A gentler cartoon
In the late 1960s, American parents' groups complained that Saturday morning cartoons had become too violent, full of superheroes fighting monsters. The television network CBS asked the animation studio Hanna-Barbera for something gentler: a group of teenagers solving mysteries. The first version was about a teenage band called the Mysteries Five, with a bongo-playing dog. The band was dropped, the dog became the star, and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! began in September 1969.
The dog's name came from the end of Frank Sinatra's song Strangers in the Night, in which he scat-sings doo-be-doo-be-doo. SCOOBY, a Great Dane, is famously cowardly, as is his best friend, SHAGGY, and together they will do almost anything for a Scooby Snack. The studio's designer, Iwao Takamoto, spoke to a dog breeder about what makes a prize-winning Great Dane, then deliberately did the opposite: Scooby has a sloping back, bowed legs and a small chin. Guinness World Records has listed the franchise as the most prolific cartoon series ever made. Our cartoons page covers other shows from the same era.
It is always a man in a mask
Almost every episode follows the same pattern. The gang arrive in their van, the MYSTERY MACHINE, painted with flowers in the style of the late 1960s, at a HAUNTED MANSION, an old theme park or a spooky fairground, where a GHOST, a PHANTOM or a MONSTER is scaring people away. FRED, the leader, sets a TRAP, which usually goes wrong; VELMA, the clever one who is always losing her glasses, spots the CLUE; and at the end the VILLAIN is caught and the MASK pulled off, to reveal a very ordinary person in a DISGUISE, often someone who wanted to scare people off to find treasure or buy land cheaply.
The unmasked villain's grumble that they would have got away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids became one of the most famous lines in cartoon history. The lesson, repeated in hundreds of episodes, is that the scary thing is never really supernatural.
Voices that lasted fifty years
Casey Kasem voiced Shaggy for most of the years from 1969 until 2009. A vegetarian himself, he once asked for Shaggy to become a vegetarian too, and the character was. Frank Welker, who has voiced Fred since the very first episode in 1969, also took over as the voice of Scooby in 2002, so one man has played two of the gang for decades. DAPHNE, who is always getting into trouble, and Velma, with her cry of JINKIES, and Shaggy's ZOINKS are as famous as the dog himself.
A live-action film, with the dog added by computer, came out in 2002, with Matthew Lillard as Shaggy; he later took over as Shaggy's cartoon voice when Kasem retired. There have been dozens of series and films since. Scooby's nephew, Scrappy-Doo, added in 1979, is one of the least popular characters in cartoon history. The mood of the whole show is SPOOKY, and it is a favourite at Halloween, as our Halloween page explains, with the gang as the DETECTIVE team and a SNACK for every MYSTERY solved.