Today, we’ll be taking a look at a character who’s had one of the most fascinating rides through the public consciousness, the little cartoon dog known as Scrappy Doo. I assume I don’t have to explain the basics of the Scooby Doo franchise, seeing as it’s one of the biggest cartoons ever and passively enjoying it came free with your being born in North America. But just in case, four teens and their talking dog drive around in a van solving mysteries that usually involve some very skillful idiot dressing up like a ghost. That’s kind of all you need to know about the premise. What you do need to know about its history is that while it’s a juggernaut of animation today with some fifteen different incarnations and nearly fifty films since its premiere in September 1969, it had a bit of a rocky transition after the original show. See, it sounds insane to suggest that this show that is constantly producing new media today wasn’t instantly popular when it aired, and that’s because it was very popular when it aired. However, not only was it a very formulaic show, but it had many, many imitators.

This image doesn’t even depict half the clone series Scooby’s own producers, Hanna-Barbera, created in the years that followed the original show’s success. Inevitably, the quality of a show only matters so much when the market is saturated with duplicates and the original is strictly formula outside of the odd TV special. As a result of all this, as well as declining production quality in the later episodes, ratings for the show’s third incarnation declined to the point that permanent cancellation was on the table. So the showrunners did what every television series does when ratings are looking rough and they need a way to save the show: they introduced a new child character for the sake of it. We’ve all seen a show try this before, and we all know that the random child introduced to the main cast usually means this will be the last season. I imagine that’s about what people expected when the new season began and the first thing they saw out of the theme song was…

Except, that isn’t what happened here. Scrappy was a hit. He’s remembered today as being annoying and useless, but that doesn’t really line up with the reality of it. I’ll be the first to admit that he was too high-energy for his own good, but kids in the 80s loved this puppy. His current reputation makes it insane to think about, but this character actually saved a failing show and helped it become the multimedia franchise we know today Feel free to dig up the sheer amount of merchandise featuring him at the time if you don’t believe me.

So the question then becomes, what happened? If Scrappy saved the series, why is he remembered so poorly that he was made into the antagonist of the live action movie, and TVTropes even uses him to indicate poorly received characters. Well, to understand that, we have to consider the series as a whole during the 80s, and the many strange decisions made during the Scrappy era. I also apologize in advance for the fact that these shows had an unnecessarily confusing naming scheme. Scrappy’s 80s appearances, ignoring films for a moment, consisted of:

• Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo, effectively a season of normal Scooby Doo except also Scrappy is there.
• The Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo Show, three seasons of 7-minute shorts that removed half the cast altogether.
• The New Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo Show, which transitioned into pairs of eleven-minute episodes and brought Daphne back.
• The New Scooby Doo Mysteries, literally the previous show following a rebranding.
• The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo, a one-season show dealing with real monsters instead of the usual hoaxes. Also returned to the usual half-hour format.

Following these shows, the next series reimagined the gang as children, and as Scooby’s young nephew, Scrappy was excluded because it made no chronological sense for him to exist. Even if you never watched any of the shows I just listed off, you might immediately notice a very distinct problem with all of them. Every show I just listed had a format shift. In the course of seven years, the show changed format, structure, episode length, and main cast no less than four times. To call it a tumultuous era for the people making the show would be an understatement. Scrappy’s initial season was a big success, and it’s difficult to say exactly why. The new character did breathe life into the show and shook up the formula and character dynamics by giving the gang a much more aggressive member who was just as likely to make a breakthrough as he was to dunk himself into hot water, but Scrappy’s debut also coincided with improved production values and the end of most of the knockoff series surrounding Scooby Doo. I’m crediting the character because he was a big hit with children, but it would be unfair to ignore the shifting market in 1980. What was certain was that the producers attributed the drastically improved ratings to the new character. And that led to them doing what every studio does when they perceive an element of their work that audiences latch onto: they made it all about that element.

