Scooby Doo Cartoon
Shanae Maerz
Scooby-Doo is an American media franchise owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment and created in 1969 by writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears through their animated series, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, for Hanna-Barbera (which was absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation in 2001). The series features four teenagers: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Shaggy Rogers, and their talking Great Dane named Scooby-Doo, who solve mysteries involving supposedly supernatural creatures through a series of antics and missteps, while traveling using a brightly colored van called the "Mystery Machine".[1] The franchise has several live-action films and shows.
Scooby-Doo was originally broadcast on CBS from 1969 to 1976, when it moved to ABC. ABC aired various versions of Scooby-Doo until canceling it in 1986, and presented a spin-off featuring the characters as children called A Pup Named Scooby-Doo from 1988 until 1991. Two Scooby-Doo reboots aired as part of Kids' WB on The WB and its successor The CW from 2002 until 2008. Further reboots were produced for Cartoon Network beginning in 2010 and continuing through 2018. Repeats of the various Scooby-Doo series are frequently broadcast on Cartoon Network's sister channel Boomerang in the United States and other countries. The most recent Scooby-Doo series, Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, premiered on June 27, 2019, as an original series on Boomerang's streaming service and later HBO Max.
In 1968, parent-run organizations, particularly Action for Children's Television (ACT), began protesting what they perceived as excessive violence in Saturday-morning cartoons.[3] Most of these shows were Hanna-Barbera action cartoons such as Space Ghost, The Herculoids, and Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, and virtually all of them were canceled by 1969 because of pressure from the parent groups.[4] Members of these watch groups served as advisers to Hanna-Barbera and other animation studios to ensure that new programs would be safe for children.
Fred Silverman, an executive for daytime programming at CBS, was then looking for a show that would both revitalize his Saturday-morning line and please the watch groups. The result was The Archie Show from Filmation, based on Bob Montana's teenage humor comic book Archie. Also successful were the musical numbers The Archies performed during each program (one of which, "Sugar, Sugar", was the most successful Billboard number-one hit of 1969). Eager to build upon this success, Silverman contacted producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera about creating another show based on a teenage rock group, this time featuring teens who solved mysteries between gigs. Silverman envisioned the show as a cross between the popular I Love a Mystery radio serials of the 1940s and the Archie characters or the popular early 1960s television series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.[5]
After attempting to develop his version of the show, called House of Mystery,[6] Barbera, who developed and sold Hanna-Barbera shows while Hanna produced them,[6] passed the task along to story writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, as well as artist/character designer Iwao Takamoto. Their treatment, based in part on The Archie Show, was titled Mysteries Five and featured five teenagers: Geoff, Mike, Kelly, Linda, and Linda's brother W.W., along with their bongo-playing dog, Too Much, who collectively formed the band Mysteries Five. When The Mysteries Five were not performing at gigs, they were out-solving spooky mysteries involving ghosts, zombies, and other supernatural creatures. Ruby and Spears were unable to decide whether Too Much would be a large cowardly dog or a small feisty one.[6] When the former was chosen, Ruby and Spears wrote Too Much as a Great Dane but revised the dog character to a large sheepdog (similar to the Archies' sheepdog, Hot Dog) just before their presentation to Silverman, as Ruby feared the character would be too similar to the comic strip character Marmaduke.[6] Silverman rejected their initial pitch, and after consulting with Barbera on next steps, got Barbera's permission to go ahead with Too Much being a Great Dane instead of a sheepdog.[6][7]
During the design phase, lead character designer Takamoto consulted a studio colleague who was a breeder of Great Danes. After learning the characteristics of a prize-winning Great Dane from her, Takamoto proceeded to break most of the rules and designed Too Much with overly bowed legs, a double chin, and a sloped back, among other abnormalities.[8][9]
Now without a centerpiece for the upcoming season's programming, Silverman had Ruby, Spears, and the Hanna-Barbera staff revise the treatments and presentation materials to tone down the show and better reflect its comedy elements. The rock band element was dropped, and more attention was focused on Shaggy and Too Much. According to Ruby and Spears, Silverman was inspired by Frank Sinatra's scat "doo-be-doo-be-doo" at the end of his recording of "Strangers in the Night" on a red-eye flight to one of the development meetings, and decided to rename the dog "Scooby-Doo" and retitled the show Scooby-Doo, Where Are You![7][15] The revised show was re-presented to CBS executives, who approved it for production.
