Scooby-Doo History: The Cartoon That Keeps Finding New Generations

I was born in 1980 in Indonesia, so Scooby-Doo was already an old TV series by the time I knew it. I started watching it when I was in elementary school, back when the television in our home was still black and white.

As a child I was never a big Scooby-Doo fan. I actually found the series quite scary despite all the funny scenes. There is no particular episode that I remember, but of course I knew the characters. It was simply on, and I watched it, the way many children watched whatever the TV offered.

Still, I am quite surprised by how Scooby-Doo stayed with me anyway.

Years later, when I was married and had a young child of my own, Scooby-Doo was still on our TV too. The animation looked different and there had been many versions in between, but there was still Scooby, Shaggy and a mystery to solve.

There is something quite special about that when I think about it now. Two generations in the same family ended up watching a cowardly dog run away from ghosts.

And since it is October, when ghosts, monsters and spooky decorations seem to appear everywhere again, I became curious about the history behind Scooby-Doo. How did a cartoon that first appeared more than half a century ago manage to remain so familiar?

At the end of this article, I will also share some Scooby-Doo products that I find interesting, fun and timeless for home decoration.

Quick Answer: When did Scooby-Doo begin?

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! first aired on the American television network CBS on September 13, 1969. The series was created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears for Hanna-Barbera. What began as a mystery cartoon about four teenagers and a talking Great Dane grew into a long-running franchise with new series, films and different versions for later generations. More than 50 years later, Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are still recognisable characters.

When did Scooby-Doo first air, and who created it?

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! premiered on the American television network CBS on September 13, 1969. Joe Ruby and Ken Spears created the series for Hanna-Barbera, with Fred Silverman at CBS playing an important role in its development.

The first episodes introduced the group most people still recognise: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers and Scooby-Doo, a talking Great Dane.

They travelled in the Mystery Machine and investigated situations that appeared supernatural. Haunted houses, ghosts and monsters might fill an episode, but there was usually a human explanation waiting underneath the mask.

That formula became one of the most recognisable parts of Scooby-Doo, but it was not how the project originally began.

It did not start as the show I watched

An early version of the idea was called Mysteries Five. It followed a group of teenagers who performed in a band while also solving mysteries, an idea influenced by the success of music-based cartoons such as The Archie Show.

The dog was originally much less important. He was a bongo-playing sidekick called Too Much, and even his breed changed while the project was being developed.

The concept went through several revisions after CBS was not satisfied with an early presentation. Another working title was Who’s S-S-Scared?

Eventually, the music-group idea largely disappeared and the dog moved closer to the centre of the show.

By the time Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! reached television in 1969, the formula had become teenagers, a dog, a van and a mystery.

Scooby-Doo was partly a response to violent children’s television

There is a bigger piece of television history behind all those apparently harmless ghosts.

Saturday morning cartoons in the United States had become increasingly dominated by action and adventure during the 1960s. Superheroes, monsters, science fiction and dangerous situations were common, and concern about the amount of violence children were seeing on television was growing.

Those concerns intensified during the social and political turmoil of 1968. Parent and civic organisations criticised violent children’s programming, and American television networks began moving away from some of the action-heavy cartoons towards comedy.

CBS and Hanna-Barbera began developing what became Scooby-Doo during this period.

That helps explain something I never thought about when I watched the cartoon as a child. Scooby-Doo could look frightening without actually being particularly dangerous.

There were creepy castles, ghosts, monsters and dark corridors, but the characters were rarely facing the kind of serious threat found in the action cartoons that had preceded it.

Even better, the monster was usually not a monster at all. It was someone wearing a costume.

For a children’s programme, that was a clever compromise. It could offer the excitement of horror without requiring the supernatural threat to be real.

Where the name Scooby-Doo came from

The name is usually credited to Fred Silverman, who was in charge of daytime programming at CBS.

