You may remember from Fun Fact #354 in June 2021 that Scooby-Doo! Music of the Vampire and Big Top Scooby-Doo were originally one movie called Scooby-Doo and the Circus of Vampires in an early stage of production. ScoobyDooUK found a cool storyboard from Big Top Scooby-Doo! for sale that confirms Big Top, Scooby-Doo! actually went through another name change before it was named what we know it to be today. A storyboard for the film refers to it as Scooby-Doo and the Circus of Werewolves, meaning it must have gone through a second name change before Big Top Scooby-Doo! was decided upon.

​You can see an image of the storyboard below:

In reruns on Cartoon Network, the scene in "The Ghost of the Red Baron" where the Three Stooges get locked in the barn is cut. Typically, when scenes are cut by programmers for commercials, the general rule of thumb is to edit out scenes that are not important to the overall plot. In this case, the cut scene leads to confusion and a massive plot hole, as the viewer is never shown the Three Stooges getting locked in the barn in the first place.

During The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries theme song, during the second scene where all the monsters from "A Halloween Hassle at Dracula's Castle" do the Thriller, for a split second, Medusa appears next to the werewolf before the camera shifts the other direction. This likely means that they were originally planning to include a female monster in an early draft of the episode. This is confirmed by an animation cel from the intro including Medusa's design, which was recently sold on eBay, bought by a frequent commenter on the blog, ScoobyDooUK, who inspired this fun fact idea.

In the 2002 console game Night of 100 Frights, the creators of the game messed up on a detail of the most classic villains in Scooby history. The Monster Gallery credits the Giggling Green Ghost to be from "A Bicycle Built for Boo," despite that it is obviously from "A Night of Fright Is No Delight."

The Hodag from "The Hodag of Horror" in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is a mythical cryptid that dates back to the Paul Bunyan stories. The first instance of a Hodag sighting was in 1893. Land surveyer Eugene Shepard from Rhineland, Wisconsin, made the report in the daily newspaper. He reported that he and a group of friends had to use dynamite to lure the hodag out. The photograph of the Hodag from Eugene Shepard was shared in the newspaper.

Shepard reported catching another Hodag in 1896 using chloroform and displayed it at the Oneida County Fair. Thousands of people came to see the Hodag. At the Fair, Shepard informed visitors that the Hodag's food source was all white bulldogs.

A group of Smithsonian Institute scientists announced they would be coming to Wisconsin to inspect the creature. Eugene Shepard then revealed that it was all a hoax he'd made up. The creature was merely a stuffed trophy animal that Shepard had rigged up with wires so it would look like it was moving.

Despite the fact that it was a hoax, the Hodag became the official symbol of Rhinelander, Wisconsin due to the mass fame the publicity had brought the town. In addition, Rhinelander High School's mascot is the Hodag. To commemorate the hoax, a local artist named Tracy Goberville created a replica of Eugene's fake Hodag. Moreover, the Rhinelander Ice Arena features two hodags; one full creature and a trophy head that blows smoke out of its nostrils.

Thank you to Drakosleuth for suggesting this fun fact idea for me to research!

Thanks to James for suggesting this week's fun fact, which is a bit of a sequel to a previous fun fact. Fun Fact #336 from February 22, 2021 mentioned Look-In magazine, which is a magazine series that ran Scooby-Doo comics from 1990 through 1994. However, James discovered that apparently there were some Scooby-Doo picture strips run by this magazine three years prior to this in 1987 including Velma and Fred, unlike the later 1990 iteration. Even more interesting, one of the issues includes a Scooby-Dum story! You can look at some of the art on Bill Titcombe's website here.

The Ghost of Dead Justice's bullets from Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated's "Dead Justice" have a striking similarity to Bullet Bill from Super Mario.

Thanks to Shadowscooby for suggesting this fun fact!

The announcer for the Globetrotters game in "The Mystery of Haunted Island" (from The New Scooby-Doo Movies) is not just a one-off character created for that episode. He appears in other episodes of the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon from the 1970s. In addition, the Laff-a-Lympics narrator's voice sounds exactly the same as the announcer in this episode, perhaps prompting an in-universe question of if it's the same announcer.

During the voice recording process for Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Frank Welker stated in an interview that he thought he might be replaced due to WB executives claiming his voice had gone down an octave since he last voiced Fred in 1984. Here's a quote from Welker on the matter from an interview with Animation Magazine.

"Coincidentally, when we were doing the direct-to-video movie, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, I was basically the only one left from the original group. I thought they might replace me because they thought my voice had gone down an octave. I personally feel I can do Freddie right up front. When we were recording it, the director kept saying, 'Higher and higher,' and I kept saying, 'No, no, I don't think so. I did that for a lot of years,' and I went back and looked at some tapes, just to make sure, because I don't want to be doing something that would be wrong for the studio, either. And so they were looking at some old tapes, 'cause they were worried about some of the old voices and matching them. She [the voice director] listened to the Freddie voice and she said, 'I'll be darned. He's absolutely right. He sounds exactly like Freddie.' It's a double-edged sword."

Animation Magazine cited Cartoon Network's speeding up of episodes as a likely reason. To allow time for more commercials, the Where Are You reruns that were so popular in the 1990s had the animation and audio tracks slightly sped-up to make time for more commercials. It was a popular phenomenon at the time for Cartoon Network to time-compress the episodes by playing them at 1.05x or 1.1x speed. As a result, the characters' voices sound slightly higher-pitched than normal, which could potentially be why the WB executives believed Welker's voice had gone down an octave.

Surprisingly, there were no Scooby-Doo comics at all for a period of 17 years, between 1978 and 1995. There were a few reprints of Charleton comics in 1992, but there was no new content during this period. 

Another fun fact you may not know about the comics is that even before Scooby began frequently running into real monsters in the 1980s TV shows and films, Scooby ran into real supernatural threats quite a few times in the 1970s comics.

Thanks to Tom Holste for coming up with the idea for this week's fun fact!