There was once a time when adults made cartoons, adults who didn’t really like cartoons. The idea of a show about college aged young adults roaming the countryside and solving mysteries, as an animated property, is really baffling in hindsight. “Why are we animating this?” they would ask. “Surely, with nothing about this show REQUIRING animation, we could simply cast this live action.” Looking at their competition, the Krofft Brothers, producing very similar shows on a much smaller budget (and blissfully free from the union problems animators bring), casting their shows with midgets and aging child stars willing to work at subsistence rates, the Hanna-Barbarians were tasked with justifying their paychecks.

And thus a much more “cartoonier” character was born. A character that could not be removed from the formula and replaced with a real dog or a midget in a foam cuddle suit. “Animated” hijinks were introduced. Gone were the faux pop song chase sequences, replaced with wacky superhero transformation sequences, much more slapstick, and the talky Hardy Boys mystery aspect was whittled down. Scrappy, Dune Buggy, Jabber Jaw, Funky Phantom and Captain Caveman were created to justify animation’s expense, and it worked. The live action shows died out within a few years and for another two decades Saturday Morning cartoons always contained a wacky cartoon sidekick, leading to Snarf, Orko and so forth. The trend continued until the extreme science fiction violence and magical rainbow fairy lands of the Toy Cartoon era. Then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dropped, and you had a genre that could ONLY work in animation. That led to anime chipping away at that, with Pokémon, and now with 24 hour cartoons on cable, it’s actually hard to fill the hours in the day.

CN fills most of it with TTG.

Even as a kid Scrappy annoyed the hell out of me. Maybe the writing just sucked more when he came into the picture, I dunno.

Never cross Vincent Van Ghoul.

His namesake would suggest he scammed a lot of people. But due to not being from a rich or white family got 'made an example of' in court. Plus the name didn't help his defense at all.

Notice that Daphne seems to be okay with a Mexican preteen being sentenced to over 20 years in an adult prison.

I guess we know who the Scooby Gang's resident Trump supporter is.