Let’s Look At The Cars Of The Scooby Doo Knockoffs

I’m not really sure what it is about a group of teenagers that spend all of their time exposing strange, low-ish stakes real estate scams that involve a lot of Halloween costumes and high school drama-class shenanigans, but in the 1970s and into the 1980s, America seemingly couldn’t get enough of them. The archetype is, of course, the Scooby-Doo gang, who roamed around the nation, seemingly unsupervised and without any responsibilities to impede their nomadic lives, in a garishly-painted van, unmasking greedy weirdos attempting to wrest ownership of various properties.

There were a shocking number of knockoffs to the formula established by Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers, along with their Great Dane   Doo, and many of these included notable cars of some kind. Sometimes very notable.

I should mention that I was reminded of all of these knockoffs when I saw this Twitter thread – I actually normally don’t devote all that much time to contemplating 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 survey of the Scooby Doo knockoff cars. Because it’s important, dammit. Let’s get right into it, starting with the one that effectively combined the roles of the non-human member of the gang (usually an animal of some sort, with the required car: Speed Buggy.

Speed Buggy, of Speed Buggy

Yes, Speed Buggy was that extra member of the gang, in this case a sentient Meyers Manx-style dune buggy. The animation style wasn’t especially detailed, but in that theme song animation there, the beginning bit with the Shaggy-esque character with the goggles working on Mr.Buggy’s engine reveals a surprising amount of detail:

It’s not wildly accurate, but whoever drew that was definitely looking at a picture of a an air-cooled Volkswagen engine, even if they likely didn’t know what they were looking at. But, you can definitely make out coil and carburetor and distributor and cylinder heads, even if it’s not exactly right.

Speed Buggy is notable for being the only sentient automobile of the Scooby-Doo knockoff community, and that’s significant.

The Chan Van of Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan

Today we may look on this Scooby-Doo knockoff with some trepidation, out of fear that it’s all awful racist tropes, but the truth is a good bit more complex. Sure, it plays on some stereotypes, as the character of Charlie Chan always had, but it was also the first time Chan had been played by an actually Asian person, and it was a welcome addition of some cultures other than mainstream whiteness in the Saturday Morning Cartoonscape.

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

How the hell does it do this? This feels beyond technology and into magic territory. I kinda feel like the Chan Clan is wasting whatever this power is by having a van that can turn into a street sweeper instantaneously, but what the hell do I know.

Fangface Car , of Fangface

Always with the mummies.

Clue Club is one of these shows I never really knew about, but it seems that here the non-human element is a werewolf of some kind, with one, large, centrally-mounted fang, placed nearly uselessly up front.

The Fangface Crew car is sort of typical of the genre, a strange dune buggy-like hot rod-like car called the Wolf Buggy, with large, open wheels and an interesting front end, with a long tapered snout terminating in a small radiator grille, and headlamps carved into 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 of Clue Club

This was essentially Scooby-Doo with two dogs instead of just one, and a car packed with cutting-edge 70s tech. Again, we have a dune buggy/show rod-type car here, with an in-dash CRT and a lot of other communication equipment, presumably helpful in solving very Scooby-Doo-like crimes, including ones with mummies, which seemed to be ever-present in the Dooniverse.

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

The Isetta-like Microcar from The New Schmoo

In the set of Scooby-Doo knockoffs, The New Schmoo is unique in that its based on a property that precedes Scooby-Doo by a significant amount of time. The Schmoo is a character that was first introduced in 1948, in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner: 

Schmoos are deceptively complex; they’re sort of an allegory for the bounty of nature, and how humans interact with and exploit them is at the root of what they’re all about. It’s too much to go into here, as we have a car to talk about, but I feel like it’s important that you’re aware of the depth going on here.

But onto the car in the show, which I really like:

The car in this show appears to be a sort of microcar, with a front-end door like an Iso/BMW Isetta or a Heinkel Trojan or a Zündapp Janus. It’s a bit more squared-off than an Isetta, and it’s three-wheeled (most Isettas had two close-set wheels at the rear) so it feels like something inspired by a number of microcars as opposed to just one.

I’m not clear on what the “M” badging was about, not having really watched the show, but it looks good? The front end reminds me a bit of a Goggomobil van, but not really. Mostly, I like that the featured car in one of these was a microcar.

I feel like there are more, and if we expand our definition to include watercraft and spacecraft, even more. Maybe we can revisit this and do some others soon? I’m just happy we got a start.

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