This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Fast Eddie: Discussion removed from entry...
- Doesn't this occur earlier in the Hound of the Baskervilles and in a few other Sherlock Holmes stories?
Paul A: And the answer is... I can't remember. But I don't think so. There are several Sherlock Holmes stories with fraudulent supernatural events, or events that are spontaneously misinterpreted as supernatural, but a quick mental rummage doesn't come up with any that are specifically Scooby Doo Hoaxes. (The Hound of the Baskervilles, for instance, wasn't about chasing people away so the villains could get on with their real plot in peace; getting rid of Sir Henry Baskerville is the real plot.)
I'm not positive, but I don't think there was EVER a real monster in Scooby Doo before the direct-to-video movies in the 90s. It was sort of the point of the show. To avoid scaring the kids by showing them there are no REAL monsters. 90s kids were a bit more jaded.
Ununnilium: No, there were. In fact, the same Retool of the series that introduced Scrappy brought real monsters in 1979; indeed, they've been more common than not.
Daibhid C: When I was a kid (mid-80s) we always knew that if the whole gang was there (with or without Scrappy), it'd be a man in a suit, and the episode would be about them proving it. If it was just Shaggy, Scooby and Scrappy, it'd be a real monster and the episode would be about them running away in humorous ways (and Scrappy trying to fight it). I used to imagine them trying to tell Velma about this: "Are you sure it wasn't just a smuggler in a mask?"
Dark Storm: The monster was indeed real in exactly one episode of the original series: "Foul Play in Funland", in which Charlie The Robot, supposedly a malfunctioning robot who was running amuck in an abandoned amusement park, turned out to actually be a malfunctioning robot. (According to Wikipedia, this is the eighth episode of the first season of the original series. But, of course, at that early stage, they hadn't quite gotten the formula down yet)
Man Called True: Removing Goosebumps from the list, because not a single one of the books I can remember off the top of my head uses the trope. And I have a depressingly wide memory of them.
Ununnilium: Yeah; most of the Goosebumps books had flat-out supernatural stuff going on.
movie007: Maybe the person who added Goosebumps got them confused with Fear Street. As far as I recall, every Goosebumps book had something supernatural in it. Some of the Fear Street books didn't, though - which can be a let down to people who read books specifically because of the supernatural element.
Removing this Batman example because it's gibberish. Can anyone figure out what this person was trying to say? "
- Certain incarnations of Batman do this with a twist: We all know that Batman is a guy in a mask, but bystanders (often times crooks) who believe that the knew masked vigilante of Gotham is a myth or a guy in a mask are chided or a chiding a more sympathetic villain who believe Bats is some Bat deamon or something like that guy in Metropolis. Than Batman shows up and "proves" the skeptic wrong."
If I may be so bold as to take a stab at it: Batman uses the trope to be effective crimefighter, some crooks see through it, some don't and then Batman arrives and convinces everybody that he isn't in fact using this trope, he really is a demon ... uhhh... *POP!*
