BREAK out the Scooby snacks and fire up the Mystery Machine – cartoon hero Scooby-Doo has been captivating audiences for 50 years.
Since 1969, countless criminals would have been getting away with their schemes had they not been unmasked by that mystery-solving gang of pesky kids.
What started as a fun Saturday morning cartoon starring Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and, of course, his cowardly, bungling Great Dane Scooby-Doo has exploded into a global franchise worth billions of dollars.
But for decades it has been dogged by conspiracy theories.
Ever since Scooby-Doo first aired, there have been suggestions that the show is full of thinly veiled innuendoes and hidden inside jokes about drug use, as well as the suggestion that Shaggy was a secret stoner, Fred was gay and Velma might be a lesbian.
And yet the winning formula never seems to grow old. Episode after episode sees a van full of hapless, hungry teenagers break down on a foggy night, conveniently close to a spooky mansion, abandoned warehouse or disused funfair.
Inevitably the spirit of a dead miner, sea captain or legendary local monster haunts the place.
Hijinks ensue, a trap is sprung by the suspicious kids, who eventually discover that the phantoms were actually the feeble janitor or greedy old man Higgins all along, trying to protect his hidden gold or stolen loot.
The aged villains and baddies are usually trying to deter outsiders and stop change, and their constant refrain on being unmasked is: “I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
To celebrate Scooby’s half-century, here are 50 things you never knew about the show.
1. With his flares and garishly painted flower power van, Scooby’s 17-year-old owner Shaggy appeared to be a stereotypical hippy with the munchies.
2. Scooby and Shaggy are constantly on the hunt for food. “Let’s do what we do best, Scoob — eat,” Shaggy says frequently.
3. There have been suggestions that those highly addictive Scooby Snacks they gobbled up were not really dog biscuits, but illegal hallucinogenic brownies — which might explain Shaggy seeing levitating ham sandwiches.
4. In his posthumous 2009 memoir My Life With A Thousand Characters, artist Iwao Takamoto, who also created The Flintstones and Penelope Pitstop, categorically stated that there were no euphemisms for drugs in Scooby-Doo because writer Joe Ruby would not have allowed it.
5. Shaggy was loosely based on Maynard G Krebs, a character in US TV sitcom The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis, which aired from 1959 to 1963.
6. Maynard was a beatnik rather than a hippy, with a goatee beard and comic reactions to the words “marriage”, “police” and “work” — at which he would jump with fear or even faint.
7. Heather North, who provided the voice of 16-year-old Daphne Blake, was also asked about drug-related innuendoes in the show and said: “No, it never even occurred to us.”
8. Online bloggers still frequently and fiercely debate whether nerdy Velma Dinkley is a lesbian.
9. Some fans believe strait-laced Fred Jones was gay and secretly lusted after Shaggy rather than glamorous Daphne.
10. An online chat room has discussed whether hunky Fred would have been using steroids to bulk up.
11. Some think that the gang are CIA agents and that Scooby-Doo is set in a post-apocalyptic world of abandoned theme parks, run-down hotels and disused airfields.
12. In 2016 DC Comics launched a monthly comic, Scooby Apocalypse, in which the gang battled for survival in a post-nuclear-war America.
13. Another theory is that Fred and Shaggy are on-the-run Vietnam draft dodgers, solving the often-asked question of why they never just call the police.
14. Scooby-Doo was named after the lyrics “dooby dooby do” at the end of Frank Sinatra’s 1966 song Strangers In The Night.
15. The show featured guest stars in storylines, including Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Mama Cass Elliot, Sonny and Cher and rock band Kiss. But unlike The Simpsons, Scooby guests were voiced by impressionists.
16. Over the years Scooby and his friends have defeated a wide variety of imaginative enemies including an Ape Man and Abominable Snowman.
17. Other curious villains have included an electric phantom called Mr Voltner and a demented doctor in The Harum Scarum Sanitarium.
18. They have battled countless zombies, vampires and knights. Scooby and his pals even did battle with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.
19. One of the original titles considered for the show was W-Who’s Scared.
20. Circus performer Max The Midget, who appeared in 1969 episode Bedlam In The Big Top riding Scooby-Doo like a horse, would hardly be acceptable in the PC world of 2019.
21. In Britain the show inspired rhyming slang for the word clue — as in “I don’t have a Scooby-Doo what you’re talking about” — which has made it into the Collins English Dictionary.
22. Scooby-Doo was the brainchild of Fred Silverman, the head of US TV network CBS, who wanted an animated show that would appeal to children and teenagers to fill his struggling Saturday morning time slot.
23. The original idea was a cartoon called Mystery’s Five, about a rock band and a sheepdog called Too Much, who travelled across America in their Mystery Machine van playing gigs and solving crimes.
24. Animation studio Hanna-Barbera created the characters of Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley and the hapless hero — befuddled Norville “Shaggy” Rogers.
25. Scooby’s full name is Scoobert Doo.
26. The first episode aired in America in September 1969.
27. It is now shown in more than 160 countries.
28. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! was only meant to run for three seasons, or 41 episodes.
29. Live-action movie versions in 2002 and 2004 have been harshly criticised by die-hard fans who say they are not true to the cartoons.
30. Scooby’s nephew Scrappy first appeared in 1983 in The New Scooby And Scrappy-Doo Show.
31. Scrappy’s high-pitched catchphrase was “Puppy Power!”
32. The New Scooby And Scrappy-Doo Show was later changed to The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries.
33. The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries ran for 26 episodes.
34. There were 42 episodes of What’s New, Scooby-Doo? broadcast between 2002 and 2006.
35. In the more recent episodes the gang used mobile phones.
36. Some of the original cast members are still involved in the franchise, including Frank Welker, 73, who has played both Fred and Scooby-Doo.
37. Frank voiced Fred through every movie and TV show except one in 1988 — A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.
38. He now voices many of the recurring characters in the Transformers cartoons.
39. Disc jockey and voice of the American Top 40 Casey Kasem provided the voice of Shaggy until he retired in 2009. He died in 2014 at the age of 82.
40. Kasem wanted his character to be a vegetarian and quit the show after Shaggy appeared in a Burger King commercial.
41. Actor Don Messick voiced Scooby, Scrappy-Doo and Papa Smurf at various times. He died in 1997.
42. Don also voiced an earlier cartoon dog, Astro from The Jetsons, whose speech style was very like Scooby’s.
43. Scooby-Doo is perpetually seven years old.
44. Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are the only characters to appear in every show.
45. Velma’s catchphrase “My glasses — I can’t see without them!” was an unscripted remark at the first read-through by actress Nicole Jaffe, who played her.
46. Scooby was meant to be a sheepdog but eventually became a clumsy Great Dane.
47. Our TV hero is a triplet – his identical siblings are Skippy-Doo and Dooby-Doo.
48. The hit show first hit British screens in 1971.
49. It was the first cartoon to feature a laughter track.
50. Obsessive fans have held Scooby - themed weddings.
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