Scooby Doo circa 1979
This poor pup, at the age of 44, was nearly decapitated sometime in those four plus decades.
His person didn’t remember if it was a fight with another dog or something else, but she found him stored like this among her mother’s things, and wanted to see about making him feel better. In addition to the neck wound, he was missing a spot on the back, needed some eye touchup… and we were planning a spa for him.
Here he is in his bubble bath:
I don’t know about you, but I can see his Scooby grin (which is actually missing) forming under the bubbles in that photo. I think it’s one of my favorite spa pics. Anyway, here’s his heart being made and installed.
Next his internal wire supports were straightened and reinstalled, and his neck injury was treated. That’s when I figured out he once had a collar, because a stub of it was clinging to the inside of his neck. So I spoke with his person and we planned a new collar. These were the felt options, based on illustrations of Scooby from that era (the stub of collar was so faded, it was hard to tell the original color).
The plan was just to do a collar, maybe with a blank diamond hanging from it as I couldn’t exactly replicate a machine embroidered tag (or the images of Scooby’s tags online). But it was the weekend, and we let Scooby rest and while he was resting and I was busy doing other things, I had an idea of how to make his tag! So I made a tag with the collar, attached it, and sent photos. I told his person if she didn’t like it, it was easy to go back to a plain gold diamond:
But she loved it! So we kept the SD tag and next was his new felt spot on his back to replace the missing one, and a new smile. Based on the stitches on his fur, it was hard to tell what his original smile looked like, so I sent a sketch with some example options:
His person chose the center one, but said thick yarn maybe? I knew it couldn’t have been thick yarn originally. There would have been larger holes. But based on all his felt parts, thought maybe it was felt, so that’s what we agreed to do. Soon, Scooby was smiling again and ready to fly home:
His person wrote “he looks brand new, wow I cannot thank you enough! Thank you so much!! He looks amazing!”
and when he got home, she added:
“He is home!!! He smells like my mom, I know you bathed him and cleaned him I don’t know how he does but that is the only thing I have now that smells like her. Thank you so so much!!!”
(that’s the heart of original stuffing holding the scent. 🙂)
This is part of a retrospective of older stuffed animal repair patient posts from my tumblr blog. You can read other back posts at doctorbeth.tumblr.com.
