Scooby Doo

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This is a /co/ related article, which we allow because we find it interesting or we can't be bothered to delete it.

Scooby-Doo is a long, long running franchise of cartoons created by Hanna-Barbera revolving around a gang of teens (and their unusually intelligent if cowardly pet Great Dane) solving mysteries in the form of faked hauntings, monsters and other paranormal phenomena. In some iterations of the setting, it may be their (self-appointed) job to investigate these mysteries, whilst in others they just have really, really rotten luck and keep stumbling across loonies pulling the same basic stunt.

The Cast

The core of the Scooby Doo franchise are "Mystery Incorporated"; four teens/young adults and one unusually smart dog.

Fred Rogers is the ostensible leader of the team. He's decently smart, and something of a mechanical whiz, as he's always the one who invents the various traps they use to try and apprehend the monster.

Daphne Blake is... uh, well, she's the chick of the group, basically. She basically doesn't have much of a role outside of being the usual damsel in distress, though her clumsiness and weirdly high Luck stat means she often unearths vital clues to solving the mystery, usually by tripping lover them or bumping into them.

Velma Dinkley is the brains of the team, often being the one to deduce who the culprit was before the final unmasking and figure out their plot. It depends a little on the series; she's prone to sharing this role with Fred in the original series.

Norville "Shaggy" Rogers is a cowardly glutton who kind of shares Daphne's spotlight as "the guy with really mixed Luck"; he's usually the one who keeps getting chased by the latest nasty, though he always manages to come out unscathed in the end. Often suspected of being a stoner. Fun fact; the really bizarre food concoctions he was prone to eating in the original series came about after his vegetarian voice actor managed to get Hanna-Barbera to agree to make Shaggy a vegetarian too.

Scooby Doo is Shaggy's pet Great Dane, and basically a chip off the old block. He's basically a clone of Shaggy in canine form.

And then... there's the Other One. The one we don't like to talk about. The one, the only, Scrappy Doo. Scooby's nephew, and widely regarded as the single worst thing to ever happen to the franchise (until the 2023 atrocity that was the Velma show, that is). He's so hated that the name that TVTropes came up with for "That character that the vast majority of the fandom seems to hate" is "The Scrappy".

The Series

There have been a lot of cartoons and movies in this franchise.

Monsters: Always Fake?

Everybody knows that the monsters in Scooby-Doo are always fakes; weirdoes dressing up in costumes to fake hauntings for various elaborate schemes. Which makes it all the more surprising for many to hear that there have been real monsters in the Scooby Doo franchise.

The most well-known is the animated film "Scooby Doo on Zombie Island", which features werecat witches and the ghosts of their victims, who reanimate as the titular zombies to try and scare off potential victims. This is generally considered the gold standard for Scooby Doo as a whole, and real monster Scooby Doo in particular.

Most of the other appearances of real monsters have been in movies, such as the Shaggy/Scooby/Scrappy era-set "Scooby Doo and the Ghoul School", where Shaggy and Scooby end up unwittingly becoming teachers at a girl's boarding school exclusively for female monsters. But there's also a series that uses this premise; the short-lived "Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo", which is about Shaggy, Scooby, Scrappy and Daphne teaming up with new human kid sidekick Flim-Flam to track down and seal away thirteen ghosts that Scooby and Shaggy accidentally released from a magic box.

/tg/ Relevance

You wouldn't think this show is all that /tg/ relevant, but you'd be surprised.

Firstly, this is actually a decent reference show for a lot of Urban Fantasy games; if you want to run a game about paranormal investigators, like Dark*Matter or World of Darkness, you could do worse than watching some Scooby Doo for ghoulies and plots. Yes, the base material is aimed towards comedy and fake monsters, but you can easily grimdark it up to suit your tastes.

Secondly, there are a ridiculous amount of monsters in the Scooby Doo menagerie, and even if they are always fakes by default, it shouldn't be that hard to watch an episode and come up with a way to take the episode's monster and twist it for use in your own game. The Spooky Space Kook, an alien ghost piloting the spaceship equivalent of a ghost ship, could easily be reworked into a horror for Spelljammer or even one of the Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, for example.