The Mystery Gang’s signature deli creation has come to life at Fan Fest Nights, and the reviews are … mixed, Scoob.
If you grew up watching Scooby-Doo, you spent a non-trivial amount of your childhood staring at sandwiches. Specifically, you stared at the towering, wobbling, physics-defying creations Shaggy Rogers would throw together in roughly four seconds of animation, and you thought: I would like to eat that.
Universal Studios Hollywood heard you. They have, in fact, put one of those sandwiches on a menu. It is called the Super Shaggy Sandwich, it is part of this year’s Fan Fest Nights, and it has accidentally become the internet’s main character for the weekend.
What it actually is
Universal Fan Fest Nights is a separately ticketed after-hours event at Universal Studios Hollywood, running select nights from April 23 through May 16, 2026, and now in its second year. The 2026 lineup leans hard into franchise crossovers — One Piece, Sailor Moon, Yoshi, Dungeons & Dragons, the Wizarding World, and a marquee Scooby-Doo Meets the Universal Monsters experience that takes over the Little Europe section of the park’s backlot.
The food menu, developed by Executive Chef Julia Thrash, is built around those fandoms. The Scooby section gets you Scooby Snacks (honey-cinnamon graham dog-tag cookies and chocolate paw-print cookies, which are genuinely cute), a Colossal Monster Dog, and the Super Shaggy Sandwich — billed by Universal as “a stacked club sandwich shareable with your own Mystery Gang.”
The reference is real, and it’s deeper than you’d expect. The original Super Shaggy Sandwich appears in “Hassle in the Castle,” the third episode of the original 1969 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! run, where Shaggy describes his creation as a “double-triple-decker sardine and marshmallow-fudge sandwich” topped with an olive — before Scooby eats the entire thing in one bite while Shaggy isn’t looking. It even popped up on Jeopardy! in 2023 as a $400 clue. The Universal version is, mercifully, not made of sardines and fudge. It’s a multi-tier club: roast beef, ham, turkey, lettuce, tomato, cheese, potato chips between the layers, mayo as the sole condiment, an olive on top for the gag.
So why is everyone dunking on it?
Because of this:
That second photo is the entire problem. Plated under purple Fan Fest lighting next to its themed packaging, the sandwich genuinely looks like a cartoon come to life — three full sandwich-tiers tall, olive perched on a toothpick, Scooby Snacks box behind it for scale. Stuffed sideways into a clear plastic to-go bag and held up in someone’s hand, it looks like the contents of a Trader Joe’s clearance bin after a long day in the sun.
The early hands-on reviews from outlets that previewed the menu didn’t help. BuzzFeed’s writer called it “just OK,” noted that mayo is the only condiment doing any work, and — most damningly — pointed out that the potato chips layered between the bread go soggy almost immediately, because they are sitting directly on top of wet lettuce and tomato. The thing that makes the sandwich visually iconic is also the thing that structurally guarantees disappointment about ten minutes after purchase.
The bigger picture
Theme park food has been a slow-rolling internet bit for years now — Disney’s $20 corn dog, Universal’s various Butterbeer adjacents, every “is the Dole Whip still worth it” thinkpiece — and the Super Shaggy Sandwich is just the freshest entry in a very long ledger. What makes this one travel is the gap between the source material and the execution. People are not really mad about a $20 club sandwich at a theme park; $20 club sandwiches at theme parks are the baseline reality of being alive in 2026. They’re mad about the bag. They’re mad that something designed to evoke a specific, beloved cartoon image has been packaged in a way that converts the visual joke into a logistical apology.
It’s also worth saying: the sandwich is explicitly marketed as shareable, which means the $20 splits across two or three people if you’re doing it right, and reduces to a perfectly normal park-food line item. The viral framing of “$20 sandwich in a bag” and the actual experience of “split a giant novelty club with friends after waiting in line for the Forbidden Forest walkthrough” are two different products, and the first one is funnier.
The Mystery Gang would, presumably, solve this case by realizing the real monster was the to-go packaging all along. Or by letting Scooby eat the whole thing in one bite the way he’s supposed to. Either works.
Universal Fan Fest Nights runs through May 16. The sandwich is at the Scooby-Doo Meets the Universal Monsters food stalls in Little Europe. Bring friends. Eat it fast. Maybe ask them to leave it on the tray.
