Scooby-Doo: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two teen detectives of trivia,
your filthy Beatnikes.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Of fascinating bits and bobs, your great Danes of great decisions.
I'm Alex Sigel.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
You're meddling kids of key points.

Speaker 4 (00:33):
I guess that's fine, that's possible.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
And my name is Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
And today, Jordan, we're talking about one of the great
American cultural legacies of the twentieth century. Not homophobia or
institutionalized racism or trickle down economics, the rather Scooby Dude.
Since September of nineteen sixty nine, Scubert Doolittle is that's
not actually his name, I think it is. It's Scubert,

(00:59):
but scuber Do. Scubert Do, his loyal human companion Shaggy,
and the rest have been taking to a stinking windowless
van called the Mystery Machine to solve various real estate
and petty theft related crimes. The initial animated series Scooby Doo,
Where are.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
You question mark or no question mark.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
You know, I've been googling so many different spin offs
of this show. You could just tell me it was
called like Scooby Doo Electric Boogoloo. Yeah, that's what I
spent That's what I spent six hours. No it is. Yeah,
it's got a solely an exclamation point without a question. Stupid,
stupid country that originally air Saturday mornings on CBS lasted

(01:44):
two seasons and twenty five episodes. But from that original seed,
over a dozen different TV series and specials, two live
action movies, twenty five direct to DVD movies, and over
twenty video games were born. Kevin Sandler and Arizona State
University professor Working Arond, a book about the show, considers
it the most spun off show in television history. What

(02:06):
do you say about that?

Speaker 1 (02:08):
I mean that scans like we were talking about before
taping this, it just when you mentioned Scooby Doo, my
first thought was just what of it? Like, there's just
it just seems to be this this giant wall of media.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
He's like the Liberty Bell or Rocky or.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Something that's not in phil Yeah, the cheese steak.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Oh No, wait, I do remember watching this growing up.
I think I saw a lot of the Hand and
Barbara stuff when it was on reruns in various different places.
I definitely remember Space Ghost, This, Super Friends, Ah, and
then in my teens they started getting recycled into the
stoner comedy stuff that Adult Swim was doing, like Space Ghost,

(02:51):
Coast to Coast and Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
I was a big sea lab of twenty twenty one guy, Yes,
that was that your.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
With my pench my youth full pinschon for spookery, I'd
love it. Scooby Do in his pals were on the
surface concerned with vaguely supernatural situations, even if they always
turned out to be an old white man and a
rubber mask.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
That's the true dark heart of America. It's always an
old white man in a rubber mask. Was there, ever,
Webber He's wearing like a Nixon mask, like that that
crime movie. What was that movie where they're all wearing
like presidential masks and.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Point break point break.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Oh, yeah, that's the one.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
Just watch that movie recently still holds up.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
You know, I didn't really watch Scooby Do very much,
despite the fact that it has all the hallmarks of
things that I love, which is like toothless sixties, psychedelia
mysteries and just sort of a generic mid century cred.
You know. I was more of a Flintstone's Jetson's guy

(03:48):
when it came to the Hannah Barbera collection, They're ovra ouva.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
Those are the ones that I found boring, right, I
mean again, bat bat scans, I also say, and I'm
really I'm afraid to this the waters that I'm about
to wade into right now.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
I sort of have a thing against cartoon dogs for
some reason. And I know that this is in the
DSM five under the entry for a bad person or
a sociopath. I'm aware of that, but I really think
it was There was a scene, and I think it
was in All Dogs Go to Heaven, that Don Bluth
trauma trigger movie from the late eighties where some dog

(04:26):
like eats pizza really disgustingly, and I think, in my
young mind it came down to, well, do I want
pizza to be ruined for me or dogs? And I
think I just made the judgment called I'm just going
to decide to hate dogs.

Speaker 4 (04:39):
As a result of this. Not dogs cartoon, Dogs cartoon dogs.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Yeah, I mean, you're objectively wrong, Lady in the tramp
Oliver and Company. I mean, come on, dude, Peanuts like Peanuts,
you hate Snoopy.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
That's a different kind of dog. But I guess I'm
talking about like big, like Bulto like dogs.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Yeah, Balto and Marmaduke.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, the dog from All Dogs Go to Heaven, which
I think was like a German shepherd.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
German shepherd.

Speaker 5 (05:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
So you just don't like large animated dogs.

Speaker 4 (05:09):
Maybe it's because I grew up with Dublin pinchers.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Oh god, what did you grow up in the sas.

Speaker 4 (05:17):
Were huge?

Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, now, I guess I get that, but I don't know.
You're on your own there as as far as you know. Well,
from the show's root says counterprogramming to the perceived violence
of other Saturday Morning cartoon programming, to the detested scrappy Doo,
the role of old Blue Eyes, and the creation of
a famous cartoon dog, here's everything you didn't know about

(05:39):
Scooby Doo. So pass forwarding or rewinding back to Jesus,
I don't even know what direction time goes in anymore.
Rewinding back to the late sixties as hilarious, the quaint
as they may seem. Currently, some of the slate of

(06:00):
the iconic Canna Barbara cartoons you may know, were actually
quite controversial for their perceived violent content. You know, at
this point, with the influence of sci fi and I
think particularly the Batman show that had been going on
a lot of Saturday morning cartoons were derided as just
being excuses for like action and biff bam pal stuff

(06:22):
and not being sufficiently educational or gentle. Part of this
was due to the tenor of shows that were being broadcast.
One was particularly bizarre. It was called Super President, a
show that depicted the national Commander in chief as a
secret superhero ready to battle any threat as milk toast
as that sounds. The National Association of Broadcasters derided it

(06:44):
as an all time low in bad taste. NBC was
responsible for this direct ideological approach to totalitarianism. We fear
that may be other broadcasters who are irresponsible enough to
keep it in circulation, pause and realize the time when
people were concerned about the creeping representation of fascism in
American media, but many fans where many people were also

(07:06):
appalled that the show was broadcast not even four years
after JFK's assassination.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Not faster than the speeding bullet was waiting.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
To see if you were going to take that one.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
It was there, It was there.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
In nineteen sixty eight, a grassroots group called Action for
Children's Television or ACT, was founded by Peggy Charon and
a group of housewives and mothers in Newton, Massachusetts, and
they chose to their target not only the content of
the crop of Saturday morning cartoons like Space Goes and Birdman,
but the number of commercials broadcasts during these shows, which
was actually, on average found to be almost double the

(07:41):
number of commercials that were allowed during so called adult programming.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
That's wild, that's really that feels wrong to me.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
It was something like nine minutes in adult programming and
then sixteen in kids program Oh.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
My god, wait per hour or per half hour, that
was per hour.

Speaker 4 (07:59):
Sorry, that's still that's still really crazy.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah. So ACT and others of their ILK put enough
pressure on broadcasters so not only cancel you'd swaped these
cartoons by nineteen sixty nine, but also to drastically cut
down in the commercial time allotted. Plus by the time
that Scooby Doo aired nineteen sixty nine in the country
had Weathered nineteen sixty eight, which has any time capsule
television special worth its salt will tell you was a
transformative one American history with the Vietnam War, the riots

(08:30):
for the Democratic National Convention, and the assassinations of Bobby
Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior, who come mano sub
in thank you, I pride myself with my fog. You
might also sub in a footage of soldiers trudging through

(08:50):
Vietnam to the sounds of dud du that was all
along the watch shower. The some of them legally available.
Use that we can yes seriously demand for more family
friendly TV contact resulted in the bizarre moment American history

(09:10):
when Bob Montana's Archie Comics achieved multi platform cultural domination.
Not just content and their mastery over the print, the
Archie Gang had to also take over the TV airwaves
by a filmation's animated series for CBS, and then the
nation's radio waves via their hit that you may remember
called Sugar Sugar, which was written explicitly to capitalize on

(09:32):
the monkeys and topped the pop charts in nineteen sixty
nine for four weeks to become the highest selling single
of the year.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
That's insane.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
It beat out songs by the Beatles, the Stones, the
those first Jackson five singles, Elvis, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder.
I also found out this afternoon that Wilson Pickett does
a version of Sugar Sugar, which.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
That poor guy, we had him do it all kinds
of right the end of his career. We really beat
that man down, which is something considering he was a boxer.

(10:20):
There's a sneak case for this archie comics being like
maybe the most influential comics in history, with this music situation,
all the stuff that was copying off of them in animation,
and now with Riverdale having had like a ten year
run and launching a bunch of now famous actors. I'm
not going to make that argument though I have never

(10:41):
I don't think i've ever read a I think when
I was a kid into comic books and people would
be like, like, hay me an archie comic, I would
like stealthily throw it away behind their back.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
I liked them because I thought that they had ties
to the fifties and sixties, and I was obviously into
all that. Yes, it's kind of my it's kind of
my bit.

