A complete history of every Scooby-Doo series – Part 2

In the last article, we went through every incarnation of Scooby-Doo, from the creation of the franchise all the way up through 1991. While the series would continue to thrive, the true next television series wouldn’t appear until 2002 when Scooby-Doo returned to television in full swing.

What’s New Scooby-Doo? (2002-2006) – 42 episodes

After A Pup Named Scooby-Doo ended in 1991, the franchise wouldn’t have another television series for over 10 years. This would be the longest break since the franchise began back in 1969.

Of course the franchise wasn’t fully dormant for that entire time. A series of successful direct to video movies launched starting in 1998 with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.

The first live action Scooby-Doo movie came out in that same time frame. But What’s New Scooby-Doo? was the first new series to come out in 10 years.

This series is pretty much an update of the original series in almost every possible way. The cast is made up of all the original characters, and they are once again, back to solving mysteries featuring villains in masks instead of actual supernatural creatures.

The biggest changes are the slight variations on the costumes to reflect what the characters wear in the direct to video series of movies, and updates to the technology and slang to set the series in modern times, instead of the era of the original series.

Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get A Clue! (2006-2008) – 26 episodes

Shaggy and Scooby-Doo get a Clue! marks the tenth Scooby-Doo series to be created. Once again, the cast is whittled back down to Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, with a group of new characters filling out the main cast.

Fred, Daphne and Velma only appear in one episode of this series. This series is something of a wild departure to what’s come before, down to the drastic shift in animation style.

The show has an overarching plot concerning Shaggy being the sole beneficiary of his rich uncle, and him using the money to upgrade the Mystery Machine into a Transformer style vehicle. The villains of this series are enemies that Shaggy’s uncle made who are after his fortune, and aim to use it to take over the world.

Added to the mayhem of this series, Shaggy’s uncle seemed to have experimented with nanotechnology which results in nanobots getting mixed in with the Scooby snacks, causing the snacks to grant temporary powers whenever they’re eaten. This series is very different from anything the Scooby-Doo franchise has produced before or since.

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (2010-2013) 52 episodes

Mystery Incorporated brought Scooby-Doo back to the formula that has been with the series since the beginning, with the complete original gang returning for this show and the element of solving mysteries. The series also has a more self-serious, gothic tone.

This is the first series in a while that leans into the fact that a Scooby-Doo series can be somewhat scary at times, especially for younger audiences. This series is also the first time a Scooby-Doo series introduces the idea of a story arc throughout the entire series.

The characters grow and change as the series progresses, and their relationships with one another evolve as well. This version of the series received positive reviews at the time, and was praised for bringing the Scooby-Doo franchise more in line with what modern television programming looks like.

Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! (2015-2018) 52 episodes

After the darker, more serious approach of Mystery Incorporated, the Scooby-Doo franchise once again swung wildly in the other direction with the lighter and more comedic Be Cool Scooby-Doo! This show drastically redesigned the animation style and gave the characters a more deliberate “cartoonish” feel.

The character growth and romantic subplots of the previous series were also done away with, returning the show to the formula that it used in the early incarnations of the series. This would also be the first series to not have Casey Kasem involved in any way.

While Kasem had stopped voicing Shaggy full time back in 1999, he would still provide occasional voice work for Scooby-Doo, usually in the form of a relative of Shaggy’s appearing on one or two episodes. However, his passing in 2014 marked this as the first series to be entirely without his involvement.

Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? (2019-2021)

Reviving the pitch behind The New Scooby-Doo Movies from way back in the early days of the franchise, this series features the Mystery Inc. gang teaming up with a celebrity, sometimes real, sometimes fictional, to solve a mystery. Plenty of celebrities from Weird Al to Tim Gunn, Alex Trebek and Terry Bradshaw all stop by to voice themselves interacting with the gang.

Throughout the series multiple superheroes including Batman, The Flash and Wonder Woman all show up as well. In a particularly meta episode, the guest stars are Frank Welker, Grey DeLisle, Matthew Lillard, and Kate Micucci, the voice actors who play Fred, Daphne, Shaggy, and Velma playing themselves filming a TV series about a group of mystery solving teenagers.

Velma (2023-?) 10 episodes so far

Velma is the latest series in the Scooby-Doo franchise and is another radical departure as it’s explicitly aiming to be a more adult take on the characters. While previous Scooby-Doo series have crimes that involve theft, or sometimes insurance fraud, this time the group is dealing with straight up murder.

Streaming on HBO Max Velma takes center stage in this one obviously, with Mindy Kaling voicing the character. This series will also notably be the first show in the Scooby-Doo franchise to not have Scooby-Doo appear due to studio mandates surrounding the character.

The Future

But that’s not all. Even with Velma, a brand-new installment in the franchise, a new Scooby-Doo show is being worked on for the future.

Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Pups! is a computer animated production that is going to focus on being an educational series aimed at preschool children. Not much is known about the series yet, but it’s currently slated to debut some time in 2024.

From the looks of the little bit of material that’s been released so far, it seems like Fred, Daphne, and Velma might be missing out on this one again. Though there seems to be three new dog characters that look suspiciously similar to the humans missing from the cast.

Where would you like to see Scooby-Doo and the gang go next in the future? Which character would you like to see more often?

Share your answers in the comments below, we’d love to read them!