Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo (1980)
First episode title: A Close Encounter With a Strange Kind / A Fit Night Out for Bats / The Chinese Food Factory
How familiar with the show am I?: I watched this show as a kid. And of course, I know of other versions of Scooby-Doo!
Is this the first episode?: Some sources (e.g. IMDb) count the 1979 version of Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo as the same TV show as the 1980 version, whereas Wikipedia counts them separately. It looks to me like there are enough differences to count this as a separate show. Plus, I wouldn't get to cover it otherwise!
I'm sure I don't need to explain what Scooby-Doo is, so let's start with what distinguishes this version of the show. The previous series had introduced Scooby's nephew Scrappy-Doo, but this one made a lot more changes: the format changed from full half-hour episodes to three shorts per episode; Fred, Daphne, and Velma were dropped; and a lot more actual supernatural villains were used in place of the typical humans in costumes. Oh, and 1980 is also the point at which Hanna-Barbera stopped putting laugh tracks in animated shows, so there's none of that in this series.
For some reason, people hate Scrappy. After having watched this episode, I don't agree with those people.
I must have watched this show so much as a kid - the intro is extremely familiar. It does make it clear that this is a version with actual supernatural villains, as they defeat a mummy by unravelling its bandages and there's no-one inside, and stuff like that.
As mentioned, this show is in a Three Shorts format, so here's the first one: "A Close Encounter With a Strange Kind", which begins with a forest at night, a full moon, and a flying saucer whizzing through the air. But forget about that last part for a second.
Scooby-Doo (the big dog), Scrappy-Doo (the little dog), and Shaggy (the human man) are gathered around a camp fire, toasting marshmallows. Scooby pinches the marshmallows straight from the fire, but they're too hot so he juggles them for a bit. Then, when Shaggy asks where they went, he tries to hide them and inadvertently passes them to Scrappy, who eats them, seemingly not realising they weren't intended for him. Scooby and Shaggy are usually the ones who like to eat lots of food - I don't think Scrappy would knowingly eat food that wasn't meant for him.
Hey, anyone else hate how similar all these names are?
Then they're all getting into their sleeping bags for the night. Scrappy tells the other two to sleep and he'll keep watch, and then he immediately falls to sleep. People often make something of the fact that Scooby's speech impediment (replacing many consonants with Rs) seems weird once Scrappy gets introduced because he talks normally. But it's noticeable here that Scrappy does have a slight speech impediment, of the child-like sort where some Rs and Ls sound a bit like Ws. It's not the full Elmer Fudd but it's there.
Meanwhile, the spaceship lands, and out come two aliens, of the "little green men" variety. How many shows is that now where we've had aliens in the first episode of a show that isn't usually about aliens? It happened in The New Archies, Dumb Bunnies, and the Dirty Dawg segment of The Kwicky Koala Show, the latter of which even had another title based on the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"! I'm not sure if I can count Super Friends since that undeniably is usually about aliens, but I want to refer back to that article anyway since I mentioned there that Casey Kasem is best known as Shaggy, so now it's like we're fulfilling a prophecy by hearing him perform that role here!
The aliens identify the trio as "three Earthmen" - hmm, not quite - and choose which one to abduct through the "scientific" method of "My mother told me", another real-life decision-making poem like Hip Dip Dip! They select Shaggy and carry him off in his sleeping bag, but Scooby wakes up and sees what's happening - he wakes up Scrappy, who starts off mumbling about marshmallows until he wakes up properly. It's actually pretty cute. The two dogs rush up to the spaceship and inadvertently end up being moved inside when the exit door-ramp-thing closes up.
They end up in a spaceship corridor which couldn't any more obviously be set up in the Scooby-Dooby Doors layout, hinting at what's to come later. The aliens strap Shaggy (still in sleeping bag) to a slab somewhere on the ship in preparation for take-off, and then they leave, just before Scooby and Scrappy go into that same room and see Shaggy. Scooby unstraps him as Scrappy says he hopes he's as clever as Scooby when he grows up. Look, their relationship is adorable! I really don't understand the hate!
Unbeknownst to them, the spaceship takes off, and so they rush out of the doors only to end up doing the whole Looney Tunes "scramble back before gravity takes effect" thing but in space. I don't know if this is just meant to be regular cartoon physics or whether the lack of gravity in space is meant to be helping them, although I don't think space works that way.