Speaker 3 (10:59):
Yes, So the Archies were the brainchild CBS's head of
daytime programming at the time, a guy named Fred Silverman,
and his next move was to envision a cartoon that
would cross the popular nineteen forties radio program I Love
a Mystery about Three Detectives, the nineteen forty eight comedy
horror movie Abbot Gassella Met Frankenstein, and the nineteen fifty

(11:23):
nine sitcom The Many Loves Adobe gillis about a scatterburan
teenager and his friends.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Fred Silverman I feel like he cropped up in something
we did recently. I can't really remember what, but he's
a big deal because he was one of the only
TV executives of that era, the sixties and seventies, or
maybe even any era, to work at all three major
networks CBSABC and NBC, and the late great SNL writer
Michael o'donahue ended up getting fired from SNL for skewering

(11:50):
Silverman with a sketch called Silverman's Bunker, which is kind
of legendary and SNL comedy nerds circles because it compares
the flagging NBC network to the last days of Germany
in World War Two, Silverman's Bunker obviously being a play
on Hitler's Bunker, and I don't think the sketch was
ever aired and he was fired for it. But Silverman,

(12:13):
on the plus side, he also gave us all the
Family and Charlie's Angels, so I give him a pass
for that time. Magazine called him the Man with the
Golden Gut in nineteen seventy seven, which.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
It's so weird, didn't meet I thought, yeah, nope, sugar.
On back to the edit, Silverman told MeTV Legends that
I had always thought that Kids in a Haunted House
would be a big hit.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
It's so executive brain that's like something vague and unoriginal.
I think it would be great, and I mean, to
his credit it was.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
But he said, as a kid, I would go and
look at Abbott He's SELLO meet Frankenstein movies like that.
I was convinced that this was going to be the
biggest hit we'd ever had, even though nobody knew what
the hell it was.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
What, so where's that coming from? Like? Wh what are
you basing that on?

Speaker 3 (13:02):
Bro his gut? Let the man cook. So Silverman farmed
this project out to Hannah Barbara rather than filmation this time,
and producers William Hannah and Joseph Barbara consequently kicked it
down to a team that included writers Joe Ruby and
Ken Spears, as well as artist Iwow Takamoto. He had
come to Hannah Barbara from Disney, where he worked under

(13:25):
one of the company's legendary Nine Old Men of animation,
Milk call.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
I actually don't know much about this nine Old Men thing.
I think you mentioned it on a few episodes where
we touched on animation or Disney stuff, and it sounds
fascinating unless they're old men in rubber masks. I mean,
not that I don't want to put you on the spot,
but what is the deal with the Nine Old Men?

Speaker 3 (13:45):
So they are basically the people who are responsible for
like a half century of animation, And that was a
nickname coming from Walt himself that I think came from
nine Angry Men or something like that. The core nine
was in place by the time that Snow White and
Seven Dwarfs came out in nineteen thirty seven, and the
last one of them left after the Great Mouse Detectives

(14:06):
in nineteen eighty six. So fully one of them was
in place for fifty years of Disney and they were
collectively either as producers or directors or animators, responsible for
basically every Disney animated film that came out in that time.
They because of the way Disney worked at the time,
they'd be working on multiple projects at once. And obviously
there were nine of them, so you're talking everything from

(14:28):
Cinderella ban the one hundred one Dalmatians on way up
through all this stuff. But one of their bigger legacies
is as educators, because two of them published a book
called Disney Animation The Illusion of Life that really laid
out the company's approach to animation with like nine tenets
of how they animate and draw characters. And then when

(14:51):
Disney died, when Walt died, a huge chunk of his
trust went to funding cal Arts's character animation program, and
a bunch of those guys taught there. And then basically
the generation of animators that came up through the late
seventies were now we're talking about guys like Brad Bird
and Tim Burton and those guys. They all they came

(15:13):
out of cal Arts and then usually either out of
cal Arts or just somewhere else. Uh, they are most
of them. A lot of them were apprentices of different
members of the Nine olvent.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
I feel like animation more than so many other areas
of filmmaking, or maybe it's just more visible, relies more
on mentorship and apprenticeships than a lot of other things,
a lot of other, you know, areas of production that
I can think of. Maybe it's just the like you know,
they're more mythologized and high profile.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Yeah, I mean, it's uh, it just seems a very
insular world. I think it's like SFX and that one.
I was just gonna say, yeah, yeah, guys, who know, guys,
thank you for that love.

Speaker 4 (15:53):
I love you how much you know about animation.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
It's that and like special effects are two things that
I know absolutely nothing about. And I love the death
that you go movie magic.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
I love movie magic. At Disney, the animator EO. Takamoto,
who had been in internment camp for the duration of
World War Two. He worked on a lot of the
stuff like I mean, he worked on Cinderella, Peter Pan,
Lady in the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, one hundred and one, Dumbination,
and then when he came over to Hanna barbera other
than Scooby Doo. He worked on The Jetsons, and he
also co directed Hanna Barbera's nineteen seventy two adaptation of

(16:24):
Charlotte's Web? Did you know that that the guy who
drew Scooby Doo directed Charlotte's Web?

Speaker 1 (16:30):
I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
It'll get more granular, don't worry. Why do we get
to the Manson family? The Sam's initial conception for the
show was called Mysteries five and featured five teams Jeff, Mike, Kelly,
Linda and Linda's brother w W and their dog too Much,
who were all in a band called the Mysteries Five.
Even the dog who played at the.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
Bongos dog was called too Much.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
That's correct?

Speaker 1 (16:54):
So was this some kind of terrible one note psychedelic
sized version of Who's On First? Where there was like,
you know, that's too much?

Speaker 5 (17:02):
Man?

Speaker 1 (17:02):
I know, baby, but what's the dog's name?

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Like you know that kind yeah, or something like they've
taken too much?

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Oh, oh oh my god.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah, kids learn about snarcan.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
Wow, that's that's terrible. That that's worse than the Golden Gut.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
So between their musical gigs, the gang was out solving
spooky mysteries involving ghosts, zombies, and other supernatural creatures. As
is pretty much obvious to anyone who cares about this
kind of thing. The character who became Shaggy was a
straight ripoff of Maynard G. Krebs from The Many Loves
of Dobie Gillis. He was the stereotypical bongo playing beatnick

(17:44):
in that show, and they basically just made him a hippie.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
He was played by Bob Denver, who later played Gilligan
from Gilligan's Island, and I kind of always assumed that
Gilligan was Maynard G. Krebs who'd like grown up and
like to make money being a hippie, just like lived
by the water and did the three hour tour just
to make some money during the day. That was my
unified theory of Bob Denver.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
It's the shared Denver cinematic universe.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah. Did you ever watch The Many Loves of w Gillis?

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
Oh, it was a really good show. I had Tuesday
weld on a big crush on Tuesday. Well, there it is.
Refining the dog concept though took work. They were torn
between the comedic possibilities of a large cowardly dog or
a small feisty one, and settled on the former, though
eventually that cautrapoint would be used for the much hated

(18:33):
and scrappy in the late seventies. Initially they were concerned
that a Great Dane would be seen as a marmaduke
rip off. They presented a sheep dog version to Fred Silverman, who,
in turn, concerned that the dog would then be compared
to the Archie's own sheep dog, told them to change
it back to a great Dane. What would you have done?
Would you have done a small feisty one or a
large cowardly one? I see you as a small feisty.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
You mean me as a dog? No, how I would
have developed the show?

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Why can't it be both?

Speaker 3 (19:04):
I think it would have been funnier if there were
a cat, because cats are useless, so you could do
all kinds of throwaway gags about them being like, hey,
you know, miss Mittens, what do you think that is?
And the cat's just like staring intently at a corner
smoking a cigarette. Yeah, I just so, that's my take.
Scooby Doo should have been a cat.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Again. We're gonna start elevator pitchon sequels right now, this
is this is good. This is good.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
We're such a good reboot.

Speaker 4 (19:32):
We are such good executives.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
Sadly we are we are, we are I know.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
The animated Takamoto created Scooby Doo's features after finding out
from a Hannah Barbara coworker who bred Great Danes. What
made for show winning features on these animals, Takamoto told
Cartoon Network. She showed me some pictures and talked about
the important points of a Great Dane, like a straight back,
straight legs, small chin. I decided to go to the
opposite and give him a hump back, bowed legs, big

(20:00):
and such. Even his color is wrong, hilarious. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
I love to imagine that coworkers appear seeing the finished
product and was like, what this is all wrong?

Speaker 1 (20:13):
Maybe thought it was an insult to like the dogs
she was breeding.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Do I hope? So? I mean, all that stuff is
why they're why they're dead, Like, don't live past the
age of a second grader at this point.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
Oh, the inbreeding of the fact that they're huge, it's
like the movie.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
My Giant inbreeding. It's like any of those breeds like
pugs or German shepherds. They've all been so inbred that
for specific features that they can barely function like the Windsors, Yes,
very much so can we not?

Speaker 4 (20:41):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
I don't know the health status of half the royal
family right now. I love either going like fools of
Prude or on that poor woman's like family photo. Oh yeah,
like I saw people instagrammed like I swear there were
like fifteen points on this damn photo of irregular pattern

(21:01):
fingers that don't line up Jesus Christ. So that is
the look of the creature we now know as Scooby Doo.
But how did the beloved CA nine get his name? Well,
it came from show godfather, shall we say grandfather Scooby
do Grandfather Fred Silverman, TV executive Fred Silverman, the guy

(21:23):
who thought that kids in a haunted house would make
for a winning combination. The idea came to him on
a plane. He said, I booked a red eye and
I couldn't sleep talking to the television academy. I'm listening
to music as we're landing. Frank Sinatra comes on and
I hear him say Scooby Dooby Do. It's at that
point I said, that's it. We'll take the dog. We'll
call it scooby Doo. It's hilarious because that's not what

(21:46):
Frank Sinatra actually says. In reality, he sings Shooby dooby doo,
and it's at the end of Strangers of the Night.

