Saturday, July 13, 2024

Scrappy-Doo - menace or misunderstood?

 I am quite surprised at the love and acceptance for Scrappy. I can only assume that these viewers started with the series at Scooby-Doo and Scrappy Doo or later. For me and my friends, who started with the New Scooby movies, the reruns of Scooby-Doo, Where are You? and then the Scooby-Doo/Dyno-Mutt Hour and then Laff-a-Lympics, we were already fond of the standard formula.


The change in Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, both in replacing the main 'normal' characters characters of Fred, Daphne, and Velma with Scrappy, as well as crossing into actual supernatural villains was a bit jarring. Even bringing back Daphne in later seasons didn't help. While we loved Daphne at the time, we didn't realize we needed Velma's competency for success.

Scrappy was loud, brash, over confident, unrealistic in his abilities, and a bully. He was like the friend you have who gets you into fights because he couldn't keep his mouth shut when in dicey situations. He was the friend who 'helped' build a deck on improper footings, or took out a load-bearing wall, while assuring you that he knew what he doing.
Flim-Flam compounded this with many similar traits in The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo.

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