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Scooby-Doo & Mystery, Inc.

Created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears

“I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids”
— never actually uttered, but the thought is there.

Ruh-roh.

No, SCOOBY-DOO, a giant talking Great Dane, and teenagers NORVILLE “SHAGGY” ROGERS, THELMA DINKLEY, DAPHNE BLAKE and FRED JONES are not private detectives. But there were millions of kids who grew up watching their Saturday morning antics on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and its countless spin-offs and incarnations, and many of them got their first taste of the mystery and detective genres there. Many a bowl of Honey Comb or AlphaBits were consumed in our house as we watched the gang from  Mystery, Inc.) poking and prowling around haunted houses, half-sunken shipwrecks, deserted mines, gloomy factories, abandoned castles and any other place where something supernatural or otherworldly (A ghost! A witch! A werewolf! A mummy! A killer robot!) was spotted.

Somehow, every week, those “meddling kids” — who apparently had no parents, families or backstories — would tool around in The Mystery Machine, a customized, tricked out van, and inevitably stumble across a situation (only occasionally were they invited) where their particular skills would be required. They would then invite themselves to investigate, and end up snooping around until they encountered the creature, whereupon there’d be some slapstick chases, until Fred, Daphne and Thelma came up with some cockeyed scheme to “catch that villain.” They always succeeded, and the inevitable unmasking would always reveal the supernatural culprit as just some charlatan in disguise, attempting to keep people away from the location to somehow profit from it (real estate scams were common) or some other sort of other criminal activity.

They’ve been at it for more than fifty years now, and Mystery, Inc. have rarely, if ever, received any recompense for their crime-busting or ghost debunking, as far as I can tell. But that’s okay — the gang weren’t in it for the money — they  were in it for the chase.

Well, Fred, Daphne and Thelma were.

Scooby-Doo and Shaggy, his laidback stoner master, were in it mostly for the food. While Fred (the non-threatening alpha male with the ascot), Daphne (the pretty, rich one) and Thelma (the smart, nerdy one — she wore glasses), were prowling around bravely doing rudimentary detective work, most of the action revolved around cowardly Scooby and Shaggy lying low, looking for food (Scooby Snacks being a particular favourite), consuming prodigious amount of whatever they could scrounge up, and inevitably being chased by whatever the creature of the week was, until it was caught and exposed. And that was basically it.

Week after week.

Yet somehow the formula worked. The mysteries weren’t really much of a mystery, though they were engrossing enough for kids to follow, but the heart of the show lied in all those generally gloomy, spooky settings and the ghosts, monsters and the like, all carefully balanced by the lighthearted slapstick antics, reminiscent of old, black and white comedy/horror hybrids by Hope and Crosby, Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis. And as scary and unsettling as the show may have been at times, particularly for younger viewers, at its best, each episode ended with the reassurance that there were no ghosts, no monsters, no boogie men under the bed or in the closet, and that the real villains, no matter the guise, are simply misguided humans out for some economic gain. Okay, it ain’t the Golden Rule, Dickens,Shelley or Keats, or Karl Marx or even Bernie Sanders, but it’s something.

Hell, in troubled times, when the world doesn’t make sense, when everything seems tattered and broken and everyone seems to be in it for themselves, there’s something comforting about the notion that if we stick together, like Scooby and his pals, we can defeat and expose the real monsters. As the theme song/ear worm goes, “Scooby-Dooby-Doo, we need some help from you, now.”

* * * * *

Yes, I know. The formula was tinkered with constantly, especially in later years, when it became “hip” to mock everything, and some shows even featured “real” ghosts and monsters — and I think the show suffered from it. A sign of the show’s enduring popularity lies not just in the endless spin-offs that Hanna-Barbera pumped out or in the endless merchandising (films, board and video games, toys, colouring books, action figures, lunchboxes, comics and even actual “Scooby Snacks” dog treats), but also in how it’s become suck a pop culture juggernaut. Certain phrases have slipped into our vocabulary, even among people who never saw the show, particularly phrases like  “Ruh-ro” and “those meddling kids,” and  Scooby and the gang are referenced or have popped up in everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and South Park to actually showing up in a “very special” crossover animated episode of Supernatural (March 29, 2018, CW), wherein the gang team up with Sam, Dean, and Castiel to crack a case.

A BURNING QUESTION & A SMOLDERING ANSWER

Since, theoretically, Mystery Inc. was a detective agency, should Scooby and the gang be considered “private eyes”? Does anyone ever remember them ever actually being hired to do detective work?

A TIP OF THE FEDORA

UNDER OATH

TELEVISION

MADE-FOR-TELEVISION MOVIES

STRAIGHT TO VIDEO

FILMS

 

COMICS

Scooby-Doo was a natural fit for comic books, and it didn’t take long (a couple of months) for Scooby-Doo to start popping up on the spinner racks. The first one appeared in December 1969, published by Gold Key, and over the years I think every major comic book publisher has had a crack at it. I’m almost disappointed Dark Horse didn’t have their Alien chasing after the meddling kids…

ODDS & SODS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Preliminary report by Kevin Burton Smith.

 
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