Let’s take a look at the Scooby-Doo replica cars

I’m not really sure what it is about a group of teenagers who spend all their time uncovering weird, low-stakes real estate scams that involve lots of Halloween costumes and high school drama class shenanigans, but in the 1970s and… Into the 1980s, America couldn’t seem to get enough of it. The archetype, of course, is the Scooby-Doo gang, who roamed the country in a brightly painted van, seemingly unsupervised and with no responsibility to impede their nomadic life, exposing greedy madmen trying to usurp ownership of various properties.

There have been a shocking number of imitations of the formula that Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers developed along with their Great Dane Doo, and many of these involved remarkable cars of some kind. Sometimes very remarkable.

I should mention that I was reminded of all these fabrications when I saw this Twitter thread – actually, I don’t usually spend that much time thinking about Scooby-Doo:

List of Scooby-Doo Clones (THREAD) ???? pic.twitter.com/E39dPYapng

— ????Hanna-Barbera ScreenCaps???? (@HannaBarberaCap) December 4, 2024

…and that’s when I realized I need to do a quick review of the Scooby-Doo copycat cars. Because it is important, Damned. Let’s jump right in and start with the one who plays the roles of the non-human member of the gang (usually an animal, with the car needed: Speed ​​Buggy.

Speed ​​Buggy, by Speed ​​Buggy

Yes, Speed ​​Buggy was the additional member of the gang, in this case a sentient Meyers Manx-style dune buggy. The animation style wasn’t particularly detailed, but in the theme song animation there, the opening part with the Shaggy-like character with glasses working on Mr.Buggy’s engine reveals a surprising amount of detail:

It’s not entirely accurate, but whoever drew this was definitely looking at a picture of an air-cooled Volkswagen engine, even if they probably didn’t know it What they looked. But you can definitely see the coil, carburetor, distributor and cylinder heads, even if that’s not the case Exactly Right.

Speed ​​Buggy stands out for being the only smart car in the Scooby-Doo copycat community, and that’s significant.

The Chan Van by Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan

Today we may view this Scooby-Doo knock-off with some trepidation, fearing that it’s just horrible racist phrases, but the truth is a lot more complex. Sure, it plays into some stereotypes, as the character Charlie Chan has always done, but it was also the first time Chan was played by a real Asian person, and it was a welcome addition to some cultures outside the mainstream -Whiteness in “The Saturday.” Morning cartoonscape.

But! We’re here to talk about cars, and the Chan Van is an important car in this genre. It’s an interesting, sleek, wedge-shaped van with pop-up headlights, but it doesn’t seem bound by the accepted rules of reality either, as it can instantly transform into pretty much any other vehicle with just the press of a button on one Keyboard with 20 odd keys.

How the hell does it do that? This feels beyond technology and into magical territory. I kind of feel like the Chan clan is wasting all their power by having a van that can turn into a street sweeper in an instant, but what the hell do I know?

Fangface car, by Fangface

Always with the mummies.

Clue Club is one of those shows I never really knew anything about, but it seems that the non-human element here is some kind of werewolf, with a large, center-mounted fang placed almost uselessly at the front.

The Fangface crew car is somewhat typical of the genre, a strange dune buggy-like hot rod car called the Wolf Buggy, with large, open wheels and an interesting front end, with a long, tapered snout that ends in a small grille and headlights engraved on the sides. It feels lupine, which is clearly intentional.

That windshield doesn’t seem to do much, aside from keeping your knuckles drug-free.

Clue Club Car from Clue Club

This was essentially Scooby-Doo with two Dogs instead of just one and a car full of the latest 70s technology. Again, we have a dune buggy/show rod car with a built-in CRT and lots of other communication devices, presumably helpful in solving very Scooby-Doo-like crimes, including ones involving mummies, which seemed to be ubiquitous in the Dooniverse.

I guess none of these teenage groups cared about roofs? The Clue Club car at least has fenders, a wraparound windshield, and pop-up headlights.

The Isetta-like small car from The new Schmoo

In the series of Scooby-Doo replicas The new Schmoo is unique in that it is based on a property that predates Scooby-Doo by a significant amount of time. The Schmoo is a character first introduced in the 1948 comic strip by Al Capp Li’l Abner:

Schmoos are deceptively complex; They are a kind of allegory for the bounty of nature, and the way humans interact with and exploit them is at the core of what they are about. It’s too much to go into here since we have a car to talk about, but I think it’s important that you realize the depth at stake here.

But about the car in the show that I really like:

The car in this show appears to be some sort of subcompact car, with a front door like an Iso/BMW Isetta or a Heinkel Trojan or a Zündapp Janus. It’s a little boxier than an Isetta and has three wheels (most Isettas had two wheels close together in the back), so it feels like it was inspired by several subcompacts rather than just one.

I’m not sure what the “M” emblem was about since I haven’t actually seen the show, but it looks good? The front end reminds me a little of a Goggomobil van, but not really. What I like most is that the car featured in one of them was a subcompact.

I feel like there is more, and if we expand our definition to watercraft and spacecraft, even more. Maybe we can revisit this and do a few others soon? I’m just glad we’ve made a start.

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