By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our titular hero and her plucky team of allies have an adorable nickname: the Scooby Gang. In-universe, it was Xander who first gave his group of friends a nickname that would follow them through the end of the series. He did so in the Season 2 episode “What’s My Line? Part One,” but what most fans don’t realize is that Joss Whedon and the show’s producers had been building toward this nickname through a constant stream of Easter eggs from earlier in the show.
The Buffy Scooby Gang Clues
Just what kinds of early Buffy Easter eggs hinted that our hero and her crew would be called the Scooby Gang? In the Season 1 episode “Never Kill A Boy on the First Date,” we see that Willow is rocking a Scooby-Doo lunch box. This establishes the friendly geek as a fan of the classic cartoon, which is likely why she is wearing a Scooby-Doo t-shirt in the Season 1 episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” and the Season 2 episode “School Hard.”
And Willow isn’t the only member of the Scooby Gang to wear some official merch from the Hanna Barbera cartoon. Xander also wears a Scooby-Doo shirt in the Season 2 episode “When She Was Bad” and the Season 1 episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight.” That latter episode also includes a memorable moment when Xander emulates the Scooby character of Shaggy with the line, “Can you say, ‘gulp?’”
In other words, Xander’s love of all things Scooby is proven very early in the series. It’s no surprise, then, that he’s the Buffy character who first gives his group of friends the nickname “the Scooby Gang” in “What’s My Line? Part One.” While it was easy to miss, the show spent about a season and a half giving us very direct references to Scooby and his friends before Xander officially dropped their catchy group name.
Once Buffy and her friends had this cheeky nickname, the show’s writers never wasted an opportunity to mention the Scooby Gang by name in assorted episodes. Interestingly, certain characters put variations on the name…for example, Xander and Faith both used the fan-preferred term “Scooby Gang.” However, Willow weirdly uses the term “Scooby Corps” in the episode “The I in Team,” and Spike uses the term “Scooby Club” in “This Year’s Girl.”
For Buffy fans who loved the term “Scooby Gang,” things went full-on meta in 2002. That was the year that lead Buffy actor Sarah Michelle Gellar appeared as Daphne in the live-action Scooby-Doo film, a role she reprised in its 2004 sequel. Just like that, a Slayer who went by a nickname borrowed from a cartoon ended up bringing that cartoon to life as we had never seen it before.
There you have it, folks: the Buffy crew getting nicknamed the Scooby Gang was not simply a sudden creative decision by Joss Whedon or his in-universe stand-in, Xander. Instead, the nickname was a culmination of several pop culture references to everyone’s favorite members of Mystery, Inc. And while Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show where the monsters are very much real, characters like Principal Snyder and Mayor Wilkins soon teach the title character the chief lesson of Scooby-Doo: sometimes, the real monsters are simply shady humans with way too much to hide.
