It’s time to pull off that mask and find out who the phantom really is! Or, actually, It’s time for Cool Weird Awesome.
It’s Friday, September 13th, the 50th anniversary of the premiere of “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?”
Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby have been setting traps, being danger prone, dropping glasses, making gigantic sandwiches and solving mysteries for a half-century.
While Scooby has been the star of the show that whole time, that wasn’t the original plan.
As first envisioned by CBS executives, the meddling kids would have been the focus of the show. They were going to play in a band called the Mysteries Five. The dog would have been in the band, too. He played the bongos and had the very hippie-ish name of “Too Much.”
They did away with the pop group concept and decided the show would just be about four teens who solved mysteries with their cowardly talking dog, as teens who have cowardly talking dogs do.
And Scooby got his forever name from the end of the Frank Sinatra song “Strangers In The Night,” where Old Blue Eyes sings “dooby dooby doo.”
While the show did start in 1969, the animator who designed Scooby, Iwao Takamoto, wanted to make it clear that Scoob and Shaggy do not have the munchies because they’re, shall we say, chemically impaired.
As he wrote in his memoir, “they were just a couple of teenagers with bottomless pits for stomachs. Any parents who have had teenagers in the house can relate.”
Also, Lake Lure, North Carolina is home to the annual Dirty Dancing Festival, beginning today. Participants will watch the famous movie, sing songs from the film, and maybe even try doing the “lift” – as long as they hold the frame.
“Like, yeah. We’ve been teenagers forever:” The Evolution of Scooby-Doo’s “Meddling Kids” (24 Frames of Silver)
Iwao Takamoto: My Life with a Thousand Characters
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