Mystery Inc. is the gang at the heart of Scooby-Doo: four teenagers, Fred, Daphne, Velma and Shaggy, and a talking Great Dane called Scooby-Doo, who drive around in a van called the Mystery Machine solving cases. The classic cases are hauntings. A ghost, a ghoul or a monster is scaring people away from somewhere, and the gang works out who is really behind it.
The Scooby-Doo formula is the reason the show still works more than fifty years on: a spooky place, a monster, clues, a chase, a trap, and an unmasking that reveals an ordinary crook in a costume. This covers the first series, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969 and 1970), where the formula was set, and notes where later series changed it. Every design on the Scooby-Doo shelf comes from that world.
Who Mystery Inc. are
Each member has one job, and the show leans on it every episode.
Fred Jones is the leader: white shirt, orange ascot, and a plan for a trap. Daphne Blake, in purple, is the one who walks into danger, usually through a trapdoor, and the one most often grabbed by the monster. Velma Dinkley, in her orange jumper and thick glasses, is the brains: she spots the clue that cracks the case and, at the worst moment, loses her glasses and cannot see a thing.
Shaggy Rogers, in his baggy green shirt, is always hungry and always scared, and so is his best friend Scooby-Doo. The pair are the comic heart of the show: they find the monster first, by accident, and run. Scooby talks in a growling, R-heavy voice, which is where "Ruh-roh" comes from.
The Mystery Machine
The Mystery Machine is the gang's van, painted blue and green with orange flowers and its name along the side. It is often how a case starts: the van breaks down or runs out of fuel somewhere it should not, and the nearest building turns out to be a haunted castle, a deserted funfair or a creaking mansion.
The van is part of the cast. It carries the whole gang, Scooby included, from one case to the next. Monster Machine puts Scooby and Shaggy with the Mystery Machine.
The Scooby-Doo formula, step by step
Nearly every episode of the first series runs the same way, and that sameness is the point.
First, the gang arrives and a local warns them about the monster. Then the monster appears and scares everyone. Fred says the line that has become the formula's shorthand: they should split up. Fred goes with Daphne, Velma looks for clues, and Shaggy and Scooby end up somewhere dark with the monster behind them.
Next comes the chase, sometimes with a pop song playing over it. Velma pieces the clues together, and Fred builds a trap. The trap rarely works as planned, so Scooby and Shaggy, bribed with Scooby Snacks to act as bait, end up catching the monster by accident.
Last comes the unmasking. The monster is always a person in a costume, usually someone the gang met earlier in the episode, with a practical motive: hiding a smuggling operation, scaring people off land they want, or covering a theft. Caught, the villain grumbles that the plan would have worked if it had not been for those meddling kids.
The classic monsters
The first series built a gallery of monsters still known today, five of which share the Meddling Kids print.
The Black Knight comes first, in the first episode: a suit of armour bound for the local museum that seems to walk on its own. The ghost of Captain Cutler is a glowing figure in an old deep-sea diving suit, seen around the time yachts start vanishing; under the helmet is Cutler himself, very much alive. The Miner Forty-Niner haunts the old mines of Gold City, where a guest ranch now stands.
The Spooky Space Kook is a skull-faced ghost in a spacesuit, terrorising a local airfield with a high-pitched laugh. The Creeper, a shambling ghoul, turns up after a bank guard is knocked out and his car ransacked, and is unmasked as Mr Carswell, the bank's president. Beyond those five is the ghost clown of Bedlam in the Big Top, who haunts a circus and shares the Zoinks print with the whole gang.
Scooby Snacks, Zoinks and Jinkies
Scooby Snacks are dog treats, and the gang's only reliable way to get Scooby to do anything brave. Offer one and he will walk into the monster's lair; offer a box and he might even stay there. Shaggy eats them too. Scooby Snacks puts the two of them on the back.
Each member of the gang has a word. "Zoinks!" is Shaggy's, what he shouts when he sees the monster. "Jinkies!" is Velma's, when a clue clicks into place. Daphne's is "Jeepers!", and Scooby's is his name, howled at the end of an episode: "Scooby-Dooby-Doo!"
On the shelf
When the monsters are real
In the first series, the rule is absolute: there is no such thing as a real ghost. Every monster is a mask, and that is the show's whole argument, that the scary thing is just a person with a reason.
Later series bent the rule. Some added real supernatural creatures, and from the late 1990s a run of feature-length films let some of the monsters be real, to the gang's horror. Later series also added Scooby's nephew, Scrappy-Doo, and some dropped members of the gang for a while. When people talk about the classic formula, they mean the first series, where the mask always comes off.
On the back of a tee
The gang, the van and the monsters are on the Scooby-Doo shelf, drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: each member of Mystery Inc. is a single block of colour, green, orange, purple and white, and the monsters are silhouettes you can name from across a street.
Read next: Aku, Nowhere and the Land of Ooo: three cult cartoons explained (Courage faces a monster a week too, real ones) and Radiator Springs, the Piston Cup and Route 66: Cars explained.
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