Scrappy hasn't immediately realised why Scooby has rushed them back into the ship:
Scrappy: Hey! What's up, Uncle Scooby?
Scooby: We are!
Only then does he see that they're in space. OK, that's a bit stupid.
The aliens, at the ship's control panel, see that the door was opened and realise they have intruders, so they go to chase after them. There's a bit here where Scooby and Scrappy are carrying Shaggy, and Scrappy takes his hand off the sleeping bag for a moment while threatening the aliens, making it look like he was never actually helping to take the weight at all! Anyway, they're in the corridor from earlier, and now we get the Scooby-Dooby Doors moment of the aliens chasing the dogs around through all the doors in the scene:
In the confusion, the aliens somehow end up carrying Shaggy off. Scrappy, annoyed, calls the aliens "horse thieves" - Scooby is confused, as am I. The aliens put Shaggy back in the room he was in before and leave, and then Shaggy finally wakes up. But he can't get out of the sleeping bag for some reason, so he just starts hopping along in it. Maybe they strapped him too tightly before. And then when the aliens spot him and start chasing him, he can't stay upright while running and has to slither along like a snake instead. Just like Scooby and Scrappy earlier, he goes out of the front entrance without knowing he's in space and the gravity almost catches up to him, but Scooby and Scrappy dash out and bring him back inside. I do like how, if Shaggy is in danger, it overrides Scooby's usual cowardice and he will rush to save him.
Once they're back inside, the aliens grab Shaggy again and the dogs chase after them, but they end up in the control room instead, and Scooby, crashing into the controls, starts making the spaceship fly all over the place and has to try and take control, with Scrappy cheering him on. At one point it flies past a constellation, and, from the look of it, it bursts one of the stars and water starts pouring out? I'm really not sure what that's meant to signify, even as a joke. Then the spaceship flies around a Saturn-like ringed planet and makes it start spinning and deforming, like it's made of Play-Doh. At least that one makes sense in cartoon logic.
Somehow he steers them back towards Earth in the end, right back to the forest they started in! Scooby and Scrappy rush out of the spaceship... carrying Shaggy? Wait, the aliens had him the last time we saw him! The aliens complain that they thought Earthmen would be friendly, implying they weren't abducting Shaggy for any evil purposes anyway, but that's hard to believe at this point. They fly off, and everyone else settles back down in their sleeping bags - Shaggy says he'll never be able to sleep after an experience like that, and Scrappy promises to keep watch like before, but both of them immediately fall asleep, and Scooby laughs and does his "Scooby-Dooby-Doooooo!" howl that he ends every episode on.
Second segment: "A Fit Night Out for Bats". Out in the middle of nowhere, it's raining, and Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy are stuck because their van (the Mystery Machine) has a flat tyre and they don't have a spare. Scrappy points out there's a house nearby, but it's a creepy old mansion and the other two are scared to go in - until a lightning bolt hits the ground right next to them and they run towards the house. Doesn't lightning normally hit things sticking up from the ground? They were lucky there!
Scrappy opens the door to go in, but he's only opened the bottom half of one of those segmented doors, so he can just walk in but the other two cartoonishly stretch as their top halves hit the closed doors and their bottom halves carry on moving. Then they both get tangled up in a curtain and roll down the hallway until they run into... let's be honest, a vampire. We don't have to pretend not to know this yet. The guy has pale skin and dark hair and a cape and fangs and everything.
Scooby and Shaggy are scared and Scrappy demands to know who he is, but once he introduces himself as Sylvester (in the sterotypical exaggerated vampire accent) and offers them food, they cheer right up! Once they've rushed into the kitchen to help themselves, Sylvester turns to the camera and makes it clear to us that he is in fact a vampire:
Sylvester: Ah! They're not the only ones interested in supper! I am too! Only of a different type! [turns into a bat] Hahahahaha! Hmm, I just hope they are my type! Type O! Blood, that is! Hahahahaha! I'm tired of tomato juice!
Well, no-one ever said vampires were subtle. I wondered why the name "Sylvester" at first, but it is etymologically related to the "sylva" in "Transylvania", so it is actually quite appropriate!
