The Scrappy-Doo Wikipedia mystery
The Wikipedia entry for fictional Great Dane puppy Scrappy-Doo is 25,623 words long.
The Wikipedia entry for fictional Great Dane puppy Scrappy-Doo is 25,623 words long. With six sections, 15 subsections, and 19 sub-subsections, the page has a greater wordcount than Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, is double the length of the average undergrad dissertation, and is nearly 2,000 words longer than the Wikipedia entry for the entire history of Poland. I first discovered this at Halloween.
There was no other way to spend the spooky season in 2020. After the government plunged London into yet another lockdown, the opportunities for tricks and treats became severely limited. And so – after a viral tweet flooded my senses with nostalgia – I pressed play on 2002’s live-action Scooby-Doo. Halfway through, I looked up Scrappy.
Just one glance at the Scrappy-Doo Wikipedia page reveals that it’s a labour of love. After detailed descriptions of the character’s development (network ABC initially feared Scrappy was a bad role model for kids), the page includes synopses for every Scrappy scene in Scooby history.
“Scrappy is the designated pizza picker,” begins the summary for the early eighties episode, Et Tu, Scoob?, “He happily dubs his pizza choice ‘The Scrappy-Doo Special’: chocolate-covered pepperoni pizza with anchovies, garlic, and whipped cream.” Skip forwards to Scooby Roo and you can read all about the time Scrappy was attacked by sheep.
Sat on the sofa, ignoring the movie, I marvelled at the size of the sidebar as I scrolled: the grey progress indicator was short and slow. I clicked on the edit history of the page – while a number of people have contributed to the article over the years, I saw one unregistered user’s IP address repeated over and over again. Almost every day between 22 May and 29 October 2020, this user had added something new to the page.
There’s no way to message an unregistered Wikipedia user; there were no clues about the Scrappy-Doo enthusiast in the string of nine numbers that made up their default username. With little hope it would amount of anything, I left a comment on the user’s “Talk” page, a space where Wikipedia editors can chat. I attached something called a “Barnstar” (a flashy sticker used to reward contributors for their work). And then: nothing.
My timing was bizarrely unfortunate. On 29 October, the same day I left my comment, the Scrappy-Doo Wikipedia page was “completed”: every single Scrappy incident had been safely summarised. But then, on 3 April 2021, almost half a year after Halloween, an email landed in my inbox.
Shauna is a 20-year-old computer science student from California. When she was eight years old, her cousins gave her a VHS tape of the 1988 made-for-TV movie Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf. After a clunk and a whir and a bit of fuzz, she was introduced to Scrappy-Doo.
“I wasn’t expecting Scrappy, because it was after they removed him from the covers,” Shauna tells me over the phone one evening in early April. When Scooby’s nephew got his first scene around eight minutes into the movie, Shauna was instantly enamoured.
“I was interested in him and I related to him on a personal level because I have high functioning autism – I have a hard time reading people,” she explains. “There was this scene early on when they finished watching a horror movie and Scrappy was telling Scooby about how exciting the scary part was. He was having such a great time and Scooby was terrified.
“I could just tell that Scrappy couldn’t read Scooby. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! He’s like me.’”
Shauna says that throughout her life, her autism has led her to be “hyper-focused” on certain subjects – as well as Scrappy, she is interested in Pokémon and The Hobbit, particularly the character Bombur. Yet Shauna hasn’t worked on the Wikipedia pages for any of her other interests: why was she so drawn to Scrappy-Dappy-Doo’s?
“I would feel remiss if I hadn’t done what I did,” she says of her edits. Though the plucky young pup has his loyal fans, Scrappy was so disliked by audiences when he was first introduced that “The Scrappy” is now a TV Trope that describes hated characters. Shauna wanted to set the record straight on Wikipedia by including positive reactions to Scrappy and contextualising some bias against him.
But Shauna’s own relationship with Scrappy hasn’t always been straightforward. Though she enjoyed re-watching the Reluctant Werewolf tape as a child, she didn’t see any other Scooby-Doo content until her early teens. When she was 12 or 13 and staying at a hotel with her family, she flicked on the TV and found the 2002 live-action film. Though she was “excited” when Scrappy popped up, she was “horrified” when she realised he was the main villain of the film. “And so for a few months, I blocked out Scrappy.”
To restore her faith in Scrappy, Shauna began watching old Scooby-Doo episodes online: amazingly, the first episode she watched featured Scrappy wrestling with a very relatable problem. “The Blue Scarab, his favourite superhero, had come to life and was being a villain,” Shauna explains. “I just was like: ‘Holy cow’.”
The more she watched, the more Shauna came to appreciate Scrappy: “He was sweet and happy, he was quirky, he was kind.” Yet she was troubled that not everyone felt the same way and spent hours trying to figure out why. “When I started my research, I was still a kid. So I guess I sort of thought about it like a kid: I thought there was like, a secret conspiracy. And if I searched and searched and searched, that I would find the secret key. But that’s not how real life works.”
As Shauna grew up and realised she was skilled with computers, she decided to rehabilitate Scrappy’s image through Wikipedia. “I love to write, and I love to think about shows I’ve enjoyed watching, so I just kind of felt a warm glow inside as I pattered away on the keyboard,” she says of summarising the episodes. She tried hard to stay objective when writing: “Luckily, Scrappy did a lot of objectively awesome things.”
Along the way, there were a few meddling kids. When Shauna tried to create a separate page for the live-action Scrappy (“because it’s pretty clear that it takes place in an AU separate to the cartoon”), other Wikipedia editors deleted and merged the page. But the rest of Shauna’s edits are ironclad. “I watched the shows, I paid attention to them, I put them in, and I cited them. And they just couldn’t argue with that.”
By the time Shauna finished her Scrappy summaries last Autumn, she was “worn out” and ready to focus on her studies. She shut the “really old” laptop she uses to edit Wikipedia and took out the computer she uses for university. When she finally opened the old laptop again around the Easter holidays, she found my comment.
At the end of our call, I ask how it feels to have contributed so much to the Wikipedia page. “It feels awesome,” Shauna says. “I hope people learn about a character that I genuinely love, a character who’s been misunderstood.”
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