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Alexa Lawlor has lost track of how many items are in her Scooby-Doo memorabilia collection.
Lawlor, 28, of Regina also doesn’t know how much money she has spent acquiring them — and she has not yet had the collection appraised.
For her, collecting is not about the numbers or accumulating any Scooby-Doo merchandise she sees.
“Generally, if an item doesn’t have a story, it’s not in here,” she said. “For the most part, I could tell you exactly where I got it or why it’s significant to me or why I think it’s fun, why it’s important.”
Lawlor admits having trouble remembering exactly when the collection started. As a youngster, she noticed her brother had a Scooby-Doo VHS tape and a little Scooby-Doo toy that he won at the fair.
Love at first sight
When she saw the toy, she just “immediately fell in love,” she said.
As a kid growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Scooby-Doo was a really easy gift idea for her. Scooby-Doo merchandise was everywhere because the live action movies were coming out.
Lawlor said the collection “spiraled” from there, with items eventually scattered all over the house.
“It’s really hard to find a photograph of me as a kid that doesn’t have Scooby-Doo,” she said.
The size of her collection really hit her and caught her off guard in the last five to seven years when she had the space to display everything, she said. The collection covers most of her living room, including eight bookshelves, and bleeds into the kitchen and hallway area.
Lawlor said she loves anything vintage — including jigsaw puzzles, VHS tapes and other physical media. She also has several dolls, figurines, action figures and stuffed animals.
But the collection also has items like character reference guides that were used by the staff at Hanna-Barbera, the production company behind Scooby-Doo.
She also has a character model sheet used by the artists to make sure poses were consistent, a storyboard from a Scooby-Doo film, and a framed comic book ad that she believes may have been the first promotion of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, the original TV show that started it all in 1969.
Lawlor also has a print of a Scooby-Doo scene autographed by Hanna-Barbera founders and animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, as well as the original animator of the Scooby-Doo gang, Iwao Takamoto.
Not afraid to ask
The first thing you notice when you walk into her living room is a giant cardboard display of the Scooby-Doo gang and the Mystery Machine that covers much of one wall. She saw it at a Spirit Halloween store and convinced staff to sell it to her.
Nowadays, she finds most new additions to her collection in online marketplaces, second-hand stores, flea markets, antique markets and garage sales.
“I call it my ‘Scooby Sense,'” she said. “If I see something that has potentially the right colours or if it’s an item that I know exists and I can see it from a distance, I am able to notice it and just make a beeline for it.”
Another time, Lawlor convinced a man at the Calgary Stampede, who had just won a giant, stuffed toy of Scooby-Doo at a game of chance, to sell her his newly-won prize. She and her friend had decided to do that in advance, she said.
“And we’re like, ‘OK, do we actually want to do this?’ Is this too crazy of an idea to go up to a stranger and be like, ‘Hey, so I know you won this fair and square playing the fair game, but also, would you sell it to us?'”
Luckily, the first person they approached seemed very confident in his game of chance-playing abilities, she said.
“I don’t know if he was showing off or if this was true. He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, sure, no problem. Give me 10 bucks, I’ll just go get another one.'”
Jump into podcasting
Her podcast, The Unmasked History of Scooby-Doo, began around the start of the pandemic.
Lawlor, who has a journalism degree and works in communications, decided to put her skills to use in something that she was passionate about.
She said she used to love the special features on DVDs that had interviews with voice actors, directors and other people involved in the making of the shows.
But as physical media declined, so did the appearance of those features. She felt she could fill that gap in a podcast by interviewing people connected to the franchise.
She even got to interview Frank Welker, who voiced “Fred” in the original show and who in recent years has voiced Scooby-Doo.
“It’s been crazy. I never would have expected that so many people would be so interested in talking to someone, in Saskatchewan of all places, about this beloved franchise,” she said.
“The best moments are being able to talk to voice actors when they dip into the voice of the character. And I’m just sitting there on the other end of the interview like, ‘This is crazy.'”
Asked what it is about this franchise that captures her imagination, Lawlor said the 22-minute episodes take you on a journey.
“It’s truly one-size-fits-all. There are five main characters. You can identify with any single one of them, or if you’re like me, you can identify with little bits of every single one,” she said.
“So I think that, as a kid, I really saw myself in Scooby-Doo and it was just so fun and so cool. And the monsters are scary sometimes, but then it always turns out to be a man in a mask. So you feel safe afterwards.”