Speaker 4 (21:53):
I would assume shooty dooby doo.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, okay. So the writer Mark Evaner, who would write
several Scoop We Do teleplays and comic book scripts, told
The Cartoon Review that the name scooby Doo came from
a different misheard lyric. The nineteen sixty three eighteen do
wop hit Denise by Randy and the Rainbows. Chorus goes, Oh,
Denise shooby Doo, I'm in love with you, Denise shooby Doo.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Was that song sung in a greeting Frankie Valley esque falsetto?

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yeah actually, okay, yeah, that's.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
What I said, Oh, dn shooby doo.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Movie right, that's actually that's fairly enjoyable coming from you.
I have to say it.

Speaker 3 (22:35):
Sucks to Frankie Valley should have been the only guy
allowed to do that, and Smoking Robinson a couple other
guys on Motown. That's it.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Brian Wilson, absolutely not. I think Frankie Valley's retiring soon.
We should see him.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
Yeah, why not?

Speaker 4 (22:49):
Great Italian American.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
Great Italian American. Ball about Rushmore? Yeah him, Bartis Scorsese,
Frank Sinatra and me.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
We got movies, we got podcasting, we got music. What's
a great Italian American on the TV?

Speaker 3 (23:08):
On the TV? James Gandolfini.

Speaker 4 (23:10):
Oh yeah, there you go, all right, very good, we got.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
Him, good, all right, good good.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
Italian writer Matt Mario Puzo.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
I think it's like Mario Pooso.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah, yeah, it's all right. So we got the dog,
we got how he looks, we got the name. Now
we got to have his damn kids around them. The
animation team whittled down their initial concept from five to fourteens,
and they called them Jeff, Kelly, Linda and w W.
The most unwieldly series of initials, and they eventually became Ronnie, Daphne,

(23:41):
Velma and Shaggy getting Closer. And these took fairly explicit
inspiration from the aforementioned the many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
It really is wild when you see them, like like
especially Daphne, uh, just like the plaid skirt, sweater, look
like it's just it's today.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Well yeah, well, well Hanna Barbara would do that. They
did the Flintstones was was the honeymooner across the board?
Ronnie the handsome male lead on the show, I get
me call him that, right? Yeah? I was renamed Fred
in honor of Fred Silverman, the TV executive who soft

(24:19):
pitched them this idea. And so there you have the
human elements of the Mystery Mystery Team. What the hell
are they called the mystery brigade, Mystery Mystery squad?

Speaker 4 (24:29):
No, mystery machine is the car?

Speaker 1 (24:31):
What were they know?

Speaker 3 (24:32):
Now?

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Collectively keep going?

Speaker 3 (24:34):
What were they called the mystery scruping shotson?

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Fred Silverman presented a pilot premise called at the time,
Who's Scared?

Speaker 4 (24:49):
Several s's with dashes?

Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yeah, I should have said the scoop Staffel, because that's
what there.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
Are two s's in that. Yeah, you're right, right hah
to CVS executives as the centerpiece for their upcoming nineteen
sixty nine and nineteen seventy Saturday Morning cartoon block, but
CBS executives felt that the presentation artwork was too frightening
for young viewers and thinking of the show would be
equally scary, decided to pass on it, which is surprising

(25:18):
when it was being presented by a fairly high ranking
executive at the network. But okay, without a centerpiece for
their Saturday morning cartoon lineup, Fred Silverman went back to
Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, the animation team, and they
retooled the pitch to focus more on the dog and
soft touching more of the scary elements, and then they
repitched it to the CVS executives, who approved it.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
I read somewy that they took it like fifteen rounds,
and I'm not sure if that was not present not presentation,
but like drafts of the pilot script.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
I mean this with all respect to everybody who Scooby
Doo seems like a first draft idea.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
You don't really think it's a you don't really think
it stood up to fifteen rounds. Ever Rebreads. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
I said this.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
Pretts you do on your scripts.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
It implies that I finished them. I said this before
we started taping. I don't think I've ever seen a
full episode of Scooby Doo. I've definitely never sat down
intentionally watched it. I yeah, this is this is sort
of a I mean agauess. One of things I love
doing the show is that it helps me find you,
found appreciation for things that I previously ignored. Last week

(26:32):
it was you with Billy Joel, and this week we're
getting there with Scooby Doo for me.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Oh, we'll get it out of here.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Moment, onto the non canine parts of the show. Legendary
voice actor Frank Welker, one of the most famous voice
actors in the industry, with over eight hundred and fifty

(27:09):
acting credits on his IMDb page, Wow, received his first
ever cartoon acting voice acting gig. I think first ever
voice acting gig period. I think. He said he had
done commercials before this at twenty three years young, as
the ascot wearing Fred Jones.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
I love how often you shout out the as Scott.
I love how much you hate the ascott.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
It's extremely dumb. No one makes them look good. You
just immediately look like a sex pest.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Are you saying that because I recently shared a PROMP
photo of me and my friend both wearing ascots.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
I'm not not saying it for that reason. You're reinforcing
my decision. I could barely read the copy and didn't
know which end of the mic was electrified, which explains
why shock therapy had no effect on me. Welker quipped
to Verbicide Magazine in two thousand and six, Joe Barbera
was fantastic and really gave me a chance. He would
give me the opportunity to read for all the characters,

(27:59):
not just Fredd, and that really opened things up for me.
Welker has voiced Fred in every Scooby series except for
a pup named Scooby Doo. Welker told Entertainment Weekly in
twenty eighteen that he didn't even want the role of Fred. Originally,
he was angling for the role of Shaggy because he
wanted to do more more comedic work, while Casey Kasem,
who was eventually cast as Shaggy, wanted the role of

(28:20):
Fred for the opposite reason he was tired of doing comedies.
In the same interview, Welker described the voice of Fred
as basically my voice plus about five cups of coffee.
Welker further recalled to USA Today that the advice he
got from Joseph Barbara was literally, just you know, you're
kind of the same age they are, not I think
Fred was supposed to be seventeen. Just do your own

(28:42):
voice and think Jack Armstrong, the all American boy. You're
the leader of the gang, and you got a driver's license.
That was pretty much it. That's all I took in
the sixties a different time. Fred and Daphne's constant breaking
off to search whatever they were environ they were investigating
as a couple wasn't so that the teams could indulge
in their normal hormonal urges, but rather because the writers

(29:05):
found them so dull that they broke them off as
much as they could to focus on the funny characters. Bizarrely,
in a twenty twelve read at Ama, Shaggy, actor Matthew
Lillard additionally revealed that the original cut of the two
thousand and two Scooby Doo live action film had Fred
revealed to be gay and say his love of the ascot,
and that Freddy Prince Junior had actually portrayed him as

(29:26):
such throughout the film. Lillard may have been screwing with everyone,
though Prince has said in interviews that he regrets doing
the Scooby Doo films, only elaborating there was just too
much bait and switch on the first one. The studio
was not honest with me in any way, shape or form.
Was he referring to pay or the decision to straight
wash Fred perhaps won't ever know.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
I think I remember hearing that the live action Scooby
Doo from two thousand and two was meant to be
more winky and like a parody, kind of like the
Brady Bunch movies were in the nineties, and then they
ended up just playing it straight when they released it
in the final cut, in the literal and euphemistic sense.

Speaker 3 (30:06):
It took until nineteen ninety seven, though, for the Fred
to nod at Fred and Depney being a couple, and
it didn't even happen in their own series. It happened
on the show's crossover with Johnny Bravo Bravo doob Doo
in July of nineteen ninety seven. Other team ups have
included with Batman, The Adams Family, the long running WB
series Supernatural, The Band's Kiss, and multiple projects involving the

(30:28):
World Wrestling Federation and Then Entertainment, the last of which
I cannot find any justification or explanation of this is
actually the second time I've gone down this rabbit hole,
because I remember seeing it was like the WWE and
Scooby Doo like the Gang solves the Ministery at WrestleMania,
and I tried to get more info about it, and
I could not. Even the original announcement on the WWE's
page goes to a deadlink. So, but it happened twice,

(30:51):
there's two of them.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Well, didn't the Flintstones have some kind of connection to
the WWE, So maybe there's some kind of hand of
Barbara WWE crossover thing.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yeah, sure, I didn't know the Flintstones crossed over one point.
That's yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
I think it might have been like a bam bam thing.
I yeah, I'm not sure. That's weird.

Speaker 4 (31:08):
What's even weirderh Igill tell us bonus.

Speaker 3 (31:11):
Fun fact on the nineteen seventy two episode Wednesday is
missing a pre taxi driver. Jody Foster supplied the voice
of Pugsley Adams Cademy Award winning Jody Foster with an
early role as the boring teenage son of the Adams family.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
Is that funnier? Less funny? Or equally funny as Billy
Joel's pre fame heavy metal band Attila.

Speaker 3 (31:37):
Oh it's much less funny, okay. The show's various iterations
have since expanded on these rather thin initial character sketches.
For example, Daphne was eventually revealed to have come from
a rich and privileged background. Although her family money funds Mystery, Inc.
She forsook the trappings of her family and dynasty to

(31:59):
fort turea path that's placing her on the same disadvantage
financial ground as the rest of the game.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
So she's basically the Mystery Gang's Patty Hurst.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
That's great, okay. That is the only interesting thing I
could learn about Daphne. She was referred to unofficially as
Daphne in Distress for a long time because of her
being basically the person that would fall into a trap
or get spooked or kidnapped. But I guess she knows
martial arts.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Now.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
They tried. They threw, you know, second wave feminism a bone.
That's the thing with all the timelines of this show,
there's like seven different timelines of reboots and things, and
I guess in some of them, Daphne has become a badass.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
The core Scooby cast assembled in the recording booth, where
they were encouraged to add lib and play off each other,
even taking turns voicing different villains from week to week.
I like that in the Latin two, and they had
the whole whole cast and a big room together to record,
which is.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Pretty rare, pretty rare.

