use it, fearing it would scare the children away.
  • Values Dissonance: Unsurprisingly, given the franchise is half a century old, the older entries have some very outdated concepts that would be utterly impossible to get away with today.
    • Depicting Daphne solely as a Damsel in Distress without any other characterization would be utterly impossible today. Very tellingly, more modern entries in the franchise, starting in the 90s severely toned this trait of Daphne down, making her an Action Girl who was rarely got by a villain unless the entire gang was caught and was often depicted as very competent.
    • A major reason why Velma often did not get any love interests, was because when the franchise was created in the 60s and 70s, the idea of women being both attractive and intelligent was seen as implausible. More recent iterations starting in the 90s have given Velma love interests, and some have also gone out of their way to show Velma is insecure about being in a romantic relationship.
    • The Scooby Doo Show had multiple issues with how Indigenous peoples were depicted in several episodes. The Jaguaro episode has them depicted as hostile headhunters who speak in unintelligible grunts and who would attack the gang on sight and are openly called savages by the cast. The Snow Beast episode has the Inuit being called "Eskimos", which is now regarded as a racist term to use for the Inuit. Another episode has the villains dressed in old Indigenous cloths in the modern era while wardrum music plays in the background, similar to old Western films. All three instances would not be allowed to get into a modern kids show today due to them being blatant racist stereotypes.
    • Scooby Doo and the Ghoul School had several issues that would be looked at a lot more negatively today.
      • Tanis the mummy is stated to be six years old and is in a foreign boarding school. This would be much harder to depict as normal into a modern film with the greater awareness about the harms that boarding schools can inflict on children if they don't have contact with their parents.
      • During the ballet lesson, Scooby, Shaggy and Scrappy are ordered to wear a tutu, which is depicted as something comedic, and also something that they really didin't need to do. A later scene depicts them saying not having to wear a tutu as completly acceptable. In the modern era, where people of either sex doing things that go against gender norms are a lot more common, it would be much harder for such a situation to be played for comedy.
      • Having Sibella be depicted as alluring with a Sexophone leitmotif despite being a young teenager would be utterly unacceptable in a modern film, regardless of if she wasan't human or not.
  • Vindicated by History: Beginning in the early 2000s and lasting into the mid 2010s, the animated Scooby films fell into a severe decline of quality and were heavily condemned as being rerun plots of episodes of the original series, often fully reliant on an Ass Pull to justify the plot falling in motion along with constantly having the monsters be bad guys in masks with the real supernatural only being alluded to, along with bringing the gang back to their original personalities and removing their unique traits. This was especially bad given that the first four films in the late 90s and the early 2000s not only resurrected the franchise, but they had genuine supernatural villains and expanded the gang's personality considerably making them unique and stand out. As a result, the films were widely accused of plunging the franchise into another Dork Age, and this was not helped with several subpar animated shows being present at the time as well. However, beginning in the late 2010s, many of the animated films of the era began to get more positive revisits, with many acknowledging that while in several instances, the films were blatant remakes of classic series episodes, they did have their strengths such as strong soundtracks, genuinely compelling new characters, and the performance of the cast, helped by the fact that several of the more classic actors like Casey Kasem had some of their last roles in the franchise in the films, in addition to the fact that the old Scooby formula was still there and used consistently. They became especially more accepted as good given to more poorer developments in the 2020s, such as the heavily condemned Velma series, which not only did not have Scooby in it, but reduced the gang to a severe case of Flanderization and often making it a shallow parody of the franchise. As a result of all these factors, many of the films of the early 2000s to the mid 2010s are seen in a much better light than when they were first released.
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