Scooby-Doo has been a staple of pop culture since the original Hanna-Barbera series premiered in 1969, with Mystery Inc. encountering all manner of real and contrived monsters for over 50 years. Stranger than any supernatural creature is the plethora of guest stars who periodically accompanied Scooby and his friends on their adventures. Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, currently in its second season, pays homage to that tradition, with a rotating slate of celebrities who take the proceedings firmly in stride. Though strange at times, their oddity is part of the appeal. However, the further back one goes into Scooby’s history, the weirder and less deliberately ironic his guest stars become.
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“Weird Al” Yankovic
Weird Al first appeared with Scooby and the gang alongside the Caped Crusader in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Season 2, Episode 25, “Bat-Mite’s Strangest Cases!” Guess Who? revived the team-up (without Batman) in Season 1, Episode 10, “Attack of the Weird Al-Osaurus!,” which embraced the same grab-bag absurdity of his first appearance. Al was clearly in on the joke, as most of the Guess Who? stars are, but his own status as an affectionate parodist found the precise tone the show was looking for.
Steve Urkel and Urkel Bot
Steve Urkel — and actor Jaleel White — rose to fame in Family Matters. He was a uniquely odd fad: a teenage scientist inexplicably placed in a family sitcom and popular for reasons no one could explain after the fact. Scooby-Doo leaned into it for Guess Who?, Season 1, Episode 8, “Where Urkel-Bots Go Bad,” in which Urkel helped the gang stop his robot doppelganger. To make matters stranger, Urkel Bot didn’t originate with Scooby-Doo: it appeared in Family Matters and was transposed to animation for Guess Who? along with Urkel himself.
The Winchester Brothers
Supernatural always carried echoes of Mystery, Inc., which the show played homage to in Season 13, Episode 16, “Scoobynatural.” The brothers were pulled into a haunted TV and found themselves face-to-face with “their role models” in Mystery Inc. Getting out meant playing along with the drama and predicting which parts of the formula to defy. The show took pains to drop them into a specific episode of the original series — Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, Season 1, Episode 16, “A Night of Fright is No Delight” — complete with accurate visual markers. More importantly, it drew a strong creative link between the Gen-X kids who grew up watching Scooby-Doo and the adult writers commenting on its influence with exercises like this.
KISS
At the height of their popularity, the rock band KISS appeared in a series of Marvel comics depicting them as superheroes, followed by 1978 TV movie, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, which operated on the same premise. Hanna-Barbera produced the movie and included the same weirdly familiar tropes of its cartoons: robot duplicates, scheming amusement park employees and kooky sound effects. All of this made a formal team-up with Scooby-Doo inevitable. The 2015 direct-to-DVD Scooby-Doo! and KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery basically reskinned the same story, with Mystery Inc. arriving at an amusement park called KISS World to solve a mystery. The story also entailed an alternate universe called KISSteria and a black diamond used when performing “Detroit Rock City” that could summon a monster called the Destroyer.
Harlan Ellison
Noted science-fiction author and proud misanthrope Harlan Ellison raised eyebrows when he appeared 2010’s Scooby-Doo!: Mystery, Inc., which quietly deflated his infamous self-regard as the gang saved him from the Lovecraftian shoggoths that descended on campus. The final push into the surreal came with the episode’s repeated reference to a torrid affair between Ellison and Velma’s mother, possibly making Ellison her father. The shtick worked so well that Ellison returned for a second episode.
Matthew Lillard
Lillard essentially inherited the role of Shaggy from Casey Kasem, and he has voiced him for nearly two decades. Director Joe Dante took wicked advantage of that in 2003’s Looney Tunes Back in Action, which opened a year after the first Scooby-Doo live-action film. It featured a cameo from the animated Scooby and Shaggy – the latter voiced by Kasem – laying into a live-action Lillard about his performance as Shaggy. The animated duo even had Scooby Snacks on their plates.
Laurel and Hardy
Scooby-Doo has always focused on ghosts, but in the case of Laurel and Hardy, the show actually brought its guest stars back from the dead. The duo rose to fame in the silent era, and both had been gone for years before Scooby-Doo. Hanna-Barbera gained the rights to their visual likeness, but it failed to provide any discernible reason why they should be used. Sound-alike actors provided the voices, and their animated antics were a far cry from what the real duo could do.
Mama Cass
As bizarre as some of The New Scooby-Doo movies were, they rarely entered the flat-out offensive. That wasn’t the case with Cass Elliot, former singer for The Mamas and The Papas, who made frequent TV guest appearances like many of Mystery Inc.’s partners. In and of itself, that would have been fine, except the episode depicted her as a food-obsessed owner of a haunted candy factory, and it was filled with jokes about her size and appetite. Elliot struggled with her weight through much of her life and died of heart failure nine months after her Scooby episode aired, so it aged poorly to say the least.
Sonny and Cher
Hanna-Barbera brought in a plethora of real-life guest starts to voice animated versions of themselves for The New Scooby-Doo Movies. Few, if any, of them would register among the children at the time, and indeed, they appeared as themselves rather than having characters created for them. Sonny and Cher are notable because they were hosting a hit variety show at the time, which revived their singing careers. They appeared with Scooby-Doo just as their resurgence peaked, playing versions of themselves who check into a haunted resort on their honeymoon. The incongruity of their presence is staggering, as are the couple’s fashions.
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