Scheduled opposite another teenage mystery-solving show, ABC's The Hardy Boys, Scooby-Doo became a ratings success, with Nielsen ratings reporting that as many as 65% of Saturday-morning audiences were tuned in to CBS when Scooby-Doo was being broadcast.[6][7] The show was renewed for a second season in 1970, for which eight episodes were produced. Seven of the second-season episodes featured chase sequences set to bubblegum pop songs recorded by Austin Roberts,[18] who also re-recorded the theme song for this season. With Stefanianna Christopherson having married and retired from voice acting, Heather North assumed the role of Daphne, and she continued to voice the character until 1997.[19]
The TV influences of I Love a Mystery and Dobie Gillis were apparent in the first episode. Of the similarities between the Scooby-Doo teens and the Dobie Gillis teens, the similarities between Shaggy and Maynard are the most noticeable; both characters share the same beatnik-style goatee, similar hairstyles, and demeanors.[6] The core premise of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! was also similar to Enid Blyton's Famous Five books. Both series featured four youths with a dog, and the Famous Five stories often revolved around a mystery which invariably turned out not to be supernaturally based, but simply a ruse to disguise the villain's true intent.
The role of each character was strongly defined in the series: Fred is the leader and the determined detective, Velma is the intelligent analyst, Daphne is danger-prone, Shaggy is a coward more motivated by hunger than any desire to solve mysteries, and Scooby is similar to Shaggy, save for a Bob Hope-inspired tendency towards temporary bravery.[7] Later versions of the show made slight changes to the characters' established roles, such as showing the Daphne in 1990s and 2000s Scooby-Doo productions as knowing many forms of karate and having the ability to defend herself, and reducing her tendency towards being kidnapped.
In the fall of 1972, new one-hour episodes under the title The New Scooby-Doo Movies were created; each episode featuring a real or fictitious guest star helping the gang solve mysteries, including characters from other Hanna-Barbera series such as Harlem Globetrotters, Josie and the Pussycats and Speed Buggy, the comic book characters Batman and Robin (adapted into their own Hanna-Barbera series, Super Friends, a year later), and celebrities such as Sandy Duncan, The Addams Family, Cass Elliot, Phyllis Diller, Don Knotts and The Three Stooges. Hanna-Barbera musical director Hoyt Curtin composed a new theme song for this series, and Curtin's theme remained in use for much of Scooby-Doo's original broadcast run. After two seasons and 24 episodes of the New Movies format from 1972 to 1973, CBS began airing reruns of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! series until its option on the series expired in 1976.[6]
As a result of Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo's success, the entire show was overhauled in 1980 to focus more upon Scrappy-Doo. At this time, Scooby-Doo started to walk and run anthropomorphically on two feet more often, rather than on four like a normal dog as he did previously. Fred, Daphne, and Velma were dropped from the series, and the new Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo format now consisted of three seven-minute comedic adventures starring Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy instead of one half-hour mystery. Most of the supernatural villains in the seven-minute Scooby and Scrappy cartoons, who in previous Scooby series had been revealed to be human criminals in costume, were now real within the context of the series.
Scooby-Doo was restored to a standalone half-hour in 1983 with The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show in 1983, which comprised two 11-minute mysteries per episode in a format reminiscent of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! mysteries. Heather North returned to the voice cast as Daphne, who in this incarnation solved mysteries with Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy while working undercover as a reporter for a teen magazine.
1985 saw the debut of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, which featured Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby, Scrappy, and new characters Flim-Flam (voiced by Susan Blu)[25] and Vincent Van Ghoul (based upon and voiced by Vincent Price) traveling the globe to capture "thirteen of the most terrifying ghosts upon the face of the earth." The final first-run episode of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo aired in December 1985, and after its reruns were removed from the ABC lineup the following March, no new Scooby series aired on the network for the next two years.
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