In Which We Scrutinize “Scooby Doo”

Ken Spears and Joe Ruby had a lot in common: both born in March (Spears #otd), both died in 2020, both born in Los Angeles, both served in the Navy. Oh, and both were co-creators of Scooby Doo.

It’s not our main jam, but we have written about dozens of what we used to think of as Saturday morning cartoon shows in a dedicated section of Travalanche, and some of the ones who we gave attention to, like Goober and the Ghost Chasers and Josie and the Pussycats, owe a little or a lot to Scooby Doo. And we have written about some of the show’s voice-over cast members. So herewith, a missing puzzle piece.

The story goes that in the late 1960s Hanna-Barbera wanted a Saturday morning mystery series to address the fact that parents were getting concerned about the violence on the many superhero series of the day. (Violence, we may add, of an amount and a type that could only be regarded as quaint by today’s audiences). Ruby and Spears went off to the drawing board, and after MUCH development and tinkering, the team finally cooked up Scooby Doo, Where Are You? I am astounded to learn that only two seasons of the original show were produced (1969-1970) — although those original episodes were rerun through 1976.

Spook comedy mysteries have a long and noble history. Major associations with the subgenre include Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, Our Gang, and The Bowery Boys. Keaton, Llloyd, and Larry Semon made them, and quite honestly you can trace them all the way back to Melies. That said, the biggest mystery on this show is how is it possible that four teenagers are living in a van together without doing drugs and constantly humping each other? It’s for children, that’s why of course, but I’m here to tell you that if I’m Shaggy or Fred, I’m going to be on the make for Daphne or Velma 24/7, with little time for ghosts. But I’m glad the show is not Euphoria; real life is trending horrible enough without making the culture worse. Anyway, I was going on four years old when Scooby Doo, Where Are You? premiered, blissfully unaware of sex or drugs. As for rock and roll, Scooby Doo’s bubble gum theme song was just my speed — and still is.

The Scooby Doo franchise never went out of existence, there have been endless spin-offs, sequels, and reboots, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining what Scooby Doo IS. But I’ll spend a little, since there still walk among us human beings who were grown-ups when the show premiered. The idea is that four teen sleuths are hired to investigate hauntings or monster infestations of one sort or another. In the highly formulaic ritual, at the end of every episode the monster is literally unmasked and found to have been one of the characters we have met during the story, who has been impersonating a ghoul in order to commit some crime. When apprehended by authorities, the malefactor always shakes his fist and says, “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”

We have heretofore neglected the show’s star. Named after Sinatra’s scatting in “Strangers in the Night” (a fact I would not realize until I became a teenager), Scooby Doo is a cowardly Great Dane who can not only think but TALK (after a fashion). His dialogue (indelibly voiced by Don Messick) is sort of “dogged up”. If you’ve ever heard some annoying person say “ruh roh” for “uh oh”, that is a Scoobyism. He is also given to using his own name as a kind of cheer or exclamation (“Scooby Dooby Dooooo!”) which I imagine is the origin of Grape Ape’s similar habit. He is also fond of consuming “Scooby Snacks”.

Scooby’s owner? master? — I guess we’re not allowed to say such things any more, so I’ll go with “human companion” — is a hip-speaking beatnik named Shaggy played by Casey Kasem. The character is clearly based on Bob Denver’s Maynard G. Krebs from Dobie Gillis, which had only gone off the air but a few years prior. Amusingly, Shaggy was already pretty dated by the time the show premiered, a tell that the writers were twice the age of the characters they were creating. His kind of jargon had gone out with the Eisenhower era. The hairstyle that gave him his nickname emulates the Beatles of 1964, five years earlier. But by 1969, Lennon and Harrison and their peers were looking more like Gandalf and Saruman.

As befits a kids show, the comic relief characters were the stars. There were three straighter characters as well, presumably to appeal to actual tweens and tweens who might be watching: the good looking Fred and Daphne, and the bookish Velma.

In 1972 came the next iteration of the series The New Scooby Doo Movies which took the concept one step further in outlandishness by booking celebrity guest stars (or impersonators) who teamed up with Mystery, Inc. to solve capers. Speaking of ghosts, among them are Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges. The rest of the hallucination inducing litany includes a mash-up of fellow cartoon characters, pre-cartoonized sit-com characters, pop stars and comedians, including The Addams Family, Josie and the Pussycats, Batman, Jonathan Winters,Don Knotts, Phyllis Diller, Tim Conway, Don Adams, Dick Van Dyke, Mama Cass, Davy Jones of The Monkees,Sonny & Cher,Sandy Duncan (!), country music legend Jerry Reed (???), and Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie (but a cartoon version voiced by someone other than Barbara Eden).

In 1976 Scooby Doo moved from CBS to ABC. As The Scooby Doo Show it was part of The Scooby Doo/Dynomutt Hour for one season, and Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics for another. (Stop calling me a “scholar!”) In 1979, Lenny Weinrib joined the cast as the inevitable, irritating puppy character Scrappy Doo. It is a TV axiom of course: when you resort to adding a new kid character you’ve jumped the shark. That same year, there was a 10th anniversay prime time special Scooby Goes Hollywood, with special guests from Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Charlie’s Angels, et al, in some sort of craven crossover attempt to draft kids as audiences for the prime time series (surely they weren’t trying to turn adults on to Saturday morning cartoons?)

There were uncountable other iterations and spinoffs of the show over the ensuing decades, but Scooby Doo REALLY went Hollywood in 2002 with the first live action movie. As with the Josie and the Pussycats movie I could only watch about five minutes of it before belching an unprintable oath and selecting another program. By contrast, during the Covid lockdown, I spent a half hour with an original Scooby episode from the ’70s for the first time in many decades and was bathed in heavenly bliss.

Thus and so: one more monster unmasked!