Powerful Shaggy: an investigation

If you’ve been on the internet anytime in the past few days — be it Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit — then you will likely have seen a Shaggy meme. Specifically a meme about Shaggy being some sort of omnipotent being able to possess his co-stars, defeat any powerful opponent, and alter the fabric of space-time. This meme was most likely words added onto a behind-the-scenes interview with the cast of the live-action Scooby Doo movie talking about Shaggy’s ultimate power.

Powerful Shaggy even caught the eye of Matthew Lillard, who played Shaggy in the live-action movies and took over the voice acting role when the original Shaggy actor retired in 2009.

But what seems like a sudden influx of Shaggy memes, starting from absolutely nowhere and blowing up to the point where the man behind Shaggy himself started to take notice, actually represents a slow build up of Shaggy memes that culminated in something beautiful. It’s the story of an insular, pocketed meme catching fire for a mainstream audience.

Let us go back to the beginning.

A 2011 movie called Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur featured a scene where, under the influence of hypnosis, Shaggy beats up an entire biker gang at a diner. In 2017, YouTube user Midya juxtaposed this clip with the Ultra Instinct music from Dragon Ball Super. This is the theme that plays when Goku first reached Ultra Instinct form in the episode “Son Goku Wakes! New Level of the Awakened!!,” which aired on Oct. 8, 2017. Four days later, the Shaggy version was posted.

The concept of Shaggy being a super powerful character in the Dragon Ball universe continued to tickle the internet’s fancy and for the rest of 2017 and into 2018, certain online pockets continued to make edits, art, and videos of Ultra Instinct Shaggy. While there’s no shortage of Ultra Instinct Shaggy posts out there, none of them reached the virality of the current Shaggy memes. Still, the idea of Shaggy as an all-powerful being started to lodge itself into the minds of deep internet denizens.

In April 2018, another competitor arose. An all-powerful, snapping supervillain, the most powerful in the universe ended up decimating half of the universe into nonexistence. Finally — a foe worthy of Shaggy.

The idea of Shaggy beating Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War bounced around on certain pockets of Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter. While the original drawing of Thanos battling Shaggy racked up lots of likes, subsequent posts just did alright. Though it never got large enough to count as viral, the idea of Shaggy defeating Thanos lasted for a pretty long time.

Super powerful Shaggy started to catch more virality two months ago, with a Reddit post on r/bossfights featuring Shaggy reached about 3,100 upvotes. A few more Reddit and 4chan posts about all-powerful Shaggy started to circulate, but I theorize what really contributed to mass proliferation of the Shaggy meme was a tweet, which made use of the already trending Sasuke meme.

There are plenty of internal memes that circulate Reddit and Tumblr without ever crossing over onto other social platforms, so there is a possibility that Powerful Shaggy could’ve stayed within the deep trenches of Reddit were it not for GnarlyBuster on Twitter, who brought this niche meme to the mainstream. Those not familiar with it were intrigued, those familiar with it clamored for their own internet cred.

Powerful Shaggy made it to the main.

The subreddit r/BadAssShaggy was created on Jan. 17 and began to spark memes of all sorts. There’s also a petition to include Powerful Shaggy in Mortal Kombat 11. While r/BadAssShaggy makes more use of Shaggy fighting other powerful beings, the Tumblr tag mostly contains edited screenshots of the live-action cast, edits of other memes, and the occasional absolutely bewildered post (also this one nod to Polygon’s Unraveled series). Twitter, meanwhile, mostly saw the screenshot memes and is currently fixated on the fact that Matthew Lillard, voice and body of Shaggy himself, has come around and full-heartedly endorsed Powerful Shaggy.

So thus, the tale of Powerful Shaggy reflects its subjects own rise: first growing in power within one area (Shaggy is the most powerful being in Dragon Ball; Shaggy as the subject of smaller meme communities), slowly growing more and more popular (Shaggy can defeat Thanos; Shaggy growing more mainstream), until finally, Shaggy’s power transcended into something all-powerful and all-consuming (Shaggy as a godlike being that influenced the live-action movies; the Shaggy memes exploding across Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter alike).

We bow down to you, Shaggy.