alt title(s): Scooby-Doo
Scooby-doo! Where are you?
Popular
Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1970s (but with episodes still being made today) featuring four teenagers (Fred, Velma, Daphne and Shaggy) and their talking dog Scooby-Doo (a classic
Speech Impaired Animal) in a
van called the Mystery Machine. Each episode they'd encounter a mystery which would be resolved at the end by unmasking a villain, who would inevitably utter "I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for
You Meddling Kids." Also full of drug references (What the hell do they put in those
Scooby Snacks, anyways?).
Since the 1970s there have been many incarnations, including several direct-to-video movies, a series with real ghosts called
The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo and a series with prepubescent versions of the cast. One such incarnation added Scooby's nephew Scrappy Doo (a classic
Talking Animal) to the cast, which was when the franchise as a whole is considered by some to have
Jumped The Shark. After that point the show frequently operated with just Shaggy, Scooby and Scrappy. Daphne often came along for the ride.
"Scooby Doo" is so thoroughly embedded in American popular culture that the ad-hoc vampire-hunting team that formed around Buffy Summers in
Buffy The Vampire Slayer called themselves "The Scooby Gang". (The
Scooby Doo kids never refer to themselves as such; their name in the pilot script is "Mystery, Inc." It has also become Cockney Rhyming Slang for "clue" (as in "Haven't a Scooby", mate)
Recently made into a pair of live-action movies, with a third planned (starring Sarah Michelle Gellar of
Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame as Daphne and her husband Freddy Prinze Jr. as Fred). These were loaded with
continuity nods, and
lampshade hung the show's own cliches.
In 2005, the show beat
The Simpsons for most episodes produced of an American cartoon.
The most recent incarnations are "What's New Scooby-Doo" (A modernised return to the mystery format) and "Shaggy And Scooby Get A Clue" (which is much flatter animation-wise and rather weird, featuring nanotech Scooby snacks and a
message from Fred (no relation) in the title).
Frequent Scooby Tropes:
- A lot of running past a Wraparound Background.
- Velma losing her glasses. (She's Blind Without Em)
- Catchphrases — i.e. "Zoinks!" for Shaggy, "Jinkies!" for Velma, "Jeepers" for Daphne. Scrappy had two: "Let me at 'em, Let me at 'em!" and "Da-da-da-da-da-da, Puppy Power!". Not to forget the infamous "Lets split up, Gang!" for Freddy, and of course Scooby's Scooby Dooby Doo!
- A Pup Named Scooby-Doo mercilessly lampooned and lampshaded these. And invented several new ones. And then lampooned and lampshaded those.
- Shaggy and Scooby consuming very large sandwiches.
- Scrappy's attempts to use physical violence against the "ghost", almost always stopped by Scooby grabbing him by the scruff of the neck.
- Daphne getting abducted and tied up.
- Scooby Doo Hoax — although a few later movie-length episodes (and Thirteen Ghosts) had the ghosts turning out to be real.
- As well as the first season episode Foul Play in Funland.
- Scooby and Shaggy dressing up in costumes and making a short skit to confuse the chasing monster.
- A convoluted plan to catch the villain that never goes as planned.
- There is a claim (it may well be an urban legend, but it worked on one test by Silent Hunter) that the first character you see apart from the gang will be the villain.
- At least in the original series, This Troper hasn't seen a single episode that this didn't work out to be true.
- Well, you generally see the Monster Of The Week first, so... But if you look at the first unmasked person seen, it doesn't fly in at least the following episodes: A Clue for Scooby-Doo, Mine Your Own Business, Never Ape an Ape Man and Bedlam in the Big Top. And in What a Night for a Knight, the first person seen is professor Hyde White (driving the truck) even before the monster appears. He's not the villain ( it's the curator of the museum) and the gang spends the rest of the episode looking for him. However, there are plenty of episodes in which this is entirely true.
