Are you ready to see the Winchesters take on an animated threat? In the upcoming 13th season of Supernatural, the Winchester brothers, played by Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, will team up with the legendary Scooby-Doo.
This isn’t a new idea. The concept of an animated episode has been around since Season 4, and co-show runner Andrew Dabb revealed it wasn’t until Jeremy Adams, the episode’s co-writer, made the pitch that the ball started to roll.
The great thing is that both properties are owned by Warner Bros. This makes it much easier for the crossover to happen. Reason being there would be no copyright issues to put up with. Because of this, the creative team was excited at the prospect of making a partially animated episode.
This isn’t the first time the Supernatural team has broken barriers. Fans might remember “The French Mistake” from Season 6 Episode 15. In that episode, the actors play themselves in a universe where their lives are the product of a television show.
Another episode where they do this is in “Changing Channels” from Season 5 Episode 8. Here the brothers are trapped in a plethora of television show parodies. The Scooby-Doo crossover is only a natural extension of what the show has done in the past.
With all that said the team stated the episode is looking at an early 2018 debut. Executive producer Robert Singer spoke to Hidden Remote about how the idea came about:
Andrew [Dabb] knew some guys over at Warner Bros. Animation and they floated this idea. We took it to Warner Bros. and asked, ‘What do you think?’ and everybody got really excited about it. The guys have already recorded their parts and, I think, the Scooby Doo people have already recorded their parts. It’s one of our bigger swings.
I would say three-quarters of that episode is animation. I’ve seen the tests of Sam and Dean working with Scooby, it’s pretty fantastic. We’re really excited about it. I’m pretty confident people are going to like it. It’s a long process. We started working on this last January and we won’t get the final animation until this coming January. We’ve been talking it for years and we’ve finally able to pull it off.
Ackles was excited about the energy for the episode when he spoke with The Mary Sue:
When we did the voice over, you could feel the energy inside the recording booth.
It’ll be very Scooby-Doo-esque. Just a little slightly darker version of Scooby Doo, but I will say that when we went in and did the recording, it was Jared [Padalecki], myself, and Misha.
We recorded, we put cameras and there were GoPros all over. All of that will be on special features, but we were like vibrating we were so excited about it. We were so thrilled, and the whole process of doing the dialogue, we were having a scene. It’s ridiculously funny.
Scooby-Doo won’t be the only experiment Supernatural will try out this season. They are also planning a pilot episode for a spin-off show featuring the Wayward Sisters.
Season 13 of Supernatural returns to The CW on Thursday, October 12th