With Halloween season well underway, fright enthusiasts have looked to their favorite horror films as a source of celebration this year. One modern classic franchise is The Blair Witch Project, which astounded both audiences with its realistic presentation of found footage-based spoops, as well as studios with its ability to leave a profoundly frightening impression on such a small budget. Another franchise often associated with Halloween, for the opposite reasons, is Scooby-Doo. The mystery-solving talking dog has crossed over with many franchises over the years, including Batman and Supernatural, but now it has been found that a Scooby-Doo Blair Witch parody special was made for Cartoon Network back in the day.

GameRant recently reported on the long-forgotten Scooby-Doo Blair Witch parody special created to promote a Scooby-Doo Halloween marathon on Cartoon Network back in 1999. At the time, the then-recent theatrical release of The Blair Witch Project took the horror world by storm and dominated the cultural zeitgeist. With Cartoon Network needing to promote their Scooby-Doo marathon on a shoestring budget, the marketing team took inspiration from that year’s similar micro budget champion, The Blair Witch Project.

The Scooby-Doo Blair Witch special was structured as quick minute-long segments to be interspersed between marathon episodes, but have since been collected in sequence as a full special. To keep costs low, much of the special was shot in live-action, complete with a real-life Mystery Machine van, with the animated Scooby-Doo characters inserted as minimally as possible. All of the then-current voice actors were also included in the special, although they apparently had their lines recorded over a phone call, again for budgetary and fittingly-stylized reasons.

The Scooby-Doo Blair Witch special was quite highly praised at the time for its cleverness and meta-commentary on both franchises, and even won an Annie award for best animated special project that year. It’s fascinating to see such a cultural mashup that no one could have predicted as an official crossover back in the day, but it’s the perfect time of year to re-watch the special. Now here’s hoping we get a Scooby-Doo/Midsommar crossover some time in the future.

What do you think about the lost Scooby-Doo Blair Witch parody special? Let us know in the comments below! Be sure to stay tuned for the latest Scooby Doo news, such as James Gunn stating that he originally wrote Velma as gay in the first live action Scooby-Doo film, here on Don’t Feed the Gamers! Follow us on Twitter to see our updates the minute they go live!