YMMV / Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Cracked makes an interesting argument highlighting some Fridge Horror about the Scooby-Doo universe. Namely between the sheer number of abandoned areas and the fact that many of the criminals Mystery Inc., encounter are highly-skilled yet desperate for money, it carries the implication that the economy in the country has completely collapsed.
  • During 2015, it became very popular to interpret the gang from the original 1969 series as being draft-dodgers who were attempting to get to Canada.
  • For some reason a lot of fans seem to think that Shaggy is a Manchurian Agent and that Scooby (as well as the entire Doo family) are the result of illegal government experimentations to make hyper intelligent animal soldiers.
  • After the ending of Mystery Incorporated, we're lead to believe that the events of the show are actually a Stealth Prequel to Where Are You!, as Mystery Incorporated ends with the gang going on a road trip to college and being urged to continue their adventures, though this contradicts how several villains they faced during Where Are You? are mentioned as already caught in Mystery Incorporated. Though to be fair, all of those cases are said to have been undone in the new timeline.
  • If this blog post is anything to go by, there is interpretation that Fu Lan Chi from "That's Snow Ghost" may be insane and the Yeti he allegedly encountered was a hallucination. The fact that he claimed to meet the Yeti's "ghost" after the encounter seems to suggest this.
  • Speaking of the Yeti (assuming if it was real), did it really come back as a ghost after it fell to its death? Or did it survive the fall and then go after Fu Lan Chi who mistook it for its ghost. Or was the "ghost" really just another Yeti that looked identical? The fact that there really is no difference between the living Yeti and its "ghost" seems to suggest the last two.
  • Another interpretation of the Snow Ghost is that when he actually flies, something that can't be done with transparent skis, that this was the actual Snow Ghost searching for Fu Lan Chi while for the remainder of the episode it is Greenway disguised as him.
• Angst? What Angst?: No matter how scary their mysteries get, the gang never suffer any sort of trauma.
• Awesome Art: Limited Animation aside, there's no denying the artists of the series went all out with the visuals (especially considering it's Hanna-Barbera!). Especially when it came to their backgrounds and character designs.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The ham sandwich scene from "Hassle in the Castle" is among the most perfect examples of this trope ever.
• Common Knowledge: After the Gang unmasks the criminal and explains how they solved the mystery, the criminal ALWAYS says "And I would've gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids and your pesky dog!" This line has been used in many Scooby Doo parodies and even in later installments of the Scooby Doo franchise itself. But in the original series, this phrase was never used verbatim (but paraphrased a few times). In addition, there are a number of instances where the criminals don't say anything after getting caught.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Creeper is, far and away, the most popular and iconic Monster of the Week ever to be featured on this show. Notably, he's one of the few characters on the original show outside of the main Mystery Inc. gang to become a well-remembered character in his own right, and was even popular enough that his daughter became a featured villain in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (which aired four decades after the Creeper's only episode). Except she's not really his daughter.
  • The ghost of Captain Cutler is easily one of the most popular and iconic Monsters of the Week in the entire franchise. This is probably due to Cutler having a really cool and striking design of wearing a glowing, green diving suit with seaweed coverings. He's so popular that he has several returns in the franchise, appearing as a boss in both Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights and Scooby-Doo! Unmasked. He's an antagonist in the second live action film, Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed, and serves as a cameo villain in both SCOOB! and Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins. He was even a full-on recurring villain in Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! , which was over four decades after his initial appearance, showing the longevity of his popularity.
  • And then there's the Space Kook, for his design and laugh.
  • The Puppet Master as well, for being one of the scariest monsters encountered by the gang.
  • The Ghost Clown is also a favorite, being especially devious and actually attempting to kill some of the gang, checking off the right boxes of a Monster Clown.
• First Installment Wins: Among all the Scooby-Doo shows Hanna-Barbera produced before Warner Bros. bought the studio, this remains the most fondly-remembered.
• Franchise Original Sin: Scooby-Doo facing real monsters is usually an argument for where Scooby stopped working for some fans, but examples of this crept in even to the original series, albeit in a less overt way.
  • In "Foul Play in Funland", the villain is a real robot gone haywire, and the mystery is finding out who is responsible for the reprogramming. The franchise would later feature more. However, robots were known to be within the realm of possibility even in 1969.
