Well then Scooby fans it's time we take a look at a franchise everyone knows and loves and while it may have taken a few missteps it is still going strong and that franchise is Scooby-Doo!
The history of our favorite great dane is actually tied to the history of another show The Archie Show which featured the Archie characters as part of a band and it helped save the CBS Saturday morning lineup so Fred Silverman who worked for the network at the time contacted William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and asked them to pitch another show about a teenage rock group only this time the band would solve mysteries inbetween shows.
After attempting to develop his own version of what would become Scooby-Doo Where Are you which was going to be called House of Mystery Joe Barbera passed the project along to Joe Ruby and Ken Spears and also artist Iwao Takamoto and between them the trio changed the name of the show to Mysteries Five which was to feature characters called Geoff, Mike, Kelly, Linda, Linda's brother W.W. and their dog Too Much but tho after all there hard work the pitch was turned down by CBS.
Ruby and Spears went back to work on making a new pitch for the network now under the name Dobie Gills and with this new pitch came alot of changes "Mike" was dropped from the lineup while the rest of the cast got new names and personalities Geoff became Fred , Kelly became Daphne , Linda became Velma and W.W. became Shaggy Too much tho was the only character to be unchanged.
The new version of the show was pitched again and this time Fred Silverman liked the idea but not the name and so the show changed name again to Who's S-S-Scared? Silerman would go on to present the show to CBS executives CBS president Frank Stanton felt that the show was two scary for young kids and thus decided to pass on the show. Since the show was meant to be the centre piece of it's 1969-1970 line up Fred Silverman had Ruby, Spears, and the Hanna-Barbera staff revise pretty much everything they had done and that included toning down the spooky elements and highlighting the comedy aspects . It was during this time that the rock band element was dropped all together and more attention was given to Shaggy and Too Much and after many meetings changed the name of Too Much to Scooby-Doo! and it was this version of the show that got the green light from CBS.
Scooby-Doo Where Are You first premiered of Saturday September 13th 1969 with the episode "What a Night for a Knight" and it ran until 1975 but during 1972 there was another Scooby-Doo show also on the air at CBS The New Scooby-Doo Movies which were just forty minuet episodes with a different guest star every week which ran for 2 seasons totaling 24 episodes and with that Scoobys run on CBS would come to an end but the franchise would live on.
From 1976 until 1991 Scooby and the gang would find a new home on ABC thanks again to Fred Silverman and it's during this time we got shows like The Scooby-Doo Show , Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo twice , The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show , The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. As any fan will tell you it's during the Scrappy years that the show is at it's worse with the gang then mostly being just Shaggy , Scooby and Scrappy with everyone else just not being in the show at all until A Pup Named Scooby-Doo came on and dropped Scrappy and brought the original gang back together and for awhile this would be the last new Scooby-Doo! product.
The Scooby dry spell would end in 2002 when Warner Bros. released the first live action Scooby-Doo movie which was going to be much darker then the show i want go into two much details here because you can find it all on IMDB but it's a version that i wish they made but the film was such a big hit that a second live action movie was made just two years later and all of the cast came back for the sequel the less said about this film the better but it did give us a look at the future voice of Shaggy Matthew Lillard.
If it wasn't for the release of the 2002 movie then we wouldn't have gotten What's New Scooby-Doo which returned the character to Saturday mornings for the first time in seventeen years and along with this new series we got updated character designs and the use of technology was added to the series and this show proved that Scooby and the gang had alot of staying power as the new show would be on the year until 2006.
After that show had ended it was soon replaced by the dreadful Shaggy & Scooby-Doo get A Clue which once again saw the main characters get a redesign only this time it wasn't for the better and was the first Scooby-Doo series not to feature the late and great Casey Kasem as Shaggy with the role instead being played by Scott Menville also gone from the series cast were Fred , Velma and Daphne but it did maintain the Mystery Machine and it dropped the mystery aspect of the show all together so it was Scooby-Doo in name only luckily the show only ran for two years.
Two years would go by without a Scooby show but it was worth the wait because it 2010 we got Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated a show that did something other Scooby shows didn't do and that's give us a long running story and if a character died in an episode they stayed dead it was also the first series to feature Matthew Lillard as the voice of Shaggy. This series more then the rest focused more on the horror aspects with the ghosts sometimes being real and the characters actually had arc's this time around but three years later the show would end.
In 2015 a more comical take on the franchise would debut Be Cool Scooby-Doo! this time the mystery aspect was slightly toned down but not to much and the comedy became the main focus with one of the characters getting a personality change Daphne would now become the groups resident goofball often taking up weird and strange hobbies and as of this writing the show is still on the air.
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As well as the two big screen live action Scooby films we got two made for TV movies called Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster and to be honest there pretty bad both serving as prequels to the 2002 movie and yet they contradict those movies and the less said about how Scooby looks the better.
Since the late 90's there's been a new direct to DVD Scooby-Doo movie almost every year with the first one being Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island which saw the teenagers get back together after a few years apart and the most recent film is called Lego Scooby-Doo! Blowout Beach Bash and next year will see the release of Scooby-Doo! & Batman: The Brave and the Bold which also happens to be the thirtieth film in the series.
Scooby-Doo is one of those franchises that will never go away there will always be someone trying to bring it back in some way shape or form and i for one am glad it's still around.