Happy Birthday, Scooby Doo

It was 40 years ago, believe it or not, that a certain Great Dane ran scaredy cat straight into the hearts of millions. Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (the full official title of the original show) debuted in its Saturday morning time slot on CBS on September 13th, 1969. Because local stations tended to tape the Saturday morning cartoons pre-feed in the wee hours of Saturday and shuffle the running order, I can't cite a specific time slot. You may remember it as a 9:00 show, while others recall it being on at a different time. Doesn't matter. Whenever it aired, it was the big hit of the '69 cartoon schedule.

And a good thing it was. Hannah Barbera Productions, then recently acquired by Taft Broadcasting of Cincinnati, needed a hit. The parents groups, most notably the national PTA, were out to demonize animation right out of existance. While the campy prime time Batman series may have spawned a superhero glut in Saturday morning, HB and others soon found themselves under fire for bringing too much violence to the screen. Arguably, it was mostly cartoon violence - ray guns blasting space ships or Space Ghost freezing a swarm of space locust, although the animated Lone Ranger was known to carry a pistol - but the perception took over all reality. And, watching some of those shows today on Boomerang, I can see they kind of had a point. The moral of many of these shows is basically he who has the biggest ray gun wins. On the other hand, I just caught an episode of The Space Cadets, a show I adored at the age of 3, where the villains showed great restraint after kidnapping the youngest cadet, saying, "Aw. He's just a little kid." The space pirate then takes out his frustration by bopping his pint-size assistant.

Justified or not, Saturday morning needed to clean up its act. And the producers of these shows such as Joe Barbera and Bill Hannah, veterans of theatrical animated shorts who had never been held accountable by any social group let alone the PTA, whose nearly 20 year run of Tom and Jerry featured painful sight gags and outright malicious behavior, not to mention at least one racial joke per cartoon, found themselves caught in a tangle only network television could create. Make them funny, but not too funny. Come up with a mega-hit, but keep it low-key.

And so, the networks called for more live action shows. The formula was simple: animated cartoon=bad, live action=good. If the hundreds of craftspeople dedicated to the art of animation wanted to keep their happy homes, somebody needed to disprove the theory.

(There's a great example of how the networks started calling the shots within the pages of "Tex Avery: King of Cartoons" by Joe Adamson, De Capo Press. During the interview with Michael Maltese we get some incidental insight into the painful pre-production process of the 1967 Moby Dick cartoon series.)

During the 1960's, Hannah and Barbera hammered out a new series where a group of teens solved mysteries. Sort of like Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but with Maynard G. Krebs from Dobie Gillis. No ray guns. No super science. And villains wanted in six states, but with enough restraint to only cook up a haunted house ruse to scare people away, as opposed to shooting them. The Krebs character would have a beatnik sister with the up-to-date glasses and sweater look, and a far-out necklace. The other teens would be "normal" with good manners and a wardrobe right off of a Beach Boys album cover. They pitched the show to the networks. CBS showed interest, but it needed work. Some meddling kid executive at CBS suggested the show needed a dog. That executive's name was Fred Silverman.

Bill and Joe went back to the drawing board, put some white out over the glasses girl's necklace and made her the dateless brainy one and christened her with a name sure to get the point across: Velma. The ink and paint department was told to never color in Shaggy's soul patch. (By the time the show hit the air, Shaggy would've fit right in at most high schools' honor society.) And some dogs were auditioned.

The first was a sheepdog named Wayout, but he soon grew tiresome. Eventually, they found magic: a Great Dane big enough to do human things like fly a plane or sit at a table, but dog enough to be the gang's pet. But most important, he was the link to the audience, showing fear when entering a haunted house, and needing a pep talk or a Scooby Snack to boost his courage when the going got tough. This was no superdog. He was one of us. Scared when he ought to be, but courageous in spite of it. In other words, he was an antihero with a heart of gold.

Scooby Doo became the breakaway hit of the 1969 Saturday morning season. Today, Scooby is still one of the most recognizable and profitable properties in television, spinning off several new series and movies, along with DVD collections and endless reruns.

It ain't art. The animation was often hack work. The ink and paint quality declined unbearably as the series trudged on through the '70's, even the voice tracks sometimes seemed to be a recording of the first run-through. And we kids did notice at times. But the central idea overshadowed the show's shortcomings. And that oft quoted line that appeared at the end of a few of the original episodes brought it home. "Those meddling kids."

Let me tell you. In 1969, that "kids" line hit like a kick to the stomach. It was a different time, when the adults were "old" and stuck in their old ways, bringing war and pollution, and sweeping aside anything good just for another dollar or because they hated change. They made rules, and we were supposed to obey them just because they were adults and we were just "kids." Their job was to keep us in our place and protect us from new ideas and thinking for ourselves. Just follow along, kids, and do what you're told. These "kids" today are nothing but a bunch of trouble making hippies. Send the boy to Viet Nam. That'll learn him a thing or two.

Each week when Shaggy, Scooby, and Velma politely explained the villain's plot to the police, I got an electric thrill out of watching the wrong-minded adult brought down by those meddling "kids." Yeah, go ahead, mister. Get in your cheap shot at us "kids" before you go to jail. But we "kids" are the future. And you're just an old man.

Maybe I'm making too much of this, but I was six when the original Scooby Doo premiered. Maybe Scooby lives on because of that sense of rebellion. Young people watch it today, and for a time Shaggy and Velma were fashion statements - a just reward for the Velma's everywhere. Maybe those hokey pop tunes inserted in the chase sequences of the second season sound pretty good compared with the pop of today. I don't know.

But every once in a while, when somebody at work is pulling politics, or some mook tries to get under my skin, I still get a kick out of being that meddling kid.