  • At the end of "A Night of Fright Is No Delight", a bone on a platter mysteriously floats out to Scooby with no explanation. Again, plenty more real ghosts would later enter the franchise. But since this isn't part of the solution to the mystery, it's not as much of a "betrayal" of the series' original premise as later examples.
  • And while not as concrete, in "That's Snow Ghost", we see via flashback a character dealing with a real yeti. It looks very much like the Snow Ghost, but of course this flashback took place years before the Snow Ghost the gang was currently investigating ever designed a costume. However, the story is related to the gang secondhand, there's no objective proof that the encounter actually occurred (at least in the way it was related), and the yeti's resemblance to the Snow Ghost could just be a product of the gang's imagination.
• Genius Bonus: The villain in "Decoy for a Dognapper" chewing his lackey out for grabbing Scooby works even if you assume he just saw that Scooby wasn't the show dog they were targeting. However, it works even better if you realize Scooby's character is the complete antithesis of the ideal Great Dane.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The eerie aesthetic of a skeleton in an astronaut's suit didn't start with Scooby, but Spooky Space Kook is one of the best-known instances of such a combination, which is likely why the Space Kook often gets comparisons to similar creatures that came later, like the Vashta Nerada.
  • Frank Welker voices Fred Jones, a guy who busts people pretending to be ghosts. Twenty years later, he would voice Ray Stantz, someone who busts real ghosts.
• Ho Yay: From "Jeepers, It's the Creeper": At the school's barn dance, Shaggy is dancing with Velma when Scooby enters and asks Shaggy to let him cut in. To Velma's shock and disappointment, Scooby goes off dancing with Shaggy.
  Velma: Well, I've been a wallflower before, but this is ridiculous!
• Magnificent Bastard: "Hassle in the Castle": Bluestone the Great is an ex-magician criminal wanted in six states, and one of the gang's more affable foes. Seeking the treasure of Vasques hidden in his old castle, he disguises himself as "the Phantom" and uses his magic tricks to scare away visitors so that he could take the treasure for himself. When The Mystery Gang investigate, he easily fools the gang with his deceptions and traps, while also showing more theatrical flair than their average adversary. Eventually foiled thanks to Scooby, he takes his capture in stride, happily showcasing the one trick they couldn't figure out and allowing himself to be taken in.
• Mandela Effect: Many fans remember Shaggy as having a prominent Adam's apple drawn on his throat. He doesn't.
• Memetic Loser: Carl the Stuntman for how despite being a muscular stuntman, he was able to be intimidated by Scooby Doo himself despite going toe-to-toe with him earlier and couldn't stop himself from falling down a staircase despite being a stuntman and crying for help in his own voice when he did. His infamous defeat of having his picture taken without his mask on and childish motive throwing his career away in the process makes him look absolutely pathetic.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Some of the things pulled by the villains of various episodes—the Ghost Clown trying to feed Shaggy to a lion; the Snow Ghost trying to saw Velma in half and then sending dynamite after her and Scooby; the ghost of Captain Cutler locking Fred, Daphne, and Velma in an underwater room, etc. Not to mention the kidnappings that were more prevalent. This gives Shaggy and Scooby a reason for their Lovable Coward moments, because there's an element of real danger despite the ghosts being fake.
  • The Ghost of Mr. Hyde is perhaps the most guilty of this. While little more than a jewel thief, his actions against Mystery Inc. are uniquely vicious, ranging from ambushing them inside the Mystery Machine to framing an innocent woman to finally threatening to kill Shaggy when he accidentally finds a clue.
• Nightmare Retardant: The Phantom of Haunted Isle looks like a cheap Bedsheet Ghost, especially when compared to the other, more threatening-looking villains in the series. His laugh, on the other hand...
• Values Dissonance: While generally harmless in its plotting, and surprisingly ahead of its time in giving girls an equal(ish) role in adventuring and mystery-solving, the series really shows its age when the Mystery of the Day involves a "foreign" or "ethnic" menace. The three worst offenders are probably all the psuedo-Fu Manchu shenanigans in "Mystery Mask Mix-Up", the Hawaiian witch-doctor in "A Tiki Scare Is No Fair", and the Native American witch-doctor in "Decoy for a Dognapper".^note A glimpse of the last one appears in the first season's opening, so the CGI recreation of that sequence featured in SCOOB! replaced it with the non-offensive (and better remembered) Space Kook.

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