The best-known story is that Silverman was inspired by the “doo-be-doo-be-doo” phrase at the end of Frank Sinatra’s recording of Strangers in the Night.

There have been different recollections about exactly what inspired the name, so the Sinatra connection is better treated as the commonly told account rather than an unquestionable fact.

What is clear is that the dog who had once been called Too Much became Scooby-Doo, and his name eventually became more famous than the name of the group around him.

Scooby was designed to be an imperfect Great Dane

Scooby-Doo does not look exactly like a Great Dane should, and that was intentional.

Character designer Iwao Takamoto reportedly learned the characteristics breeders considered desirable in a prize Great Dane and then designed Scooby with several of the opposite features.

Scooby was given characteristics such as bowed legs, a sloping back and a small chin. Instead of looking like an elegant show dog, he looked slightly awkward.

I think that suited his personality much better.

He was large enough to look as though he should be brave, but he was frightened by almost everything.

Don Messick provided Scooby’s original voice. Messick was already an experienced Hanna-Barbera voice actor and had also voiced another famous cartoon dog, Astro in The Jetsons.

The gang had a television ancestor

Did you know that Fred, Daphne, Velma and Shaggy did not appear from nowhere either?

Their early character types were influenced by characters from the American sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which ran from 1959 to 1963.

Dobie influenced Fred, Thalia influenced Daphne and Zelda influenced Velma. Shaggy’s clearest predecessor was Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnik played by Bob Denver.

Maynard’s goatee, mannerisms and frequent use of “like” helped shape the character who eventually became Shaggy. By 1969, the beatnik influence had been updated for a younger generation, making Shaggy look more like a hippie-era teenager.

Another interesting detail is that Fred’s name also has a connection to CBS executive Fred Silverman.

In an early version of the project, Daphne was called Kelly and was part of the teenage band concept before the characters evolved into the group viewers know today.

Some of the voices lasted almost as long as the characters

For a series that would eventually last for generations, the original voices also became an important part of Scooby-Doo’s continuity.

Casey Kasem became the voice most strongly associated with Shaggy for decades. Don Messick gave Scooby his distinctive speech in the original series.

Frank Welker’s connection is particularly remarkable. Fred Jones was his first major voice acting role in 1969, beginning a career that would eventually make him one of the most prolific voice actors in American animation.

The actors changed over the decades, but recognisable voices, speech patterns and character relationships helped different versions of Scooby-Doo still feel connected to the original. The voice actors behind these legendary characters certainly deserve some credit for that.

Even the famous theme song was not quite there at the beginning

The familiar Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! theme was written by David Mook and Ben Raleigh and originally performed by Larry Marks.

But the programme did not simply begin with the familiar song exactly as viewers later remembered it.

Hanna-Barbera musical director Ted Nichols had composed a different instrumental theme. The first broadcast episode, What a Night for a Knight, used Nichols’ instrumental music for its opening. The vocal theme that became associated with the series was introduced into the programme around the same time and soon became the regular opening.

Yes, it is a small detail, but an interesting one. Even one of the most recognisable parts of Scooby-Doo was still being settled as the programme reached television.

Scooby-Doo began meeting celebrities surprisingly early

Scooby-Doo also experimented with its formula much earlier than I realised.

In 1972, only three years after the original premiere, The New Scooby-Doo Movies began. Despite the title, these were television episodes, generally longer than the original adventures.

The unusual part was the guest stars.

Scooby and the gang solved mysteries alongside celebrities and famous fictional characters. Guests included Sonny & Cher, Don Knotts, Dick Van Dyke and Davy Jones. They also met the Harlem Globetrotters, the Addams Family, and Batman and Robin.

Some living celebrities even provided their own voices.

It sounds like the kind of crossover television uses today, but Scooby-Doo was already doing it in the early 1970s.

The familiar gang did not always stay together

Scooby-Doo may seem like one continuous cartoon, but the series actually changed many times over the years.

