Scooby Doo is one of the most beloved canine characters in entertainment.
This iconic giant dog is actually based on a dog breed you can find in real life.
If you’re a lonely Shaggy looking for their Scooby Doo, then you will want to look into owning your own Great Dane.
Scooby can give you a good idea of what many Great Danes are like.
What Kind Of Dog Is Scooby Doo?
Scooby Doo is a Great Dane, one of a few giant breed dogs.
Since Scooby Doo is a male Great Dane, he could weigh between 140 and 175 pounds.
The average female Great Dane will typically weigh between 110 to 140 pounds.
While male Great Danes will stand anywhere from 30 to 32 inches, females are smaller at 28 to 30 inches tall.
Scooby Doo shares many classic traits with his real-life counterpart.
The Great Dane is loyal and tends to never leave its owner’s side.
These intelligent dogs make excellent service and working dogs because of their driven nature.
Scooby uses his super sleuth nose in the same way Great Danes who work as medical alert and bomb-sniffing dogs do.
Unlike Scooby Doo, Great Danes have extremely sensitive stomachs and are prone to bloat.
Bloat is medically known as gastric dilation-volvulus and is the number one killer of Great Danes.
Scooby wouldn’t be able to handle the majority of foods that he eats in the show without needing a stomach tack.
Great Danes are one of many working breeds, similar to German Shepherds.
Working breeds tend to be highly intelligent and need an even higher amount of mental stimulation.
If you’re considering getting your own Scooby Doo, you will want to also consider task training for your dog.
Working breed dogs without jobs can become aggressive and destructive.
Tasks for your dog don’t need to be complex.
You can train your dog to get the mail for you, pick up sticks, or even grab things for you.
You will find that task training is more complex than command training.
Scooby Doo isn’t the only famous Great Dane.
Scrappy Doo and Marmaduke are both more mischievous Great Danes, which happens when a working breed dog is bored.
What Kind Of Dog Is Scrappy Doo?
Scrappy Doo is also a Great Dane.
Unlike Scooby, Scrappy Doo is a puppy.
You may be wondering how Scrappy has stayed in his puppy stage.
This may be thanks to juvenile-onset Panhypopituitarism.
While juvenile-onset Panhypopituitarism may be a mouthful to say, it also goes by the much simpler name of dog dwarfism.
Although dwarfism is most common in breeds such as German Shepherds and Miniature Pinscher, it isn’t unheard of for Great Danes to have dwarfism.
The dogs with dwarfism grow at the same rate as their littermates for up to two months, but after that point, they grow very little or even not at all.
They keep their puppy coat and never grow the coarser primary guard hairs that older dogs have.
They also keep their shrill, puppy bark.
Scrappy Doo hasn’t grown since his first appearance and has maintained his shriller voice.
By looking at the 2002 live-action Scooby Doo movies, we can see that time does pass in the Scooby Doo universe.
Between the introduction of the first movie and the following sequel, a minimum of one year has passed.
That would be more than enough time for Scrappy to mature.
While Scrappy may just be adhering to the nonsensical rules of cartoons, you could see him as a representation of dogs with juvenile-onset Panhypopituitarism.
These unique dogs need all the attention they can get.
Scrappy has been around since 1979.
He was originally voiced by Lennie Weinrib until 1980 when Scooby Doo’s voice actor, Don Messick, took over the role.
Scrappy’s birthday is April 28th, which you get to see in the episode Scrappy’s Birthday.
Scrappy is the son of Ruby Doo, Scooby’s sister.
Scooby and Scrappy used to have a television show called Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, which ran from 1979 to 1983.
When Did Scooby Doo Come Out?
Scooby Doo has been running since September 13th, 1969.
The first series to come out was Scooby-Doo: Where Are You?
At first, the show was originally pitched as Mysteries Five.
The show would star Mike, Kelly, Geoff, Linda, and W.W.
The kids had a bongo-playing dog named Too Much, who was also a Great Dane.
The first pitch was turned down by the studio.
The studio was only looking for their next greatest hit.
After seeing what the final designs looked like, they cut the group down to four and renamed the characters to be Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy.
Too Much didn’t fit with the rest of the characters, so he was renamed Scooby Doo after the scat ending of Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night.
The show was an immediate hit and did better than any of the other shows in its time block.
When Hanna-Barbera began releasing hour-long specials, the show became even more successful.
Some of these specials even had special appearances by Batman and Robin, the Harlem Globetrotters, Speed Buggy, Josie and the Pussycats, the Addams Family, and the Three Stooges.
Special guests became a tradition for the Scooby Doo shows and movies.
The show would go on to have a long list of celebrity guests through the years.
The show had celebrity guests such as Cher, Vincent Price, and many more.
In 1976, ABC bought the rights to Scooby Doo from CBS.
The show restarted as The Scooby-Doo Show.
This is where characters such as Scooby-Dum and Scrappy Doo originated.
From 1987 to 2002, Scooby Doo was only appearing in movies and no show was running at the time.
In 2002, What’s New, Scooby Doo hit the scene with music by Simple Plan, a popular rock band from the 1990s and early 2000s.
Why Is Scooby Doo Still Popular?
Scooby Doo has been running for more than 50 years, and Scooby is still a beloved character by people of all ages.
Scooby Doo is something that all generations can enjoyably sit down and watch together.
The television shows and movies have held up so well, even after five decades.
The characters play a big role in the reasoning behind the success of the series.
All of the characters are simple to understand and play off of character types that everyone has seen before in their life.
Fred is the jolly, jock leader.
Daphne is the popular girl who is most likely dating the jock.
Velma is a smart student who is well put together.