- Scooby Snacks
This show provides examples of:
- Affectionate Parody (Night of the Living Doo
, which aired on Halloween in 2001)
- Big Eater
- Big Friendly Dog (Scooby is a full-grown Great Dane and has never been vicious to anything, ever. Unless you count sandwiches.)
- The Blank ("The No-Face Zombie Chase Case")
- Blind Without Em
- By The Lights Of Their Eyes
- Cartoon Crossovers (There was one episode which they crossed over with Batman, and another with Josie And The Pussycats. Also, the characters have appeared on Johnny Bravo and Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law.)
- Catch Phrase
- Conspicuously Light Patch (When the spot on the floor that the gang is standing on suddenly turns a lighter color, you know that they're about to fall down a trapdoor.)
- Convection Schmonvection (In "Aloha, Scooby Doo", and probably others)
- Conveyor Belt O Doom
- Cousin Oliver: Scrappy Doo and Flim Flam
- Darkerand Edgier: Scooby Doo on Zombie Island and Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost are the darkest of the animated films
- Dawson Casting: (Is this troper the only one who doesn't think they look like teenagers?)
- Deadline News: In the second live-action movie.
- Does This Remind You Of Anything (Shaggy and Scooby seem to constantly have the "munchies").
- The Drag Along: Scooby and Shaggy, sometimes literally kicking and screaming
- Everybody Laughs Ending: "Scooby-dooby-Doo!" (cue group laughter)
- Family Unfriendly Death: The death of the cat people in Scooby Doo on Zombie Island goes straight into Nightmare Fuel.
- G Rated Drug: Scooby Snacks.
- Five Man Band
- Follow The Leader (quite a few shows ripped this off)
- Fridge Logic (Why haven't they caught on that it's always Old Man Jenkins in a Rubber Suit?)
- The movies did address that.
- Just in time for that not to be the case.
- He Went That Way
- Hippie Speak (Shaggy)
- Hurricane Of Puns (The made-for-TV movies had more than enough of monster puns.)
- Just Ignore It
- Lighthouse Point
- Limited Animation (was infamous for it)
- Limited Wardrobe
- Live Action Adaptation
- Magic From Technology
- Mobile Shrubbery
- Monster Clown - Quite a lot of these.
- Monster Of The Week
- Monster Mash (In a few of the movies)
- Nightmare Fuel
- No Fourth Wall (in A Pup Named Scooby Doo)
- Occult Detective (Though the occult almost always turns out to be someone in a Halloween costume)
- On One Condition
- Outdated Outfit (The gang's original outfit usually get copied, but a few adaptations give them fashion makeovers)
- Paranormal Investigation
- Popularity Polynomial
- Real After All (Something of a tradition in the movies.)
- Reckless Sidekick (Scrappy Doo)
- Red Herring ("I didn't do it!")
- 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)
- Reverse Psychology
- Road Sign Reversal
- Robot Maid (Robot Butler in this case. Robi in Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue.)
- Scooby Dooby Doors (The Trope Namer.)
- Scooby Doo Hoax (Again, the Trope Namer.)
- Scooby Snacks (Yet again, the Trope Namer.)
- Ship Tease: Between Fred and Daphne, so, so, so, so much.
- The Scrappy (Need I say it? also an example of a Leeroy Jenkins)
- Self Offense
- Shaggy Search Technique (Take a wild guess.)
- Speech Impaired Animal
- Spinoff Babies A Pup Named Scooby Doo although they are not babies they are ten year olds.
- Standardized Leader (Freddy)
- Syndication Title
- Talking Animal
- Tasty Gold
- Theres No B In Movie
- Thirteen Is Unlucky (The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo)
- Totally Radical (Found in the Live Action movie. It's also sadly found in the made-for-TV movies.)
- Twist Ending
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee
- Video Wills
- Who Would Want To Watch Us (In one of the made-for-TV movies, the newly-redrawn cast mocks their original appearances in a video game based on them.)
- Witch Species
- Wonderful Life
- Wraparound Background
- You Meddling Kids (sigh...}
