Netflix’s Upcoming Fantasy Detective Series Marks The Beginning Of A New Era

As hard as it might be to believe, Netflix’s upcoming Scooby-Doo: Origins will be the first live-action TV show in the franchise’s 57-year history. The last time that TV viewers heard from Scooby-Doo, the franchise was at an all-time low. HBOMax’s R-rated reboot Velma was dubbed one of the worst TV shows ever made, and its two-season re-imagining of the family-friendly series was roundly abhorred by longtime fans, critics, and newcomers alike.

After a few years spent licking its wounds, the Scooby-Doo franchise is finally ready to bounce back with Netflix’s upcoming supernatural mystery series Scooby-Doo: Origins, a prequel that tells the story of how the Mystery Inc gang first started working together. If that sounds familiar, that could be because 2020’s Scoob! already retold the gang’s backstory, while 2010’s earlier Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated was an acclaimed attempt to fuse the show’s cartoonish humor with genuine Lovecraftian horror and mystery.

However, fans of the franchise need not fear that the upcoming show will be a mere retread of these earlier outings. Scooby-Doo: Origins marks a genuine first for the series as, after almost 60 years on the air in various guises, this will be the first live-action Scooby-Doo series ever. There are two theatrical live-action movies, numerous straight-to-video live-action movies, over a dozen different cartoon shows, and countless direct-to-video cartoon movies under the franchise’s name, but this Netflix reboot offers something authentically new thanks to its medium shift.

Why A Live-Action Scooby-Doo Series Is Only Happening Now

The co-creators of Scooby-Doo: Origins, Josh Applebaum and Scott Rosenberg, previously worked on the superb Netflix teen drama Everything Sucks and the MGM+ small-town horror series From, and this Scooby-Doo re-imagining would be doing better than most earlier shows if the reboot managed to blend the appeal of these two great hits. However, the question of how it took so long for the series to spawn a live-action show remains a pertinent one. The main reason is likely that a live-action Scooby-Doo show is only feasible now in the streaming era, when shows can have both shorter seasons and the large budget required to make Scooby himself work on-screen.

It is hard to imagine a live-action version of Scooby-Doo working as a network serial with 20 or more episodes per season in the ’90s or 2000s, especially when even expensive genre shows of the era like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files wouldn’t have had the budget needed to make Scooby look believable. The iconic live-action movies of the early 2000s spent a lot of money on their version of the show’s iconic mascot, and a TV show with only eight episodes that has the budget of a blockbuster movie would have been entirely unthinkable 20 years ago.

Netflix’s Scooby-Doo: Origins Can Redefine The Franchise

Fortunately, the economics of TV production have since changed radically, and many major Netflix shows now cost more than blockbuster movies and still garner a return on the investment made by the streaming service. Wednesday and Stranger Things, both of which are also nostalgic live-action mystery shows with teen protagonists, are among Netflix’s biggest franchises. With the first spinoff of the latter proving that Stranger Things is shifting genre and becoming more family-friendly, Scooby-Doo: Origins is primed to replace the hit teen TV series.

Judging by the robot’s gritty, grown-up title alone, Scooby-Doo: Origins is likely to be much less cartoon-y and more grounded than the ‘00s movies. The show is already being marketed as a supernatural mystery rather than a comedy, meaning Scooby-Doo: Origins can offer fans of the franchise something truly fresh and new when the show arrives on the streaming service.

TV Show(s)

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show/The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries (1983), The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? (2019), Velma, The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour, Scooby’s All Star Laff-A-Lympics, The Scooby & Scrappy-Doo/Puppy Hour, Scary Scooby Funnies, Scooby’s Mystery Funhouse

Video Game(s)

Scooby-Doo! And The Spooky Swamp

Created by

Joe Ruby, Ken Spears