Speaker 5 (32:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
I think the only other ones that do it are
Simpsons in Futurama.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Right right, right. Welker, who voiced Fred, recalled that two
of Velma's iconic catchphrases came from these sort of quasi
collaborative vocal recording sessions. Velma, he said, who was portrayed
by Nicole Jaffe back in the early days, was the
one who said jinkies. Then the cast started trying to
do our own little things. Mine was hold the phone.

(33:23):
Could have gone better there, but not great, Welker, I
could try harder on that one. Meanwhile, Velma's famous line
my glasses, I can't see without them wasn't.

Speaker 4 (33:33):
A line in the script for Velma.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
Originally. It was actually something that was said for real
by voice actress Nicole Jaffe at the very first table reading,
and the writers thought that it was cute and fit
the character, so they kept the Lime and Nicole Jaffe,
the voice of Velma, had them playing Peppermint Patty in
You're a Good Man Charlie Brown before being cast as Velma.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
As you put it, yes, she portrayed two of the
most closeted lesbians in television history cartoon history.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, huh, that's that's interesting. But she apparently was not
happy with getting cast in this deathless enduring cartoon franchise.
In a twenty eleven interview, she said she was hoping
to become a Daniel day Lewis esque actor, and she
found voice acting. Yeah, kind of silly quote. It was
like getting on a soap opera when you wanted to

(34:22):
be in a Scorsese film. I don't know what voice
people are like today, but in those days I thought
they were kind of weird. I've heard that. I remember
that came up during the Rudolph the Red Noose Reindeer episode.
We did too that back then. I think now voice
acting has a much better reputation.

Speaker 3 (34:38):
Yeah, Robin Williams who legitimized it basically, Yeah, and Gully
and Aladdin, But yeah, they were. It was a weird,
sort of ghetto for a long time.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
She continued, somebody of forty was playing somebody of twenty,
somebody was playing a dog.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
But when you break it down.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Here, yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:57):
Fun.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
In the same interview, she mentions Lauren Hill at one
point somehow meeting her at a I can't even begin
to imagine how they would have crossed paths. But apparently
Lauren Hill was a big fan of Scooby Doo. So
that's that's cool.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
I just love that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Do you think that Lauren Hill went to like some
kind of like cartoons, like comic con convention.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
I like to think so. I can't imagine. I can't
imagine that's what that's going to be.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
I almost could. It's just weird enough.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
Velma's look was another direct rip from the Many Loves
of Dobie Gillis TV show from the fifties. There was
a character on Dobie Gillis called Zelda Gilroy, and she
was frequently shown wearing sweaters and plaid skirts, and she
was kind of a nerd. The most interesting thing about
Velma to you is the long standing coding of her
character as a lesbian. Fred and Daphne had each other,

(35:53):
as did Scooby and Shaggy. Now, by that logic, Scooby
and Shaggy, you get your mind.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Out of the gut cow, all right.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Velma, according to Matt Lipp, who runs the Scooby Doo
History account on Twitter, Velma quote has never really had
a main love interest, he continues, to The New York Times,
she had occasional flirtations and brief relationships, notably with Johnny
Bravo and a nineteen ninety crossover, but even when the

(36:24):
writers attempted to pair her up with Shaggy at one point,
Lipp continued, it's something that doesn't feel natural for them both.

Speaker 4 (36:31):
This guy is really humanizing these cartoon characters.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
Hey, that's what you gotta do. James Gunn, the Guardians
of the Galaxy Autur now running the DC Cinematic Universe,
co wrote the Big two thousand and two live action
Scooby Doo film and originally turned into version that got
an R from the MPAA. In twenty twenty, he tweeted
that Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script, but
the studio just kept watering it down and watering it down,

(36:56):
becoming ambiguous for the version shot. Then nothing least version
and finally having a boyfriend. The sequel, the original film's director,
Raja Gosnell said that further retooling and cutting was necessary
to get the script down to a PG for a
PG thirteen, explaining that some of the things that they
had to lose were some winks to Velma's sexual orientation
and more pot jokes. The studio Gospel continued to e

(37:19):
wanted to sell the movie to what the current demographic
of Scooby Doo was, and that was young kids and parents.
A test screening in conservative Scottsdale, Arizona didn't play well
at all, he said, and that started the first scramble
to take out all of the Isbelma gay references. We
just had to do our best to protect the movie
and make the best movie we could under newer guidelines, ma'am.

(37:40):
And this is funny to me that there was a
scene actually in the film that was shot but cut
in which Daphne played by Sarah Michelle Geller, and Velma
Linda Carlini kiss, which must have fulfilled a lot of
long standing fantasies held by some of the creatives on
this project. Sarah Michelle Geller, though, were called to sci
fi Wire that it was actually a plot device. It
wasn't just like for fun. Initially, in the soul swapping scene,

(38:03):
Velma and Daphne couldn't seem to get their souls back
together in the woods, and so the way that they
found was to kiss, and the souls went back into
proper alignment, to which I say, sure, Jan, I.

Speaker 4 (38:15):
Have a question for you. He do you get your
soul in alignment.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
Drinking avant garde jazz?

Speaker 4 (38:23):
For me, it's abba.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Yeah. All that said, Velma did finally get her queer moment,
albeit one revealed retroactively. In twenty twenty, Tony Servone, the
co creator Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated, a twenty ten series
on Cartoon Network, posted an image on Instagram of Velma
standing in front of a Pride flag, writing, we made
our intentions as clear as we could ten years ago.

(38:44):
Most of our fans got it. To those that didn't,
I suggest you look closer. Responding to a fan of
the comments, he said, specifically, Velma in Mystery Incorporated is
not by she's gay, So at least one timeline definited.
Lee got Vilma somewhat out of the closet.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Anyway, Scooby Doo premiered the Year of Stonewell, like probably
I think three months after the Small Riots. So those
are the human members of the gang. Now we got
to talk about Scooby Doo. The voices for Scooby Doo
and the much maligned Scrappy Doo are all done by
one man named Don Messick. Now Mesic is something of

(39:24):
a Saturday cartoon icon. Aside from the aforementioned Doues Messrs
Do and Do, he voiced Bam Bam, Rubble and the Flintstones,
Astro and the Jetsons, Boo Boo Bear and Ranger Smith
and the Yogi Bear Show, Sebastian the Cat and Josie
and the Pussycats, Gears, Ratchet and Scavenger and the Transformers,
Papa Smurf and Azerrol as a Reel Azarel in the Smurfs,

(39:49):
and Doctor Benton Quest in Johnny Quest. So he gets
stuck with all the like annoying characters. He's like the
gist that I'm getting that's.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
Looking at it.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yes. He also voiced a few characters in the first
animated adaptation of The Hobbit I Rank in Bass in
nineteen seventy seven. Shortly before his death, he claimed that
giving up smoking had robbed him of the rasp in
his voice that he needed to voice Scooby Tragic. Scooby's
speech disorder, which really boils down to his excessive use

(40:18):
of the letter R, is called rodicism. I'm told, I'm
now being told, hear I have it in. I'm breaking,
I'm getting something in my ear. Scooby's speech disorder is
called has a name, according to speech pathologist, according to
speech methol, according to somebody who could probably help me,
say speech pathologist, doctor Stephen Long was referred to quote Stevie's.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
We're Suffering.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
I would refer to Scooby's disorder as phonological as opposed
to a phonetic disorder, and that he shows a pattern
of substituting and adding sounds in his speech, rather than
just distorting sounds. Scooby's error pattern doesn't have a specific name,
at least, it's not one that we commonly use in
clinical practice.

Speaker 4 (41:03):
Messick, the voice of Scooby Doo.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Told the Asbury Park Press that there was an interesting
genesis to his rhodic pattern. Astro from the Jetsons preceded
Scooby Doo Messick said, I had to come up with
what I call growl talk. Joseph Barbara liked things starting
with RS for the dogs especially. He got that from
watching Sooopy Sales, who was a kids show host. Sales

(41:26):
had an off screen dog. All you would see was
the Paul and he would talk with our talk. So
Joe Joseph Barbara decided that Astro should have that kind
of attitude. But then along came Scooby Doo, my favorite voice.
So then when we were doing later Jetson's episodes, I
had to pitch Astro a little bit higher because Scooby
had the growl talk, though his was more of a

(41:47):
barrel chested thing.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
I appreciate the thought that went into this voice.

Speaker 3 (41:52):
I just got distracted with becoming adjusting my life goals
to becoming the first ever person diagnosed with scoob be
speech disorder, like convincing everyone that it just happened to
me one day, and then like faking that you'd never
I don't even know what Scooby do is. I've never
seen an episode. I just I've never ever even read

(42:14):
an eperthro Rush start rocking like rish run day.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
No, No, here's the movie it's yesterday, but with Scooby Doo.
Instead of the Beatles never existed. Scooby Do's never existed.
And then you just start talking like that and you
become famous for some reason. Oh sure, yeah, it's one
and the same. In twenty twenty four, this brings us
to Scubert. Ken Spears, one of the animators on the show, said, Scubert,

(42:44):
which is Scooby's Christian name, the name on Scooby's birth
certificate dogs at birth certificate. It's right, Scubert wasn't our doing.
It's talking to Scooby addicts dot com. We don't know
who came up with that. We wouldn't have. Co creator
and writer Joe Ruby immediately said after him, neither was
Scrappy Doo. We didn't like him either. I don't know

(43:04):
much about Scrappy did. I guess what we're gonna hear
more about scrappy Do later.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
He's divisive. He's basically like if you picked like an
annoying He's sort of like the Great Gazoo in that
he's like, uh, it's like a late stage addition to
try and sort of save the ratings and everything.