Scooby’s nephew Scrappy-Doo arrived in 1979. He was small, energetic and almost the opposite of his frightened uncle.

The programme was then changed substantially. For a period beginning in 1980, Fred, Daphne and Velma were dropped from the regular format, leaving much of the action centred on Scooby, Shaggy and Scrappy.

Daphne later returned, and the franchise continued experimenting with different combinations of characters.

In The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo in 1985, even the old rule about fake monsters was no longer absolute. The story involved actual supernatural ghosts, with horror-film actor Vincent Price voicing a character named Vincent Van Ghoul.

The programme that had originally reassured children that there was probably a human underneath the monster costume was now sometimes allowing the monsters to be real.

Then Scooby-Doo became a child too

Another reinvention arrived in 1988 with A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.

This time, the familiar characters were reimagined as younger versions of themselves. Scooby was a puppy, and Fred, Daphne, Velma and Shaggy were children solving mysteries together.

It was a clever way of keeping characters created in 1969 familiar to children watching television almost twenty years later.

That pattern would continue. Scooby-Doo did not survive simply because the original episodes kept being repeated. The characters themselves kept being repackaged for new audiences.

The late 1990s changed the formula again

After A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, there was a period without a new regular Scooby-Doo television series.

But the characters did not disappear.

A new series of animated films began in the late 1990s, starting with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island in 1998. This era could be darker than the original television programme and sometimes played with one of the oldest expectations of the franchise: that there would always be an ordinary person behind the supernatural mystery.

Scooby-Doo was no longer tied only to Saturday morning television.

Direct-to-video films, later television series, feature films, games and other versions gave children many different ways to encounter the same characters.

Every generation seems to get its own Scooby-Doo

This is probably the part of Scooby-Doo’s history that best explains my own experience.

A child watching in 1969 might have known Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.

Children a few years later could have watched The New Scooby-Doo Movies. By the end of the 1970s there was Scrappy-Doo. Children in the late 1980s could meet younger versions of everyone in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. And yes, that was the version of the series I was familiar with.

Later audiences had direct-to-video films, What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, newer animated versions and live-action films.

The drawings changed. The voices changed. Sometimes the rules of the supernatural changed too.

But the central idea was difficult to lose.

A group of young people arrives somewhere strange. Something appears to be wrong. There is a monster or ghost. Scooby and Shaggy would rather be somewhere else, preferably eating. The gang investigates, clues begin to fit together and eventually there is an explanation.

That structure is simple enough to be understood by a child watching for the first time, even decades after the characters were created.

Frequently Asked Questions About Scooby-Doo

Why Scooby-Doo still gets watched

When I think about Scooby-Doo now, I do not remember following its history while I was growing up. I certainly did not know that the cartoon I was watching in Indonesia had begun on American television in 1969.

I just knew Scooby-Doo.

That may be one of the more interesting things about a programme that lasts this long. Children do not necessarily experience it as something old.

I watched it on a black-and-white television when I was young. Around 30 years later, my child watched Scooby-Doo too, surrounded by completely different children’s programmes and much newer animation.

The franchise had changed enough to keep appearing in front of new audiences, but not so much that I could no longer recognise it.

For me, the connection was never really about one favourite character or one unforgettable episode. Scooby-Doo was simply there.

First on the television in my childhood home, and years later on the television in my own family.

A show does not have to be your favourite to become part of your childhood. Sometimes it stays in your memory simply because it was around long enough to become familiar.

Scooby-Doo has been doing that for generations.

What do you remember about Scooby-Doo? If you know something I missed, or you have your own story connected to the series, I would love to read it in the comments.

And since we are already in the spooky mood, you can also read my article about the history behind Halloween decorations and how familiar Halloween symbols became part of the season.

Work with Twinkle So Bright: If you have a product, design or collaboration that fits naturally with the subject of this article, you can view my collaboration options on the Twinkle So Bright Collaborate page.

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