Shaggy is the chilled-out slacker who brings his talking dog everywhere.
Another reason the show is so popular is that it is safe for children of all ages to watch, but it still makes viewers of all ages curious to see if they can spot the villain before “those meddling kids.”
The stories were easy enough to follow along with but weren’t too dumbed down to bore older audiences.
Part of this was because of what was going on in the world in the 1960s and worried parents.
Robert F. Kennedy was an attorney for the Federal Communications Commission who was trying to clean up the children’s programming of his time.
Kennedy didn’t appreciate how violent many children’s shows were and was worried about what bad influences these cartoons had on the minds of children.
After Kennedy’s assassination in June of 1968, President Johnson created the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.
They were the ones who created and enforced the rules of what could and could not be on children’s television.
The need for a kinder character is what led to Scooby Doo’s creation.
How Scooby Doo Increased Great Dane Popularity
The adoption rates of Great Danes and the popularity of whatever the newest Scooby Doo movie or show is have a strange, statistical connection.
The higher-rated the production is, the higher the demand for Great Danes is.
After Scooby Doo’s premier in 1969, the Great Dane population leaped 24%.
The population increased steadily through the best years of the show’s run.
It wasn’t until the 1980s when the show and adoption rates began to decrease.
When a certain type of dog becomes popular after being seen in entertainment, it is called the Dog Movie Star Effect.
The traditional Movie Star Effect applies to anything that gets more popular after being seen in one form of popular media or another.
Through the years, there have been many dog breeds that have experienced this, other than Great Danes like Scooby Doo.
Saint Bernards became popular after the release of the Beethoven movies.
Dalmatian puppies were in incredibly high demand after Disney released 101 Dalmatians.
While it is wonderful to see many families add new members to their homes, new dog owners find themselves in hot water because they did not take time to research the breed.
Many of these dogs find themselves in shelters.
If you become inspired to adopt a certain breed of dog, you should check out the breed-specific rescues in your country or state.
While there are a lot of Great Dane rescues, you will often find Great Danes at rescues that specialize in giant breeds.
One of the best Great Dane rescues is Great Danes Friends of Ruff Love.
They have been rescuing Great Danes since 2009.
They will help you prepare for your very own Great Dane.
They find the perfect dog for your lifestyle, so you two can be as close as Scooby and Shaggy.
Who Voices Scooby Doo?
Don Messick was Scooby Doo’s original voice actor, voicing him from his premier in 1969 until the early 1990s.
Messick was also the voice of Boo Boo from Yogi Bear and Papa Smurf.
Messick passed away in 1997 after having a stroke the year before, which is what caused him to retire from his roles.
Scooby’s role was taken over by Fred’s voice actor, Frank Welker.
Welker was the voice for Scooby Doo in 25 episodes of Scooby Doo, Where Are You, so it was a seamless transfer for the role.
You can barely hear the difference between the two voice actors.
Welker still does Scooby’s voice for the majority of Scooby’s appearances.
Scooby Doo has had some other special voice actors do his voice for different incarnations of the classic character.
People’s ability to get the character’s voice and mannerisms spot on is a testament to how beloved Scooby Doo is.
For Scooby Doo’s appearance in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, Scooby was voiced by Mark Hamill.
Mark Hamill is best known for playing Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, but as he has gotten older, he has fallen in love with voice acting.
Hamill also voices a few incarnations of Joker from the Batman cartoon series.
For a parody skit on the show Robot Chicken, Seth Green voiced Scooby Doo.
Seth Green also appears in Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, as Patrick Wisely.
In the movie, Patrick is the love interest of Velma.
Neil Fanning was cast alongside Seth Green to voice Scooby Doo in both of the early 2000s live-action films.
He also voices Scooby in the 2004 Scooby Doo video game.
The latest voice actor of Scooby Doo is Scott Innes.
Whenever Welker is unable to fill the role of Scooby Doo, Scott Innes is called in.
The Scooby Doo Comics
Scooby Doo has more comics than many superheroes have.
There have been eight different publishers of these comics.
Both Marvel and DC Comics have drawn and written their own stories with the Scooby gang.
The first of Scooby’s comics were released from 1970 to 1975 by Gold Key Comics.
There were only 30 comics in the series.
Charlton Comics picked up where Gold Key left off.
Those comics released 11 comics from 1975 to 1976.
From 1977 to 1979, Marvel released their own Scooby Doo comics.
The standalone Scooby Doo comics were simply called Scooby Doo and had nine issues.
The Laff-a-Lympics, which featured Scooby and Shaggy alongside many of Hanna-Barbera’s best characters for 13 issues.
The series mashed the Marvel and Hanna-Barbera art styles so well, keeping the exact designs of the iconic characters while adding Marvel’s classic coloring and shading.
Marvel’s final comic featuring Scooby Doo is The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, which only had three issues that were published between 1977 and 1978.
Some of the best-known Scooby Doo comics are the ones from Archie’s Comics.
Their first series Scooby-Doo had 21 issues and was released from 1995 to 1997.
During that time, Archie also published their series Hanna-Barbera Presents.
Their final comic starring Scooby Doo was the one-shot release of Cartoon Network’s Christmas Spectacular.
DC Comics has run wild since they obtained the rights to publish Scooby Doo comics.
Their first series was Scooby-Doo, which has 159 issues, making it the longest Scooby Doo comic series.
In their 2013 to 2019 comics, Scooby-Doo! Team Up, the Scooby gang pairs up with many different special guests for 50 different issues.
DC Comics also has a series of Scooby Doo one-offs for fans to enjoy.
They are currently releasing their newest series, The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries, which started in 2021.