Speaker 1 (43:19):
But he's cousin Oliver.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Yeah, and he's like so brash and annoying and brave
that it just throughout the whole dynamic. It's just obnonxious. Meanwhile,
another fun Scooby fact, the dog is positive as being
seven years old, which is kind of depressed and considering
that the average lifespan of Great Danes is eight to
ten years old, meaning that Scooby is spending his waning

(43:41):
years hanging out with a bunch of teenagers being scared
out of his wits. Fred and Jaggy are supposedly seventeen,
Daphnie is sixteen, and Vilma is fifteen?

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Did I send you that? On the other show I'm
working on the Paul and ka talk show, we interviewed
the singer Tony Orlando, and Tony Orlando and Paul Anka
were tight with the wrap pack and they knew Dean Martin.
Did I send you this clip?

Speaker 5 (44:05):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (44:05):
Yes, they did about how Dean Martin was like just
what they would see him in a restaurant. He would
just be like I'm waiting to die.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, you go, they go to Dean Martin at these
these little Italian places in Hollywood, and you need to
be sitting there by himself toward the end of his life.
Hey Dean, how you doing? Just waiting to die? Pally
waiting to die?

Speaker 4 (44:26):
So that's that's where Scooby was at.

Speaker 3 (44:28):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
That's that was the tie in.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
And now, friends, we must move on to the true
reason of this episode. Casey Kase has Norville Rogers aka Shaggy.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
That's the name that sounds like he came from money.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
Yeah, right. As mentioned, Shaggy was a very explicit rip
off of the pet Nick parody Maner G. Crebs in
The Many Lives Adobe Gillis and Shaggy also has mentioned,
was not the role that Kasum won it when he
auditioned for the show. When I auditioned for Shaggy, they
should be a picture, so I knew he was supposed
to be a hippie case I'm told cartoon research, I
combined two voices, sort of an attitude of Dave Hull,

(45:07):
who is disc jockey on KRLA, or the actor who
played on our Miss Brooks, Richard Krenna, whose character spoke
in a high, squeaky voice and was always very breathy.
It may shock some of you to know, as I do.
Richard Krenna, who I am most aware of because he
was Rambo's handler in the Rambo movies. Was once on

(45:28):
a dumb sitcom and talked like this, I've just finished
another article about you with the Madison Monitor. You see
My Favorite Teacher.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
By Walter Denton. It's very complimentary. Yes, I can imagine
your last article.

Speaker 5 (45:41):
About me was complimentary to the point of embarrassment. I
wish you wouldn't print that wall.

Speaker 6 (45:46):
Hear me, it don't be so modest.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
I'll look at the notice I attack on the bulletin board.

Speaker 3 (45:50):
Tell Jerry Lewis, Richard krennaman Friggin' Colonel Troutman depressing. Case
did admit that certain parts of the character came pre envisioned.
They gave me the word zoincs and having him say like,
I guess because of the hippie aspect. I did come
up with the scoob old buddy of mine, old pal thing,

(46:11):
but I have never used the word zoincs ever in
my everyday conversation. I like, I'm like, I'm suddenly defaulting
to like a very low and gravitas voice for Casey Kasem,
despite the fact that we all know he sounds like
a gravelly voiced elf total aside. But Joseph Barbara seems
like kind of a dumbass. He dispassionately broke down the

(46:31):
dynamic between Shaggy and Scoomy and interview with the Television Academy, saying,
Scooby would eat anything anywhere at any time. Shaggy would
eat anything anywhere anytime. So you had this competition between
them as far as eating. They would eat waxed fruit
off the table. Those two guys, You know, that became
a funny gimmick that the kids must have liked and bought.
Otherwise we wouldn't be going today, just like the stupidest

(46:57):
possible boiling out of that relationship.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
Do you think he hates the show like you know?

Speaker 3 (47:03):
I think he's just I think he's a dumb ass,
because listen to his pit.

Speaker 5 (47:07):
Give an example of what I'm if I ever can
get to it, I want to do. Scooby Doo goes
to the Woodstock and he ended the gang are going
up in this little van and there they're a group.
Now they have instruments, and they arrive at Woodstock and
there's nobody there, just this dark, empty feel, and then

(47:29):
the zombie show up. I'm sorry, I forgot the zombie
would sick. They go to the woodside, not knowing its
a zombie would stock and the zombies show up. They're
doing this, you know, the whole bunch, and then one
arm falls off or whatever is necessary, and then they

(47:49):
won't let them go. They wanted to keep playing and
they got to out trick them somehow or so it's
a perfect vehicle for them, especially with Scooby jumping in
his arms.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
They get there, there's nobody there and there's zombies.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
And zombies are saying, you know whatever it is. Zombies
say like, oh, trying to grab them because and then
they go to leave after they played their son. Zombies
don't want them to leave. It's just like a drunk
guy like Pitchese. I love it, Joseph Barbara very funny.
Jordan tells about Casey Kasem.

Speaker 1 (48:23):
Casey Ason wound up voicing Shaggy from nineteen sixty eight
to nineteen ninety non stop. And in the seventies, Casey
Caason became a vegetarian and by the eighties he refused
to do any commercials for clients that sold meat, fish, poultry,
or dairy products.

Speaker 4 (48:38):
So wow, he sounds like more of a vegan. It's hardcore.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
As Caseon remembered a Hanna Barbera, I asked the director
at the time, it would be possible to quietly make
Shaggy and Scooby vegetarians in the series She goes with
Ahollle Hippie Thing. The director of the shows at the time,
Gordon Hunt, Helen Hunt's father. Helen Hunt's father directed Scooby
Doo for a time. I'd sure, Casey, we can do that.

(49:02):
So when Scuoby and Shaggy had a pizza instead of pepperoni,
they would put vegetables on it. Instead of a hamburger,
they would have an elaborate peanut, butter and jelly sandwich.
The only time Casey Kaseum didn't provide Shaggy's voice during
this time period was for a couple of Burgerkan commercials.
I said, I couldn't do it. It was against my
conscience to promote something that I myself wouldn't eat. So

(49:22):
I told Hannah Barbera, I couldn't do it. They were
willing to understand after playing Shaggy for those three hundred
shows in a couple of movies that I turned them
down on one commercial. This was you say nineteen ninety five,
and Casem did indeed sit the roll out until two
thousand and two.

Speaker 5 (49:38):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
Casum apparently at least officially said that he was unaware
of one of the most universally picked up on aspects
of the character. Asked by Newsweek in two thousand and
two if he was aware of the subtext that Shaggy
was a major stoner, Casum responded, there wasn't anything like
that at all, and quote, we never even thought of it.

(50:04):
He added that he never observed anything of his colleagues
making a joke about Shaggy smoking marijuana, explaining, I guess
it's because I don't know. It was a wholesome show
from beginning to end.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
I tried to find that original interview so hard and
couldn't much at all I have is in Yeah, I
couldn't find the original Newsweek, so I just have to
take a bunch of other sites word for it. But
it can some. Being the guy who asked Casey Casem
if he picked up on the fact that one of
his most durable creations was a pothead and him just

(50:37):
being like straight to your face, like no.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
According to Casey Caysm, he said he wasn't even aware
of this until the interviewer brought it.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Up to him, which is high Laurius.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
I mean, you gotta think he's making that.

Speaker 3 (50:51):
Up and putting the guy on. Yeah, I hope so.

Speaker 4 (50:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
But Kasem, who if one very famous on air freak out,
is any indication I would assume had something of an
ego doing it? Oh? Yeah, they have, like a he
took a letter about like somebody who was like planning
for a funeral or something, and then they like played
some like really uptempo song afterwards, and he melted it down.

Speaker 6 (51:13):
Oh, we're up to our long distance dedication and this
one is about kids and pets and the situation that
we can all understand whether we have kids or pets
or neither. It's from a man in Cincinnati, Ohio, and
here's what he writes, Dear Casey, this may seem to
be a strange dedication request, but I'm quite sincere and
it'll need a.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
Lot if you play it.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
Recently, there was a death in our family.

Speaker 6 (51:37):
He was a little dog named Snuggles, but he was
most certainly a part of Let's go start again. I'm
coming out of the record. Play the record, Okay, see
when you come out of those uptemple damn numbers. Man,
it's impossible to make those transitions, and then you got
to go into somebody dying. You know, they do this
to me all the time. I don't know what the
hell they do it for, but damn it, if we

(51:57):
can't come out of a slow record, I don't understand.
And I want a damn concerted effort to come out
of a record that isn't a fucking up tempo record.
Every time I do a damn.

Speaker 7 (52:06):
Depth dedication, it's a god last damn time. I want
somebody to use a brain to not come out of
a damn record that is uh, that's uptempo. And I
gotta talk about a dog dying.

