Scooby-Doo

About

Scooby-Doo is an American cartoon franchise created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears for Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1969. It centers on the adventures of four teenagers and the eponymous dog as they solve mysteries involving supposedly supernatural events. The franchise includes 12 different television series, 22 direct-to-video films, 10 made-for-television films, and 2 theatrically-released films.

History

In 1968, Fred Silverman, executive of CBS daytime programming, was looking for a show that would revitalize the channel’s Saturday morning cartoon line and please parent groups who were upset by more violent cartoons like Johnny Quest. Working with producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, along with writers Ruby and Spears and character designer Iwao Takomoto, they came up with the idea for House Of Mystery. The show about five teenagers: Geoff, Mike, Kelly, Linda, Linda’s brother “W.W.” and their dog, Too Much, who were all members of the band “Mysteries Five”. The band would solve mysteries in between gigs.

As the ideas progressed, the rock band element was dropped, the number of teenagers dropped from five to four, being named Fred, Velma, Daphne, and Shaggy, and the dog was named Scooby-Doo, with the new name inspired by Frank Sinatra’s scat singing.

The original show, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, premiered on CBS on September 13th, 1969. It ran until 1976. In 1977, Silverman became President of ABC, and wanted to bring Scooby-Doo to his new channel. Scooby-Doo series ran on ABC until 1987. In the early 1990s, Turner broadcasting acquired Hanna-Barbera studios, and the franchise was revived on their Cartoon Network cable channel.

Online Presence

Being a long-running franchise, Scooby-Doo has gained a considerable fandom, with fan content appearing on sites like Tumblr,^[1] Fanpop,^[2]DeviantART,^[3] FanFiction.net,^[4] and Reddit,^[5] as well as the reference sites Scoobypedia^[6] and TV Tropes.^[7]

Related Memes

Scooby-Doo Doors

Scooby-Doo Doors are a gag popularized by Scooby-Doo in which characters, being pursued by another character, will dodge into a room down a hallway. The gag became synonymous with the show, and has been used in popular culture enough to get its own TV Tropes page.^[8]

Scrappy-Doo

Scrappy-Doo is a character introduced to the franchise for its 1979-1980 run, Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, who is canonically Scooby’s nephew. Many saw him as an extremely irritating character, giving him a large hatedom. Scrappy became so infamous that in the 2002 Live-Action film, he was given an antagonistic role. TV Tropes uses the term The Scrappy^[9] to describe a character that is hated by fans of a given work of fiction.

I Hate My Job

I Hate My Job is a bait-and-switch copypasta story that opens with the narrator ranting about their disdain for their job, and in the end, revealing themselves to be a fictitious character. In the original version of the story,^[10] the narrator is revealed to be the character of Fred from Scooby-Doo.

That’s My Fetish

That Is My Fetish is a reaction face meant to show one’s arousal at something others might find weird or disgusting. One popular version of the meme shows a GIF from the 2003 version of the show, What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, which shows the cast’s horrified faces before panning over to a grinning Fred, with the caption That’s My Fetish.