Following on from that little speech, we catch up with our heroes in the kitchen, where they're finding that there is a lot of tomato juice, but they also find some flour for doughnuts. The bat flies in (none of them know it's Sylvester of course), and, rather easily, Scrappy catches it in a chef hat and chucks it out the window, which he closes. Sylvester seems like quite a pathetic vampire so far...
Shaggy announces he's making "three king-size doughnuts", but once he's started cooking, the lights go out. Shaggy lets out a "Zoink" - yes, not "Zoinks" apparently, perhaps this was only worthy of a single zoink - and runs, crashing into Scooby, who he briefly struggles with until Scrappy opens a door and the two of them can see each other again. Scrappy says he's going to go and find the fusebox. This is the first time in this episode when he says his catchphrase:
Scrappy: Ta-da-da-ta ta-ta! Puppy power!
I learned something interesting about this phrase while preparing this post. Back in Saturday Supercade I noted that Donkey Kong Junior's "Monkey muscle!" catchphrase was an obvious rip-off of Scrappy-Doo. Well, Donkey Kong Junior was played by Frank Welker - Scooby-Doo fans would know him as the original Fred, and later as Scooby himself. Scrappy on the other hand was played by Lennie Weinrib when introduced, and by Don Messick (Scooby himself) in this series. However, Welker did actually audition for the part of Scrappy, and in his audition he improvised the "Puppy Power" catchphrase! The show's producers immediately knew they needed to keep the phrase - apparently Fred Flintstone's "Yabba-Dabba-Doo!" had a similar origin as a random improvisation by a voice actor, so there was precedent within Hanna-Barbera for that being a good idea - but they decided not to go with Welker for the actual role. So, when he got the job as Junior, he took the catchphrase's concept with him!
So next, Shaggy and Scooby are creeping through a corridor, looking for Scrappy. On the wall is a painting of a woman with flowers, and, as Shaggy and Scooby stop to look into another room, the painting moves aside and Sylvester leans out, trying to grab Scooby - Scooby inadvertently dodges the attack as he leans in to look into the room, and Sylvester quickly hides again. The "eyes" of the painting are presumably holes for Sylvester to look through, as, when Scooby turns to look at it, the woman winks at him! Again, Sylvester isn't doing very much to make me see him as a competent threat. Also, in a creepy vampire mansion like this, that painting really doesn't fit the décor!
Scrappy has discovered what he thinks is the fusebox. Shaggy and Scooby arrive, Scooby accidentally shoving Shaggy into what is actually clearly a coffin.
Scrappy: What's a coffin?
Shaggy: Well, for one thing, vampire-type kooks like to take naps in them!
Hey, Shaggy, why not explain what a coffin is actually for? Scrappy is relying on you here! Instead, he proceeds to give the general idea of what vampires do. They're allowed to say that vampires bite you and suck your blood, so is it that they can't specifically mention death or something like that?
The bat flies in, and they've worked out enough to identify it as a "vampire bat", but they still don't realise that it's Sylvester at this point, even though it has his laugh! Scrappy does his "puppy power" bit again here and tries to fight the bat, but Shaggy and Scooby flee and Scooby takes Scrappy with him. They slam the door behind them and Sylvester crashes into it, and he comments that he especially hates the little guy - hey, he got there before all the haters!
After some more chasing around corridors, with Scrappy spraying the bat with some bug spray, the trio encounter Sylvester in humanoid form again, still oblivious to what he is. They even tell him he should look out because there's a vampire about, but then he mockingly draws their attention to his lack of reflection in a nearby mirror, and they catch on and flee. They reach the kitchen, and see that the doughnuts they'd left cooking had grown as big as tyres. Remember, the whole reason they were stranded here was because they didn't have a spare tyre? In hindsight it's weird that they didn't immediately ask Sylvester if he had any spares, but I guess they were distracted by food. Anyway, they are finally able to drive away with a doughnut as a tyre, leaving Sylvester disappointed.
The third and final short is "The Chinese Food Factory". Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy are strolling around a Chinatown, city unspecified, where the buildings are decorated with what I'm pretty sure is not accurate Chinese writing. Of course, all they have on their mind is Chinese food. They are startled when they come face to face with a Chinese dragon, but, of course, it's just a parade. Chinese New Year, maybe?