Speaker 4 (52:20):
I enjoy that.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
It's so funny because his voice is so like robotic
and just smooth and modulated that when you hear it
break containment and start delivering profanities, it's like hearing like
series starting person or something.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
Yeah, that's pretty good. Guy's got power. Yeah, Casey gives him,
not somebody who wanted to mess with Guy. It's got
kind of an ego, but he was aware that he
his character, I should say, Shaggy was second banana to
the dog, Scooby. He said, what was the star of
the show. The Shaquillo o'neel of the show.

Speaker 3 (52:54):
Which is hilarious because depending on which phase of Shaquill
O'Neil's career, it gets fun you're and funnier, like Shaquille
O'Neil with the with the Orlando Magic, Shaquille O'Neil when
he was arguably battling Kobe for a title of most
Valuable Laker, or Shaquille O'Neal the Commentator era. Now it
just gets funnier and funnier Shaquille and eel Becauzam.

Speaker 4 (53:17):
Yeah, that's how I'm choosing to believe it.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
Yes, Kasem continued. People love animals more than they love people.
Am I right or wrong? They give more love to
their pets than they give to people.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
Maybe, and I should know it because I've killed many dogs.

Speaker 1 (53:33):
I'm Casey KAYSM. Scooby is vulnerable and lovable and not
brave and very much like the kids who watch Oh
that's a harsh truth, Casey, But like kids, he likes
to think he's brave. Casey Cassum's view of the human
condition is is is troubling. I am legally obligated to

(53:53):
mention the bizarre circumstances of Casey Kaysum's death, or rather
his post death. When the beloved tal forty DJ died
in twenty fourteen at the age of forty two, a
fierce feud erupted between his adult children and his second wife,
Geene Thompson, an actress who had a recurring part on
the sitcom Cheers. Citing disagreements over the funeral arrangements and

(54:15):
millions of dollars worth of life insurance benefits, Thompson had
Casem's remains transported from Washington State to Montreal and finally
to Freggin' Norway, where he was ultimately buried in Oslo.
For some reason that I don't fully understand. It's a
great controversy more than six months after his death. It

(54:35):
kept him on ice for six months and shipped them
all around God's Green Earth.

Speaker 3 (54:40):
Honey, I finally want to see Normay. I don't care
how you get Beata.

Speaker 4 (54:45):
I want to be buried by the Fiords.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
The show also had a fairly insane roster of guest stars,
including Sonny and cher In the Secret of Shark Island,
which Cher had such a good time doing that she
returned to the franchise in twenty twenty one.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
It's fifty years later, how good a times fat.

Speaker 3 (55:04):
You know, Sometimes sometimes actors take a long time to
come back to their most favorite the roles that took
the most out of them. Don Knotts joined The Scooby
Gang for two adventures, playing a detective who looks exactly
like Don Knots in Guess Who's Not Coming to Dinner
and I guess you can take a wild guess at
how that's spelled. And then he also returned for a
fairly obvious writ of his Andy Griffith Show character in

(55:27):
The Spooky Fog of Juneberry. Probably my favorite of these.
Mama Cass Elliott showed up in The Haunted Candy Factory.
Not I mean she was in a Haunted Candid Factor,
but the name of the episode was the Haunted Candy Factory.
She owned the Haunted Candy Factory, which was the title
of the show.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
I don't like, well, you give Mama Cass a candy
factory owner.

Speaker 4 (55:47):
Oh, she just deserves better than that.

Speaker 3 (55:49):
Also, The Three Stooges appeared on two, nineteen seventy two,
TV movies, while Laurel and Hardy long after their deaths,
popped in for the season one episode Ghost of Bigfoot.
Other notable guest stars included Dick Van Dyke, the Harlem Globetrotters,
Country Shred guitarist Jerry Reid, and in more recent years,
Steve Buscemi and Woopy Goldberg. Also or legend, Vincent Price

(56:12):
got his own standalone movie, thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo
in nineteen eighty five. Lastly, for this section, anyway, when
we arrive at the gang's faithful Steve and they're wreaking
home away from Home, the Mystery Machine, the green Van
was eventually given a history of its own in the
fifth episode of the two thousand and two incarnation of
the show on the WB What's New Scooby Doo, The

(56:33):
previous owners of the band were revealed to have been
a popular family band known as the Mystery Kids, with
the van being plainted by Flash Flanagan, the band's pianist.
In the episode, the van, currently owned by the actual
Mystery Gang, seems to be possessed by Ghost until what
else it is revealed to have been the machinations of
the mother of the Mystery Kids sabotaging the van in

(56:56):
an attempt to bring the band back to fame. Anyway,
as far as what kind of van the Mystery Machine
could actually be, the fine folks at Autumnweek broke it
down far better than people like you and I who
don't actually know the right end of a dipstick could.
In the early run of Scooby Doo, Where Are You,
the van was either a mid sixties Chevy G body
panel van or Dodge A one hundred. Both of these

(57:17):
look similar to the Mystery Machine and both have round headlights.
The forwarda Cottle Line is also a model mentioned frequently
by fans. It had round headlights, but a distinct housing
to those headlights that disqualifies it. Yeah, that was.

Speaker 1 (57:30):
Always my assumption. That was a Ford Aconoline van. That
was what my dad had in the early seventies, and
he tricked it out by cutting a skylight in the
roof and putting a bubble window on it, and he
put shag carpeting all along the walls and ceiling and
put a bed back there. And he called it Marrigold
the Octopus. That was what he called his van. Because

(57:52):
it was nineteen seventy three. I have so many unanswered questions, but.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
I don't think we're going to get there. No, yeah,
it's probably prob best we don't. Maybe just keep that
one for therapy. In the late nineties, Scooby Doo on
Zombie Island, a director video feature film, the van looks
more like a minivan, perhaps a Chevy Astro or a
GMC Safari, and it's painted as a news van for
Daphney Blake's fictional show Coast to Coast with Daphney Blake.

(58:20):
Fred is her producer. In two thousand and eights directed
DVD animated movie Scooby Dooo and the Goblin King, the
Mystery Machine is turned into a monster called the Monstrous Machine,
so there you have it. In two thousand and two,
for the live action movie, the Mystery Machine is portrayed
as a nineteen seventy two Bedford CF. Bedford was a

(58:40):
brand manufactured by Vauxhall. It's never mentioned how an allegedly
seventeen year old teen would have gotten his hands on
an imported van, but Bred and Daphne do travel to
Australia in the aforementioned Coast to Coast with Daphney Blake
so maybe the Bedford is a nod to that particular continuity. Now, obviously,
there have been many fan made versions of the Mystery

(59:00):
Machine throughout the years, but perhaps the most famous one
may have been driven by fifty one year old Sharon Turman,
who led police on a chase in twenty sixteen while
high on math driving amnivan styled just like the Mystery Machine.
She was sentenced to over two years in prison.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
Ma'am, I'm sorry. This man is just too cool to
be sweet legal. I'm so sorry. I have not heard that,
and that's very much seems like something I would have
heard of.

Speaker 4 (59:24):
That's incredible.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
I'm sure she's. If she's not, she won't be the last.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
I'll just say, yeah, to lead police on a high
speed chase in a mystery machine? Yeah, no, I mean
trust me, no one else will. I will. That's how
I'm going up.

Speaker 3 (59:42):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
Now, we're going to a section we like to call
Scooby Doo.

Speaker 4 (01:00:06):
Be sound interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
Historical note, Scooby Doo was actually the first Saturday Morning
cartoon to feature a laugh track. To make sure television
audiences laughed at the you know in quotes right moments
and did some proper levels and volumes. TV producers in
the fifties started substituting their own canned laughter using a
laughing machine invented by Charles Douglas that came to be

(01:00:30):
called the laugh box laugh with two f's. This is
shocking to me because I assumed it was just something
that they just dubbed it in posts and really wasn't
that complex. But it was a literal machine. Well, the
Flintstones also used the laugh track. Scooby Doo holds the
distinction of being the first Saturday Morning cartoon to harness
the canned laughter. Hy'll tell us about the laugh box,

(01:00:53):
not to be confused with Peter Frampton's squawkbox.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
Ha ha ha ha that's a talk box. Oh yeah, wrong, awk.
The history of the laugh box is amazing. Charles Douglas
had a team of certified laugh boys and you bet it,
you bet your bottom dollar, buddy. Laugh Boys is spelled
with two f's.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Are we the laugh boys?

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
Yes, yes we are. Uh the They were certified texts
who were allowed to operate the laugh Box in his
absence allowed Well, Douglas had this thing, had the laugh
game laugh track game on lock throughout the seventies, and
he basically took this thing and it was over two

(01:01:38):
feet tall in an exterior box, occurred with padlocks, and
one of the descriptions that I read operated like an organ.
I don't quite know what that means, but basically Douglas
would roll this thing into you know, studio, and the
producers would say, okay, we need a subdued laughter there,

(01:02:00):
we need the quiet tittering there, and Douglas would go
to work on it in private to guard his techniques
and technology.

Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
It's like the Wizard of Oz.

Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
Yeah, only his immediate family who would inside the inside
of the machine looked like and it was referred to
one point as allegedly the most sought after but well
concealed box in the world never find Yeah, I guess.
So my guess is that this thing, when they say
it operates like an organ, it's just triggering different tapes

(01:02:34):
that he would combine. Yeah, like a mellow Yeah essentially. Anyway,
one of these was discovered and put on Antique's roadshow.
At one point they said you can probably get around
ten grand for it, So those your belongs in a
museum segment for this episode.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
There's an episode of the dakoder Ring podcast. There's a
whole half hour episode about this machine. Wow. Yeah, I
want to check this out later. This is really wild looking. Yeah,
and I remember I think it was I think it
was Andy Kaufman or somebody who pointed out that part
of their hatred of laugh tracks, in addition to it
just being an authentic was that the voices that you're

(01:03:14):
hearing were recorded many, many, many decades ago, and that
they were just all dead by that point, which added
a whole other level of creepiness to the mechanical laughter.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
I think I read that Chuck Plank book.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
Oh maybe that was it, which.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Is sort of the most normy ault Dickhead to have
been reading as a teen. Anyway. As for the non
dialogue sounds of Scooby Doo, as you might have guessed
for the show originally pitched as a rip off of
the Archiees, there were a number of musical considerations that
went into the Gang's adventures. The original theme song for
the show wasn't even the one that people are familiar

(01:03:51):
with today. Scooby Doo, wherever you got some learning to do,
or Now. It was basically sounded like the Monster's theme ah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
Which then got sampled by Fallout Boy and Uma Thurman.

Speaker 8 (01:04:08):
Yeah Scooby Dell, where are you?

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
However, this version, the instrumental version, only appeared in the
first two episodes because the network thought that it was
too spooky for children, so this was replaced by a
more kid friendly theme now. This is an example of
the insane timelines that this used to operate under the
original version. That song is almost lost to history because
when the original show the original two seasons were remastered

(01:04:57):
and re released in nineteen ninety eight for home media,
they used the second incarnature of the theme song for
every episode, almost losing this first one for history. And
that instrumental was written by a guy named Ted Nichols
who worked at Hannah Barbera for nearly a decade contributed
to a ton of the company shows. Just a fun
note about him, He used to sing in a barbershop
style Dapper Dan quartet at Disneyland, and he got his

(01:05:18):
gig at Hannah Barbera when a member of the church
choir who was musical director of introduced him to him.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
The show's more familiar theme song, the one you so
indelibly sang a moment ago I was written by David
Mook and Ben Raleigh. Raleigh seems to be the more
famous of the pair, having written hits like Wonderful, Wonderful
for Johnny Mathis, tell Laura I love her. You know,
one of those great classic teen death songs of that era,
and similar you'd say, Drek, I say classics for Leslie Gore.

(01:05:50):
According to Rosemarie Mook, David Mook's widow, he had done
some work for Hannah Barbera before when they assigned him
the role of a new theme song for Scooby Doo
with Dan Raleigh. The two men met on a Tuesday
and completed a new draft of the song in time
for the episode that aired that Saturday. They met on
a Tuesday, it was on the air on Saturday. It

(01:06:12):
means they wrote it and recorded it, mixed it, mastered it,
stuck it on the episode. That's insane, that is totally nuts.
It was sung by a guy named Larry Marx. That's
the voice who sings the famous Scooby Doo theme. Marx
have been working for Lee Hazelwood. Of all people, who
was to me best known, I mean has a lot

(01:06:33):
of great mid sixties production partnerships, but the most famous
ones with Nancy Sinatra. Yeah, so so gold that's nuts
to me and known for his three and a half
octave voice. Larry Marx came in and knocked out the
Scooby Doo theme on a Wednesday, the day after the
two guys wrote it, and it was in place for
the series in time for the third episode airing that Saturday.

Speaker 3 (01:06:59):
That is just nuts. Yeah, he had this three and
a half after voice. Or he's saying male and female
parts in falsetto just every part on.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
That track.

Speaker 3 (01:07:09):
Is wid and Jordan. Yes, this will interest you. Before
the Manson murders, Mook's widow recalled David telling her that
Charles Manson had come into David's office pedaling demos he'd written. Yeah,
she said in an interview, David looked at him and thought,
this is a very strange person. I've got to get
him out of my office.

Speaker 1 (01:07:28):
They all say that I think he was much more
connected to the sixties music industry than people won a
lot on The only guy who admits that he was
like really ingrained in the scene was Neil Young. Everybody
else tries to like whitewash him out of the picture.
But he was. He was hanging out with a lot
of I mean the beach boys, Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson's
the most famous. I think he was hanging out with

(01:07:49):
some of the mamas on the papas.

Speaker 4 (01:07:50):
Like, no, Mason Manson was in the scene. But whatever.
Scooby Doo guy.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
Larry Mark's version of the of the Scooby Doo theme
song was replaced by a newer version, a better version,
a faster version, sung by George A. Roberson junior stage
named Austin Roberts, who also sang some of the chase
music in a second season of the show.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
That's the music that kicks up when they're running in
between the hallways and out of doors.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
Can you do it? No, I'm such a Scooby Doo nube.
I'm not tall lo sure what it is like. I
can kind of approximate it.

Speaker 7 (01:08:28):
Though.

Speaker 1 (01:08:30):
Danny Jansen was the producer for the show's music at
that point, and he was already an industry event. He'd
written Come On and Get Happy for the Partridge Family
and was involved in Josie and the Pussycats. Supposedly he
threatened to walk away from the latter because the network
was leary of one of the singers he wanted, Patrese Holloway,
who'd become the first ever African American woman to star

(01:08:50):
in a cartoon.

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
I just want to stress how cool this guy Danny
Jansen was. He threatened to walk away because they weren't
going to let a black woman onto it cartoon show.
And he produced Kurt Russell's nineteen seventy self title record,
What What.

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
The What is Kurt Russell's records sound like? I Is
it like a I think yeah. I mean I've never
heard him saying I didn't know he's saying. I hope
it's like himing a guitar.

Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
Baby Believe Me is one of the songs.

Speaker 1 (01:09:21):
Oh so he's in his Disney phase. Okay, yeah, okay.
That's the craziest thing I've learned on this.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
I just love how the these industries were so connected.
I mean, that's the truly if there's any truly magical
magic in LA it's that you can have. You know,
a guy who made cartoon history by pushing for the
first black representation on a cartoon show and working on
something that was written by another guy who been pitched

(01:10:08):
by Nansen and sung by another guy who did guide
vocals for Kurt Russell's a What a wacky What a
Wacky town.

Speaker 1 (01:10:17):
Now we're heading into a section that you call Scooby
Doobie reception. Ken Spears, one of the producers of the show, said,
we were worried it wouldn't last but one season, much
less than thirty eight years. It was up against the
Hardy Boys on NBC, and we thought we'd get clovered
in the ratings. This did not happened. Nielsen Ratings reported
that as many as sixty five percent of Saturday morning

(01:10:39):
audiences were tuned into CBS when Scooby doo was being broadcast.
Insane market. Yeah, that's that's ridiculous. At the end of
the first season, the original voice of Daphney Stephanieanna Christofferson,
which definitely seems like a made up name, retired and
was replaced by Heather North.

Speaker 4 (01:10:59):
Who voiced the character until nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
The show was such a success that it stopped being
a ripoff of The Archies and Dobie Gillis and became
a trendsetter of its own. Hannah Barbera and its rivals
produced a glot of animated programs that also starred teenage
detectives solving mysteries with a pet or mascot. These shows
included Josie and the Pussycats, The Funky Phantom, The Amazing
Chan Chan and the Chan Clan, Goober and the Ghost Chasers,

(01:11:25):
Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels. One of these is
a fake, I know one of these. You put it in here.

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
Actually, it's about saying I was just about to say,
those are all real shows.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
In the fall of nineteen seventy two, Hannah Barbera and
CBS embarked on a new format one hour episodes called
the New Scooby Doo Movies, which started the Parade of
guest stars. After two seasons and twenty four episodes of
the New Movies format in nineteen seventy two, in nineteen
seventy three, CBS began airing reruns of the original Scooby
Doo Where I Use series until its option on the

(01:11:57):
series expired in nineteen seventy six. That was around the
same time that Fred Silverman, who we mentioned earlier in
the episode kept jumping TV networks during the seventies, became
president of ABC moving from CBS to ABC, and Silverman
made a deal with Hannah barbar to bring Scooby Doo
to ABC along with him. Began airing in nineteen seventy six,
and it was around this era that Scooby was joined

(01:12:19):
by a new Hannibar Bear show, Dyno Mutt Dog Wonder,
to create the Scooby Doo Dyno Mutt Hour. What are
you having me read?

Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
I just want you to keep reading obscure sixties and
seventies cartoons cold. It's the biggest joy of my day.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
Joe Ruby and Kevin Spears, some of the creators of
Scooby Doo, who are now working for Fred Silverman and
supervisors of the ABC Saturday Morning cartoon lineup, returned the
program to its original format half hour, notably adding Scooby's
dim witted country cousins Scooby.

Speaker 3 (01:12:53):
Dumb also not a thing we made up.

