'Ruh-roh!': Celebrate 50 years of 'Scooby-Doo' with these real-life lookalikes
Fifty years after Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! aired on CBS, the mystery-solving Great Dane lives on in pop culture. Sure, it’s mostly due to his forever useful phrase “ruh-roh,” but he also has a formidable presence on Instagram, where dog owners like to show off their lookalike Scoobies.
First things first, though: Anyone with a keen eye for dog breeds would immediately raise their eyebrows at the cartoon Scooby-Doo, who doesn’t exactly look like a Great Dane.
In fact, the glaring differences were intentional. According to legendary animation artist Iwao Takamoto, he purposely designed Scooby with non-Great Dane qualities like “a hump back, bowed legs, big chin and such. Even his color is wrong.”
Of course the biggest difference between cartoon Scooby and real-life Scoobies is that he can talk — barely, but still, that’s a trick no dog can pick up.
The first voice of Scooby-Doo, in 1969, was Don Messick, and he was later replaced by veteran voice actor and current Scooby voice Frank Welker — who was part of the gang from the start, having voiced Fred in the original series. Of course, there was Casey Kasem, who lent his talent to the squealing, perpetually-hungry character of Shaggy.
But back to the Scoobies that live among us…
Hannah Lackey, of Greensboro, N.C., named her pup Scooby Melvin Doo, even though he’s a German Shepard mix. And honestly, he looks eerily similar to the cartoon version — although the matching blue collar definitely helps.
Even more importantly, Lackey’s Scooby is seemingly aware of his royal ancestry. “One day I put on the Scooby-Doo movie,” says Lackey, “and [he] actually sat there and watched the entire thing with [my husband and I].” Case in point, she shared evidence of this phenomenon on her dog’s Instagram account:
Geneva Heinkel, of Phoenix, Ariz. is a fellow Scooby owner who’s a longtime fan of the cartoon and is studying to be a veterinarian. Her Scooby-Doo, a Fawn Great Dane, even has the signature SD dog collar as seen on the cartoon Scooby (and is available to buy on Amazon).
“As a kid, I had a stuffed animal of Scooby-Doo that I slept with every night,” Heinkel shares, “so when I grew up I always knew I wanted a Great Dane that looked just like him.”
And in terms of personality, Heinkel says her Scooby is just as easily spooked as cartoon Scooby. “He’s scared of everything,” she reveals. “When I first got him, he fell into the pool, so now he’s not a big fan of swimming.”
Besides Heinkel and Lackey, a quick search on Instagram for #scoobydoo reveals plenty of lookalikes.
And for fans of the anthropomorphic dog and his human colleagues, a new Scooby-Doo movie is scheduled to be released in 2020, this time under the name Scoob!.
According to IMDB, Welker will continue to provide the “ruh-rohs” and will be joined by Will Forte (Shaggy), Zac Efron (Fred), Gina Rodriguez (Velma) and Amanda Seyfried (Daphne).
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