Scooby Doo, the Great Dane and his bunch of human friends need no introduction. A musical group by profession and detectives by accident, their comic capers are well known since their inception in 1969 in the series famously known as Scooby-Doo Where are You! They don’t go in search of a case, nor does anybody hire them to solve mysteries, things just happen to them! Ghosts, zombies and spooks crawl out of the woodwork whenever they are around. They travel for their shows in a van called the “Mystery Machine”.
Scooby-Doo is a cowardly yet fun loving dog who always ends up taking the credit for solving the mystery. He runs away from villains and zombies but also tricks them by donning absurd disguises. Always hungry, his tummy is a bottomless pit and he will go to any lengths for his favourite Scooby snacks.
A Hanna Barbera company production for the CBS Network, this show was originally conceived as a teenage comedy with a dash of mystery thrown in. Fred Silverman, the executive in charge of the children’s shows at the CBS network, envisioned the show as a cross between the 1940s popular detective series on radio, I love a mystery and the 1960s much loved sitcom, The Many Loves of Dobie Gills. The show was earlier titled the Mysteries Five with five teens, Geoff, Mike, Kelly, Linda and her brother W.W and their dog called Too Much, who played the bongo in the band. When not performing at musical dos, the gang was busy unravelling spooky whodunit involving zombies, ghosts and supernatural beings.
Inspired by the ad lib, “doo-be-doo-be-doo” rendered by Frank Sinatra at the end of the song Strangers in the night, Silverman renamed the dog Too Much as Scooby Doo and the show got rechristened as Scooby Doo Where are you! With the first telecast on 13th September 1969, the show went on to be a major hit for CBS. Nobody had imagined that the cowardly Great Dane Scooby Doo, his sidekick Norville ‘Shaggy’ Rogers and friends Fred Jones, Welma Dinkley and Daphne Blake would be such a rage. In late 70s, two pup characters resembling Scooby, named Scrappy Doo and Scooby Dum were introduced in the show.
Scooby Doo has inspired a lot of merchandise over the years in the form of school kits, lunch boxes, board, video and online games, t-shirts and underwear, stationary, storybooks, colouring books, plush toys, action figures, as well as breakfast cereals, dog food and even multivitamins.
Over the years the show has undergone many transformations and revivals such as The New Scooby-Doo Movies, The All-New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo show, A Pup named Scooby Doo, The Scooby Doo Laff-a-lympics among others with each one of them being a huge success.
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