Scooby-Doo
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 later absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation in 2001. The series features four teenagers named 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 in a brightly colored van called the Mystery Machine. The franchise has numerous shows, films, and specials.
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 to 1991. Two Scooby-Doo reboots aired as part of Kids' WB on The WB and its successor The CW from 2002 to 2008. Further reboots aired on Cartoon Network from 2010 to 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 2013, TV Guide ranked Scooby-Doo the fifth-greatest TV cartoon of all time.
Development
In 1968, parent-run organizations, particularly Action for Children's Television, began protesting what they perceived as excessive violence in Saturday-morning cartoons. 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. 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. 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.
After attempting to develop his version of the show, called House of Mystery, Barbera, who developed and sold Hanna-Barbera shows while Hanna produced them, 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. When the former was chosen, Ruby and Spears wrote Too Much as a Great Dane but revised the dog character to a large sheepdog just before their presentation to Silverman, as Ruby feared the character would be too similar to the comic strip character Marmaduke. 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.
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.
Ruby and Spears' second pass at the show used Dobie Gillis as the template for the teenagers rather than Archie. The treatment retained the dog Too Much, while reducing the number of teenagers to four, removing the Mike character and retaining Geoff, Kelly, Linda, and W.W. As their personalities were modified, so were the characters' names: Geoff became "Ronnie"—later renamed "Fred", Kelly became "Daphne", Linda "Velma", and W.W. "Shaggy". The teens were now based on four teenage characters from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: Dobie Gillis, Thalia Menninger, Zelda Gilroy and Maynard G. Krebs, respectively.
The revised show was re-pitched to Silverman, who liked the material but, disliking the title Mysteries Five, decided to call the show Who's S-S-Scared? Silverman presented Who's S-S-Scared? to the CBS executives as the centerpiece for the upcoming 1969–70 season's Saturday-morning cartoon block. CBS president Frank Stanton felt that the presentation artwork was too scary for young viewers and, thinking the show would be the same, decided to pass on it.
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! The revised show was re-presented to CBS executives, who approved it for production.
CBS years (1969–76)
''Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!''
The first episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! "What a Night for a Knight" debuted on the CBS network Saturday, September 13, 1969, at 10:30 AM Eastern Time. The original voice cast featured Don Messick as Scooby-Doo, Casey Kasem as Shaggy, Frank Welker as Fred, actress Nicole Jaffe as Velma, and Indira Stefanianna as Daphne. Scooby's speech patterns closely resembled an earlier cartoon dog, Astro from The Jetsons, also voiced by Messick. Seventeen episodes of Scooby-Doo Where Are You! were produced in 1969–70. The series theme song was written by David Mook and Ben Raleigh, and performed by Larry Marks.Each of these episodes features Scooby and the four teenage members of Mystery, Inc.—Fred, Shaggy, Daphne, and Velma—arriving at a location in the Mystery Machine, a van painted with psychedelic colors and flower power imagery. Encountering a purportedly supernatural monster terrorizing the local populace, such as a ghost, they decide to investigate. The kids split up to look for clues and suspects, while being chased at turns by the monster. Eventually, the kids come to realize the paranormal activity is actually an elaborate hoax, and—often with the help of a Rube Goldberg-like trap designed by Fred—they capture the creature suit-wearing villain and unmask him or her. Revealed usually as a flesh and blood crook who used the costume to cover up their crimes, the villain is arrested and taken to jail, often with the catchphrase "if it weren't for those pesky/meddling kids". A few times though, the "villain" turns out to be innocent, such as a haywire robot or the owner disguised to scare away thieves. However, in all cases, the 'supernatural' element of the mystery was revealed to be phony -- in the end, there were no actual ghosts or monsters featured on the show.
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. 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, 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.
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. 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. 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.
Scooby-Doo itself influenced many other Saturday-morning cartoons of the 1970s. During that decade, Hanna-Barbera and its rivals produced several animated programs also featuring teenage detectives solving mysteries with a pet or mascot of some sort, including Josie and the Pussycats, The Funky Phantom, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Speed Buggy, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Jabberjaw, and Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels.