Is Scooby-Doo An Alien?: His Bizarre Mystery Inc. Origin, Explained
With Netflix calling its upcoming live-action series Scooby-Doo: Origins, it feels like a good time to go back and look at something the franchise has never really addressed. What is Scooby-Doo exactly? Since 1969's Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, Scooby has just been a Great Dane who hangs out with his buddy Shaggy, eats too much, gets scared easily, and occasionally saves the day by accident.
The show never explains why he can talk, and more importantly, it doesn't need to. Everyone in-universe accepts it, so the audience does too. But the franchise didn't stay that simple. Over time, especially once various iterations of the show moved into more serialized storytelling, it started to include things like backstories and eventually full-on mythology.
And that's where things begin to get a little strange, because once you try to explain Scooby, you kind of have to explain everything else around him too. That's exactly what the 2010 animated horror comedy Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated ends up doing. And the explanation it goes with isn't just weird for Scooby—it's weird for the entire structure of Mystery Inc.
Mystery Incorporated Rewrites the Rules of Scooby-Doo
Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated introduces the idea that the group of super sleuths keeps repeating across time. The setup is always the same, and the group's existence is always tied to something bigger. So when the "Scooby is an alien" theory hit the internet, it wasn't totally random. But it is slightly misunderstanding what the show is actually saying.
If you go through Mystery Incorporated Season 2 properly, the Scooby stuff doesn't just appear out of nowhere. The series builds up to it. Like in Season 2, Episode 2, titled "Night Terrors," the show introduces the idea that mystery-solving groups always come in the same form of four humans and one animal. At that point, it just feels like a fun meta joke.
But it's actually setting up something much bigger because once that pattern exists, Scooby becomes part of a formula. Then, in Season 2, Episode 15, titled "Theater of Doom," Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, Scooby, and Velma meet a ghost who says he was part of the first mystery-solving group called Fraternitas Mysterium, and it was their donkey, Porto, that destroyed them.
By the time you get to Season 2, Episode 20, "Stand and Deliver," and Season 2, Episode 22, "Nightmare in Red," the mythology is fully in play. This is where the interdimensional Anunnaki come in. These beings don't actually have physical forms and need hosts to exist in the real world. So they essentially speak through various animals, like Scooby.
Scooby's Origins Are Weird, Just Not Alien Weird
While the series reveals that Scooby is connected to the Anunnaki, he does not share their DNA. These beings only possess their hosts (temporarily) so they can interact with the physical world. So when the show says animals like Scooby are descended from those hosts, it's not talking about biology in the usual sense. It's more like an echo that was left behind. Like the ability to speak.
This is why Scooby can talk and why he's more aware than a normal dog. Mystery Incorporated, Season 2, Episode 26, "Come Undone," kind of settles the "is he an alien" debate. The Evil Entity he faces off with doesn't recognize Scooby as one of its own, but it does try to use him as a vessel. That only works if Scooby is still fundamentally separate from it.
So he's not an alien. He's just a dog whose lineage got tangled up with something alien, a very long time ago. It's unlikely that Scooby-Doo: Origins will touch on any of that despite its title. The premise reads more like a first case story, which brings together a group of teens and a Great Dane puppy that may have witnessed a supernatural murder.
The cast of Scooby-Doo: Origins features Mckenna Grace as Daphne Blake, Tanner Hagen as Shaggy Rogers, Abby Ryder Fortson as Velma Dinkley, Maxwell Jenkins as Fred Jones, Frank Welker as the voice of Scooby-Doo, and Paul Walter Hauser in an undisclosed role. The series, which will consist of eight episodes, does not have a release date at this time.
