Scooby-Doo

Scooby-Doo, American animated cartoon series featuring the adventures of Scooby-Doo, a talking Great Dane, and his mystery-solving teenage companions.

The original Scooby-Doo-based cartoon series, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969–70), established the basic template for more than 30 years of stories. The dog—cowardly and gluttonous but good-natured—traveled around the United States in a van called the Mystery Machine with four young friends, the Mystery, Inc., gang: slacker Shaggy (voiced for most of the series by disc jockey Casey Kasem, longtime host of the countdown show American Top 40), shrewd ascot-wearing group leader Fred, beautiful but “danger-prone” Daphne, and brainy, tomboyish Velma (the group was later joined by Scooby’s brash nephew, Scrappy-Doo). Scooby and his owner, Shaggy (one of the first serial abusers of the word like), were generally afraid of their own shadows, but, ever motivated by insatiable hunger, they put themselves in harm’s way, provided they were compensated with Scooby Snacks. Everywhere they went, the quintet encountered some mystery with a seemingly supernatural origin—frequently a monster. Upon investigation by the amateur sleuths, though, the mystery proved to have a human origin, and the episodes invariably ended with the evildoers convinced that they would have gotten away with their nefarious deception “if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”

The series was conceived by CBS television executive Fred Silverman, who was attempting to steer his network’s children’s programming away from the often-condemned violence of action and superhero shows and toward humour. The creative team of Joe Ruby and Ken Spears developed the series for Hanna-Barbera Productions, which debuted in 1969 and quickly achieved great success. The program’s formula lent itself to seemingly endless variations, and new Scooby-Doo episodes were produced under different series titles into the early 1980s.

A number of spin-offs and reimaginings followed in the late 1980s and early ’90s, including A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (1988–91), featuring younger versions of the main characters. The original formula was revived in 2002 with the new series What’s New, Scooby-Doo? That year also saw the premiere of the first live-action film featuring a computer-animated Scooby.