The idea of Scooby-Doo was inspired by popular teen shows in the 1960s. Fred Silverman, who was CBS’s head of daytime programming at the time, wanted to copy the success of the Archies. His pitch was “a teenage rock band that would solve mysteries”. Hanna-Barbera gave the pitch to writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, and artist Iwao Takamoto to work on. The first draft they came up with was a group called “The Mysteries Five”. The members were Geoff, Mike, Kelly, Linda, W.W. (who was an additional kid brother), and a bongo-playing sheepdog named Too Much. This draft were rough duplicates of Archie's characters Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica and Hot Dog. Fred Silverman was not impressed so he sent them back to the drawing board. It was at this time that the writers got the idea of basing the characters off of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Fred is Dobie, Daphne is Thalia, Shaggy is Maynard, and Velma is Zelda. 10 years on September 13, 1969 the first episode of “Scooby Doo Where Are You?” premiered. When it premiered the show offered no backstory, no reason why they came together as a group and absolutely no hints to why they started solving mysteries in the first place. Hanna-Barbra has tried to provide context and origin stories with the numerous shows and spin-offs but did not do a good job with it. One of the shows (A Pup Named Scooby Doo) shows the five detectives solving mysteries as children. This was one of the poor attempts to create a backstory for the gang. “Scooby-doo Where Are You?” consists of seventeen twenty-minute-long episodes in the first season, and eight in the second. Every episode follows a similar plot as the last. The gang stumbles upon a strange or supernatural activity in a place like an amusement park, a swamp, a theater, hotel, restaurant, etc. There will be some type of monster scaring people away from said place. The gang then will trespass on the property and will encounter the monster, chase or get chased by a monster, then finally trap it, unmask it, and it turns out to be some type of forger, counterfeiter, treasure-hunter, or other opportunist in a costume driving people away from said place for their own selfish reasons. Really tells you sometimes things are not what they seem to be. After “Scooby-Doo Where Are You?” ended, numerous spin offs and series came out roughly every 3 years. In 1998 a Scooby-Doo movie came out named “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island”. In this movie, Scooby-Doo and the gang reunite in search of mysteries and they take a chance upon a remote island haunted by a zombie pirate and his zombie crew. More movies and shows came out after this movie and the most recent Scooby-Doo movie to come out is Scoob. Throughout the late 1900s up to 2022 Scooby-doo has always been such a loveable show and will always be such a fun cartoon to watch.