Speaker 1 (01:12:58):
The following year, those two, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears,
left to start their own studio in nineteen seventy seven
as competition against Hanna Barbera, which I'm kind of shocked
that they didn't have that in their contract not to do.
And this is when things started to go downhill for
poor Scooby and his friends. By nineteen seventy nine, ratings

(01:13:19):
were so low that the series was nearly axed, so
Joseph Barbera and Mark Evner developed Scrappy Do, Scooby's nephew,
to prevent ABC from canceling the series. The character, obnoxiously
brash and fearless, though physically small, was the other rubric
pitch for Scooby Doo before they ultimately went with large

(01:13:39):
but scared as the core and really only personality traits.
Sixteen episodes of Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo aired during
the nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty season, but ABC ultimately
felt that Scrappy was not a positive influence on kids.
Evanor wrote about the experience on his blog, quote it
dawned on ABC broadcast, then maybe Scrappy was a bad

(01:14:01):
role model for the kiddos. He was, and one person
in that department actually used this term to me, quote
too independent. The network also thought Scrappy was quote too rebellious.
But all that said, Scrappy did exactly what he was
supposed to do. As Evanor wrote, he got Scooby Doo
renewed for another season. More Scooby Doo came from the

(01:14:22):
blood of Scrappy Doo. In case you haven't figured this out,
Scrappy Doo was fairly hated among Scooby Doo heads. Series
creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears have gone on the
record about having hated him, and so did animator i
Will Takamoto, who described Scrappy as quote definitely not my
favorite member of a Scooby family. In two thousand and four,

(01:14:46):
when Scooby Doo received acclaim for being the animated show
with the most episodes, was the movie before the Simpsons
took that record over. Fans congratulated the show but didn't
hide their vitriol for Scrappy, with comments like please let
Scrappy get caught by the Dogcatcher and any true Scooby
fan would have to disregard all the episodes featuring the
terrible Scrappy do. It's just too painful. Clearly, they made

(01:15:11):
their opinions very clear.

Speaker 3 (01:15:13):
I just love I love how much I love when
people get out of pocket about things that do not matter.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
Hey, that's the name of this show, that's sure. James Gunn,
who we mentioned earlier, wrote the live action Scooby Doo
movie once so far as to call Scrappy Do quote
a little piece of this in his movie's twist, ending
Scrappy actually winds up being the villain. The film's director

(01:15:40):
Rajah Gosnell told E Scrappy ruined the series. So it's
just a brainstorm between James and I where we were
trying to figure out the final twist. So just out
of the session, it was like Scrappy. I know people
younger on us that really like Scrappy. The twist was
widely debated on what era of Scooby you watched, but
enough people hated Scrappy we were mostly applauded. Scrappy Dow

(01:16:03):
was eventually killed, at least non canonically in twenty eleven
in a work of online fan fiction which tied the
show to Dexter, the show about a serial killer with
a heart of goal.

Speaker 3 (01:16:18):
Question mark, that's why I love fanfic.

Speaker 1 (01:16:20):
Yeah. Yeah. By twenty fourteen, the out of context line
Scrappy Do found dead in Miami has become a Twitter choke.

Speaker 4 (01:16:28):
I don't remember that.

Speaker 1 (01:16:30):
You're much more online than me. You remember that.

Speaker 3 (01:16:33):
No, I don't remember this. One in particular. But I
find it so amazing to recap someone online was writing
fanfic Dexter fanfic and the murder that Dexter is investigating
on Scrappy do them. I love the Internet.

Speaker 1 (01:16:50):
Also in twenty eleven, in an episode of Scooby Doo
Mystery Incorporated, Scrappy appeared in a brief cameo when Fred
and Daphne visited a museum celebrating their exploits, to which
Fred claims, we all promise each other that we would
never speak of him.

Speaker 3 (01:17:06):
It's hard to pin a straight narrative onto the decline
and subsequent expansion of Scooby Doo, simply because, as you
may have gleaned already, the show was mercilessly shoved in
any direction that whoever owned it at the time thought
could make them money. The last incarnation of the show
on ABC was called a pup named Scooby Doo and
wrote on the then prevalent trend of making established children's
television characters young a la Muppet Babies. After the show's

(01:17:28):
first season in nineteen eight eighty eight, Tom Ruger, who
had previously been the head story editor on Scooby Doo,
since i'ont eteing eighty three took much of his team
to defect from Hannah Barbera to Warner Brothers to develop
Steven Spielberg presents Tiny Toon Adventures and later Animaniacs and
Pinky in the Brain. So that's just a fun historical
note that this weird guy worked on two different things

(01:17:50):
about making cartoon characters babies and had enough people on
the team to want to continue doing that with him.

Speaker 1 (01:17:58):
I just love that Steven Spielberg felt strongly enough about
Tiny Tin Adventures.

Speaker 3 (01:18:03):
To get branded with his name on it. Yeah, Yeah,
I just jesus. This infantilized Scooby marched on until nineteen
eighty one, but following the success of the show's reruns
and live action film, the next version was What's New
Scooby Doo, airing on Kids WB from two thousand and
two until two thousand and six. From there, the franchise

(01:18:25):
is travel to cartoon network Boomerang, which is a cable
and streaming app that apparently exists, and finally HBO Max,
where Mindy Kaling's adult oriented Velma. A rebooted version of
the show centered on that character, premiered in January twenty
twenty three. There's also an entire cottage industry of comic

(01:18:46):
books and video games based around Scooby Doo that we
will not be mentioned.

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
I feel bad taking Alex's fan theory corner from you
do you want to do this?

Speaker 3 (01:18:57):
No? Go ahead, go ahead?

Speaker 1 (01:18:59):
Okay. One thing we did want to note is some
of the more hilarious fan theories about Scooby Doo. For example,
there's a theory that Scooby Doo is able to speak
English because he was part of a Soviet experiment. I
like that one. Or that the gang is actually constantly
on the move in the Mystery Machine because the draft
Dodgers avoiding the Vietnam War.

Speaker 4 (01:19:19):
I like that one too.

Speaker 1 (01:19:20):
That's why I.

Speaker 3 (01:19:20):
Also liked that one.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
Yeah, But the award for the most as you describe it,
baroque theory goes to the one that posits that the
characters were based on the five college consortium. Where did
you find this? Amherst College has a very preppy reputation,
so that represents Fred Hippie Shaggy is Hampshire College, Mount

(01:19:45):
Holyoke College matches upper class upper crust, Daphne Smith College
is Nerdy Velma, and Scooby is UMass Amhurst, which is
known for partying. Yes, it is a lot of friends
who went there. However, FactCheck Hampshire College didn't even open
until one year after Scooby started airing Yeah it is,

(01:20:06):
you prove the stuff. One of the animators shot down
the rumor in his autobiography, writing I don't think I
could have named five colleges in the Boston area, let
alone been familiar enough with them to copy their styles busts.

Speaker 3 (01:20:20):
So there you have it, folks. We will chase down
any dumb thing that shows up at alistical. I'm not
even sure how that the genesis of that theory, but
we will run it down at fact check it for
you anyway. Despite its massive success, Scooby Doo has only
been nominated for two major awards, Daytime Emmy in nineteen
ninety for a pub named Scooby Doo and another in

(01:20:41):
two thousand and three for the voice of Velma Mindy
Khn for Outstanding Performance in an Animated Program. It's not
like the property was ever going to be a critical darling. Ao.
Scott want snifted in The New York Times that Scooby
Doo was quote one of the cheapest, least original products
of modern American juvenile culture.

Speaker 1 (01:20:58):
Ouch. I mean, I'm not a huge fan, but it's
got to be way more deserving targets than Scooby two.

Speaker 3 (01:21:06):
Just like that that he went for that one.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
Yeah, that is personal. That feels like that feels like
a hymn problem.

Speaker 3 (01:21:13):
Honestly, I would though. A good counterpoint comes from other
other than Carl Sagan, who in his last book hyped
Scooby Doo as approaching the supernatural with a healthy degree
of scientific skepticism, which he said the X Files did
not do. He called Scooby Doo a public service which
paranormal claims are systematically investigated and every case is found

(01:21:36):
to be explicable in prosaic terms. Thank you, Carl.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
Billions and billions of ghosts.

Speaker 3 (01:21:43):
Obviously, Scooby Doo's massive success has more to do with
its impact on culture. I mean, you look at something
like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is one of the
biggest television hits of the waning days of the twentieth
century into the twenty first, and that is explicitly modeled
after Scooby Doo by Joss Whedon. Admittedly that the game
even calls themselves to the Scoobies. Yeah, I read an

(01:22:05):
interesting think piece in The Atlantic which you'll probably never
hear me say again about some of the societal underpinnings
of the gang. Fred and Daphne, with their implied couple
them and relatively straight appearances minus the Ascot, represents the
upstanding mainstream America, while Shaggy and Velmo, with their implied
drug habits and obscured sexuality, are the products of the counterculture.

(01:22:26):
Writer Christopher Orr continues, the show's longevity demonstrates that the
metaphor works equally well as outsiders versus popular kids, or
most primarily, as children versus parents, And I think that
really gets at the essence of Scooby Doo. Like another
tootemic illustrated work, Calvin and Hobbes, it captures a representative

(01:22:46):
handful of American archetypes and their companions as they navigate
the adult world. Scooby Doo's ultimate lesson, though, I think,
is far more cynical than anyone ever let on the
fun evils of the world, like ghosts, vampires, and ghouls
are ultimately all in our heads, and growing up means
learning that every spooky thing haunting your imagination via the
dark hallways of the world. Is, in the end, just

(01:23:08):
another greedy adult in a cheap mask. But there's a
silver lining in that it also teaches us we'll always
have our friends, animal and otherwise, a good sandwich or
two and a pretty sweet van with a custom pain
job to help us model our way through. Folks, Thank
you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm
Alex Sigel.

Speaker 4 (01:23:28):
And I'm Jordan run Tagg. We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 3 (01:23:31):
We're right your next time.

Speaker 1 (01:23:38):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (01:23:41):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 3 (01:23:47):
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtog
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
With original music by step Applebaum and the Ghost Punk Orchestra.

Speaker 3 (01:23:55):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave.

Speaker 1 (01:23:57):
Us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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