Tuesday, 25 February 2020

Scene From The Opening of Scrappy Doo That Nobody In Britain Got To See

 In a comment to last week's Drunk Women in Werewolf of London post, I said I'm "not particularly into being scared. What I like about 'Horror' is that it's high-stakes magical realism in which a happy ending is not guaranteed." But thinking about it more, I realise my interest in the genre, or at least that pantheon of old monsters, runs a lot deeper. This for example is very first drawing I made on page one of my very first school book:

 

 Over the page is the second drawing I ever made at school, which goes some way towards explaining the first:


 So I've been looking through old Scooby Doo title sequences to see where this image might come from. "Scrappy Doo" debuted the year it was drawn, and I remember there being a mummy in that, because Scrappy unwraps it in a single whisk. Rewatching the titles, it turns out I recalled them pretty much shot for shot, except for one shot towards the end which surprised the hell out of me. It's of Daphne, Shaggy, Fred and Velma waiting nervously in A&E...


 This definitely did not make it into the British broadcasts. I've checked. Instead, we got Scooby and Shaggy running down more corridors. Nor did we get this:


 And I'm fine with that; it is an incredibly weird thing to include in the opening titles of a cartoon about monsters, and Scrappy's offputting enough without hauling casualties of his own recklessness out of their hospital beds. Still it's nine minutes into this if you want to see for yourself, and you are, as ever, welcome:


 Tomorrow we'll look at "House of Dracula", and maybe talk a little more about white plastic fangs. Oh, and this was on page three:


 I'm a dinosaur that's also a jockey? I've no idea.

2 comments:

  1. Brilliant drawings - your Dracula is especially fabulous.

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  2. Thank you! My sense of composition as a four-year-old was definitely okay.

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