Zoinks! ‘Scooby-Doo’ celebrates 50th anniversary
Fifty years ago, the world was introduced to a motley crew of crime-solvers and their gawky, talking Great Dane.
On Sept. 13, 1969, CBS premiered animated comedy “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” The first episode, “What a Night for a Knight,” followed the so-called Mystery Gang of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby as they investigated an archaeologist’s disappearance and faced off against a sentient suit of armor, coining indelible lines (”My glasses! I can’t see without my glasses!”) and catch phrases (”Zoinks!”) along the way.
At the time, the show was an outgrowth of sorts of sci-fi adventure series “Jonny Quest,” which was also produced by the Hanna-Barbera studio, but was canceled in 1965 after one season.
“Quest” was “full of guns and pretty hard-core, especially for its day,“says Tony Cervone, a producer on several direct-to-video “Scooby-Doo!” movies and director of next year’s CGI-animated “Scoob!” But the studio still “thought, ‘Hey, there’s something to this adventure aspect. Maybe we should tone it down a little bit, and play with Scooby and Shaggy,’ by having these comical, ‘Tom and Jerry’-like cartoon characters in the middle of a real-world mystery. It was pretty groundbreaking for that time.”
Voice actor Frank Welker was a thenstruggling 22-year-old stand-up comic in Los Angeles when he auditioned for “Scooby”: first as the title pooch and hippie Shaggy, before he was offered the role of the ascot-wearing Fred, whom he still voices five decades later on streaming service Boomerang’s “Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?,” which wraps its first season Sept. 19.
“I really wanted Shaggy, because he was the comedy part,” says Welker, 73. But producer Joseph Barbera “kept pushing me towards Fred. He said, ‘You know, you’re kind of the same age. Just do your own voice, and think ‘Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy’: You’re the leader of the gang and got a driver’s license.’ And that was pretty much it.”
Now, actors typically record voiceovers alone, but the core “Scooby” cast assembled in the recording booth, where they were encouraged to ad-lib and play off each other, and even voiced different monsters from week to week.
“Velma, who was (portrayed) by Nicole Jaffe back in the early days, was the one who said, ‘Jinkies!’ And Joe was like, ‘What was that?,’” Welker remembers. “Then, the cast started trying to do our own little things. Mine was, ‘Hold the phone!,’ which came in later years.”
Like any long-running franchise, “Scooby” has had its share of creative lows throughout various TV incarnations and movies, including two critically reviled live-action adventures released in the early 2000s. Fans roundly rejected Cartoon Network’s 2010 series “Mystery Incorporated,” which abandoned the procedural format for a serialized story, and controversially paired Shaggy and Velma as secret lovers.
The show continues to evolve: “Scooby’s talking a lot more (now) than he ever did, and Daphne is more sarcastic and less innocent than when other actresses have played her,” says Grey Griffin, who has voiced the character since 2000. But mostly, “they’ve really stuck with the classic formula. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”
Going back to the spirit of the original “Where Are You!,” “Guess Who?” brought in comedians in comedians including Wanda Sykes, Ricky Gervais and “Weird Al” Yankovic to play themselves, sometimes with a villainous streak.
“Whenever celebrities guest star, everybody gets a big thrill out of saying the ‘meddling kids’ line,” Griffin says with a laugh. “They always freak out when they get to say that. They kind of turn into 10-year-old kids.”