An observant TikTok user has discovered that a sequence from the fourth season of Netflix's Stranger Things is almost identical to one featured on Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
In the sixth episode of Stranger Things 4, "Chapter Six: The Dive," several of the show's teenage protagonists take a boat out onto a lake in Hawkins in search of a portal to the Upside Down. Upon discovering the portal is beneath the surface of the lake, the group reluctantly decides to dive underwater and swim through the portal. Following the episode's release on Netflix, TikTok user "cowboinary" posted a clip from a 2013 episode of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated along with a caption saying they "loved this episode of Stranger Things 4." The Scooby-Doo clip also features several teenage protagonists in a boat who discover the inter-dimensional portal they're searching for is underwater.
Stranger Things And Scooby-Doo Are Super Similar
While comparisons between Stranger Things and Scooby-Doo have been made before, the similarities between these two scenes are hard to ignore for many fans. One commenter even pointed out that in the Scooby-Doo scene, Velma mentions the portal is "upside down" from where Mystery Inc. is. The TikTok has received over one million views as of this writing, leading @cowboinary to make more Stranger Things/Scooby-Doo comparison videos.
First airing on Cartoon Network in 2010, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated was a significant departure from what fans of the long-running franchise came to expect. The series featured multiple series-long story arcs, heavy character development, and dark themes. Another first for the franchise was that the series' version of Velma Dinkley was canonically gay despite her sexuality never being explicitly stated in the series (another Stranger Things similarity). "I've said this before, but Velma in Mystery Incorporated is not bi. She's gay," series producer Tony Cervone wrote in a 2020 Instagram post. "We always planned on Velma acting a little off and out of character while she was dating Shaggy because that relationship was wrong for her and she had unspoken difficulty with the why."
Fans who can't fill the Stranger Things-shaped void left by the end of Season 4 with Scooby-Doo may rest easy knowing the show's writers are already hard at work with the fifth and final season. Although no official date has been given for Stranger Things 5, series star David Harbour recently said that he thinks the season will "probably come out mid-2024, based on our track record."
Seasons 1-4 of Stranger Things are available to stream on Netflix, while Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is available on HBO Max.
Source: TikTok