The immediate next season saw Fred, Daphne, and Velma wholly removed from the series. Choosing to focus on just Shaggy and his dogs, The Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo show reduced itself to trios of short, seven-minute episodes that were usually just extended chase sequences with a bit of setup. I find these seasons mind numbing and will react violently any time I hear its signature chase music, so I can very much understand if the hatred of Scrappy starts here. From a viewer’s perspective, he just replaced three characters, and the show’s format fell apart into something rather mindless shortly after his debut. Oddly though, I think he’s the best part of these seasons. Shaggy and Scooby are aggressively out of character in these shorts, largely to keep forcing random chases to occur, and Scrappy is left as the loosely levelheaded one who resolves these plots. It’s not a great look in general, but it’s more a series that reeks of bad writing and studio mandates than one where the character is eclipsing the show. You can also tell it wasn’t loved at the time, because they backpedaled on these decisions in the next incarnation. The next show saw Daphne’s return (and her theft of Velma’s braincells) so that the show could shift back into mystery solving, even if the episodes were ultimately too short for them to build up much of anything and occasionally dipped further into the supernatural than fans actually wanted. I don’t love this era of the show, but I would say this is where Scrappy is at his best, as he mellows out considerably here and pairs off with Daphne to form a competent detective duo when the characters split up, loosely recreating the original show’s formula of “Scooby and Shaggy goof off and meet the monster while the others solve the mystery.” Then came 13 Ghosts and I feel like nobody really minds Scrappy there. It might be because he’s given less screentime, it might be because he actually has a dedicated character to pair off with as a comedic duo, it might be because everybody hated said dedicated character even more, or it might just be because 13 Ghosts is such a fever dream of a series that almost no one even has an opinion on it.

There were also three movies featuring the Scooby/Shaggy/Scrappy trio (+ one-off supporting characters) and these tend to be much better remembered than the series they aired alongside. Scrappy sees proper use as a real asset to the team who is both actually funny and much mellower than he was in his early appearances, and I think the general consensus, even amongst those who despise the puppy, is that he’s likable in these. Either way, the character made an impression that he couldn’t quite shake. Cartoonnetwork bumpers in the 90s featured all their characters interacting in various ways, and on the rare occasions where Scrappy appeared in them, he was generally the butt of the joke and treated as though distaste for the character was the norm. The best conclusion I can come to is that while his debut was well-liked, the changes to the show surrounding him resulted in an association that he couldn’t shake. Scrappy was a decent enough character, as an abandoned kid who was trying much too hard because he was terrified of being sent back the pound if he wasn’t useful enough to his new family, and who grew into an actually competent member of the team with each new incarnation of the series. Unfortunately, he would be eternally remembered as the character who replaced half the cast and dragged the show into a bunch of ill-fitting formats to produce the worst era in the franchise’s history (ignoring a certain current HBO series). That isn’t the character’s fault, but the association stuck, and it would reach its natural conclusion when the 2002 live action movie cast him as the villain, and James Gunn got to publicly execute a character he disliked throughout cinemas nationwide. While writing him hopelessly out of character, I might add. Seriously hearing him say Scooby instead of Uncle Scooby alone is enough to establish that something is horribly off, never mind that they couldn’t be bothered to see if he was wearing the right collar in flashbacks. Since then, Scrappy’s been a punchline that never appears and is only mentioned when it’s to make fun of him. With one exception.

Scooby Doo Apocalypse was a comic series running from 2016 to 2019, focusing on a reimagined version of the cast surviving in a world where an artificial plague mutated most of humanity into monsters. I read it out of sheer curiosity and it was bad. It started off strong, but frankly they didn’t know where they were going with it and the whole thing devolved into a boring Walking Dead parody. However, it also brought back Scrappy as a central character, even reworking his monstrous form from the live action film into his mutated design. And he was far and away the best character in the whole thing. In an otherwise unimpressive comic, they made Scrappy into a self-aware snarker and mutant pack leader torn between a hatred for the world stemming from his being a punchline for years, and his inherent desire to just make kids happy as a cartoon mascot. They play this shockingly well and have him go from a side antagonist to a part of the team, even becoming Daphne’s dog once again like he was in the late 80s. It’s far from the direction I would have imagined, and it’s a shame you have to read Scooby Doo Apocalypse to see it, but this feels like proof of concept that Scrappy is a salvageable character. He almost made the series worth reading by himself, and made me believe that a writer putting a little care into the character could resurrect him in a way that people could enjoy. While he’s never been a favorite, I think Scrappy’s always been a fine character who was made into an abomination by the pop culture zeitgeist built around hating him. With Scooby constantly reinventing itself, and still making regular new content today, maybe it’s time we gave the old pup one more chance to redeem himself and be in a normal series for once in his life. It certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing the franchise has been involved in as of late.