Scooby Monsters That Almost Won

A comforting part of Scooby-Doo is knowing how it ends. The mystery is solved. The mask comes off. Everyone is safe.

Occasionally, it feels weird watching the old episodes, you can’t help sense the closeness around. Not in a dramatic, cliff-edge fashion- but quietly, subtly, in the way the gang loses control long before they ever learn to move on from it.

Some Scooby monsters didn’t simply frighten the gang. They nearly beat them.

When Scooby-Doo aired in 1969, danger looked very different. Monsters didn’t overwhelm the gang by speed or spectacle- they won ground bit by bit. They controlled space. They made places feel unsafe.

Take the Tar Monster. No clever disguise is doing the heavy lifting here, only raw and unstoppable presence. Traps fail. Running barely helps. The entire episode the gang spends reacting and scrambling for time rather than doing anything to help. If they hadn’t jumped in with the right solution, that monster would have outlasted them all.

Early Scooby-Doo villains often thrived on endurance. They needed no rush, they just had to keep at it.

And then there’s the spooky space kook, who almost gets away without touching anyone at all, At that abandoned airfield, he isolates the gang and strips them of noise, witnesses and comfort. Al those long stretches of silence, flashing lights and horrendous laugh, mentally it wears away the gang. The risk isn’t physical, it’s psychological. Panic is dangerously close to replacing logic.

That was something early Scooby did admirably: fear through emptiness.

But as the franchise goes forward, especially toward What’s new, Scooby-Doo? In the early 2000’s the kind of monsters that “almost win” change. The world becomes louder, faster and more kinetic, and so do the threats.

The phantom racer doesn’t capture the gang; he overwhelms them by never slowing down. High speeds remove thinking time. There is no space to regroup, no calm to plan. Danger comes from the movement itself. One mistake and things are much more immediate than on previous eras.

Just as villains such as the Roller Ghoster weaponise the environment in different fashions. Tracks, machinery and scale are all there to do it for them. The gang is constantly reacting to moving parts, momentum and timing instead of getting answers. Survival supersedes strategy.

What’s curious is that not one era is more dangerous than the other, they’re just hazardous in different ways.

Early Scooby monsters almost succeed because they make the gang feel really alone. Now monsters nearly win because they make them feel so completely overwhelmed.

It’s also true that in either case, the gang doesn’t win by strength. They win by remaining calm enough to think.

Which is why the episodes endure. They remind us that scooby-doo’s safety net was never there, but it was earned. The monsters that came closest to being victorious were by no means the loudest or the flashiest. It was they who held the pace, the space and the silence.

Those are the episodes where you stop and passively watch and realise: This might have gone so differently.

And perhaps that’s why we remember them.

Stay groovy- and keep unmasking.