Then they spot a "Chinese Food Factory" with an ad in the window for a nightwatchman job, that comes with all you can eat Chinese food! I hope that's not instead of getting any actual money. They go in and are apparently all hired on the spot, since we next see them patrolling inside, each wearing a security guard hat but no other sign of a uniform. And of course, now that they're actually walking around the dark empty factory, Shaggy and Scooby are both scared of the place.
They come across a fortune cookie making machine and Scrappy pulls the lever - worried about what might happen, Scooby rushes towards it, only to slip on a pallet and fall into the machine! A giant fortune cookie comes out of the other side, and a fortune slips out that says "RELP!" I have to admit I love those little jokes that reference the way Scooby speaks. Then, of course, Scooby himself bursts out of the cookie. All of a sudden we get a close up of someone wearing some kind of ogre mask - yes, there is still the occasional disguised villain in this version of the show! - but all he does is let out an evil laugh before we move on for now.
The trio reach the kitchen and are excited to get started on all they can eat. In their haste to rush to the food, Shaggy and Scooby's uniform hats go flying off their heads and land on Scrappy, and he actually continues to have three hats stacked on his head throughout the next couple of scenes!
The three start eating bowls of noodles. Scrappy thinks Scooby is very clever for knowing how to use chopsticks - I guess back then there was still a stereotype of them being some kind of impossible to use alien tool. Shaggy produces a long straw out of nowhere and slurps up all the soup from Scooby's bowl, apparently in an attempt to sneakily have more food, but like, isn't this meant to be all-you-can-eat? What does Shaggy gain out of that?
Then the lights go out - seems familiar - and Shaggy and Scooby encounter the ogre mask guy. They run away in fright, and Scrappy tries to burst a bag of rice to attack the villain, but he ends up bursting it under his own feet and one of his three hats falls down over his eyes, so he just ends up blindly slipping around on the rice, which is a pretty funny sequence of events in my opinion. At least until Scrappy calls it "rice skating".
They manage to hide from the ogre, who grabs a safe and starts running off with it, as his mask comes off and he laughs about how easy this robbery is. Shaggy and Scooby, despite it being their job to deal with a burglar, run off anyway, Scooby carrying Scrappy. They crash into some big hollow sculpture of a lion-like monster. The result: Shaggy and Scooby end up wearing the giant head of the statue together, making them look like a four-legged beast, and Scrappy finally loses the hats. Shaggy and Scooby inadvertently rush towards the burglar, who's scared of the "monster" and starts running.
Apparently realising what the monster is, the burglar, on reaching the kitchen again, pours out a big bowl of noodles in Shaggy and Scooby's path. In all the scenes with the noodles, they're just coloured pure white... they look so bland. Put some soy sauce or something on those! Shaggy and Scooby slip, their monster head comes off, and they get tangled in the noodles.
Burglar: So long, bunglers! This burglar's leaving!
For some reason he says "so long bunglers" like he's delivering the wittiest parting line ever. Scrappy grabs the noodle from around Shaggy and Scooby, making them spin like a top, and uses it as a lasso to grab the villain and the safe. This is a tough noodle! The trio reel in the burglar and make some jokes about how Shaggy and Scooby really did "dive in" to some Chinese food.
Finally, Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy are sitting down in a Chinese restaurant for another feast, and a restaurateur with a very stereotypical Chinese accent thanks them for saving his factory. He owns the factory and the restaurant, I suppose, so that's how they get another free meal out of this. Scrappy apparently wasn't satisfied with making one joke about how the episode was resolved in the previous scene, because here he jokes that he really "used his noodle". And Shaggy says that they "wrapped up" this case as Scooby gets his noodles tangled around his head. Was one of the writers trying to cram in the jokes they didn't get to make during the rest of the episode here? As a result, Scooby's episode-ending "Scooby-Dooby-Doooooo!" is muffled by the noodles, which I appreciate is a little detail they didn't have to add.
Overall, I enjoyed this! Obviously there was no real mystery to solve in any of this, but the cartoon antics were fun and I love over-the-top characters. Also, the animation was better than what I associate with the name Hanna-Barbera - go back and compare to The Kwicky Koala Show, for instance!