NOTABLE DEATH ELSEWHERE
JOE RUBY, 87
Co-creator of Scooby Doo
“Scooby-Doo, WhereAreYou!” the ghostly, goofy animated mystery series featuring a ragtag quartet of teenage sleuths and a cowardly Great Dane with a gruff bark who leads the gang in and out of trouble, was a hit from its first episode in 1969.
It would become a Saturday morning staple at a time when broadcasters gave parents a break, and advertisers a bonanza, by devoting programming to children in the early hours of the weekend. And it would grow into one of the most lucrative franchises in the history of animation, making the reputations (but not the fortunes) of its creators, Ken Spears and Joe Ruby.
Ruby, a longtime writer and producer of animated television shows, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
Ruby and Spears had been working mostly as editors at Hanna-Barbera, the leading TV animation studio, when they were charged with creating a show that was a mashup of “I Love a Mystery,” a popular radio show heard from 1939 to 1944 about three adventureseeking pals; the 1948 horror-comedy movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”; and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” the 1959-63 sitcom about a hapless teenager.
The directive, which came from Fred Silverman, then the head of daytime programming at CBS, also asked that a pop song be embedded in each episode, as was done on “The Archie Show.” The idea was for the new series to be soothing and nonviolent, an answer to the moral panic about violence in the media in the wake of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, said Kevin Sandler, an associate professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University.
The pop song part didn’t work out. But Ruby and Spears hit all the other marks by writing an adorable half-hour comedy-mystery with a lovable and hapless Great Dane — a character modeled, they often said, on the character Bob Hope played alongside Bing Crosby in the “Road” movies. After 15 or so drafts, they realized that the dog, Scooby-Doo, was the star.
A half-century later, episodes of “ScoobyDoo” are still being broadcast, and it is considered the most spun-off series in the history of television, having spawned other series as well as feature films, video games, comic books and other merchandise, said Sandler, who is working on a book about the show. In 2004, the showbeat “TheSimpsons” to set a Guinness record for “most prolific cartoon,” at 350 episodes.