You think Scrappy-Doo is insultingly ill-conceived? Film-Flam is a small, doe-eyed, orphaned Hispanic child who joined Scooby and the gang to hunt down a chest of demons for The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. He’s a liar and a huckster by nature, with a wild mop of black hair. To make things even more insufferable, Flim-Flam did not replace Scrappy-Doo. No, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo augmented the core mystery-solvers with both Scrappy-Doo and Flim Flam.

True, Flim-Flam’s reign of terror did not last anywhere near as long as Scrappy-Doo's. Scrappy had close to a decade in the limelight before being phased out on account of the blinding hatred the character engendered from everyone older than five. But Flim-Flam’s day in the sun was brief. He didn’t even have much of an opportunity to get on viewer’s nerves. He was one season and done, like Coy and Vance Duke on Dukes of Hazzard.

Granted, there is an insane amount of Scooby-Doo related stuff out there, ranging from a gritty science-fiction comic book called Scooby Apocalypse to the 1980s kiddie version A Pup Named Scooby Doo but it’s nevertheless fascinating that Flim-Flam could be erased from the public’s memory like the victim of a Stalinist purge. Of course, it doesn’t exactly help that making a Hispanic child a lying criminal and con artist is, at best #problematic but it seems like the racial component appeared to be one of many, many troubling elements of the character.

So now I am of course gripped with a morbid curiosity about Flim-Flam. How bad could he really be? Could he possibly be as offensive and obnoxious as he seems on paper? And why for the love of God was he allowed to exist in the first place?