Zoinks! Scooby Doo and the Story Behind “Shane on the Scene” (by James A. Hearn)

SCOOBY-DOO OR SCOOBY DOO?

Let’s get the question of the hyphen out of the way before I begin.  When Scooby Doo, Where Are You! premiered on CBS in 1969, the titular hero’s name was written without a hyphen between “Scooby” and “Doo.”  The talking Great Dane’s name was Scooby Doo, no hyphens, and it remained that way until some bored Hanna-Barbera executive decided to hyphenate it to Scooby-Doo and have the name retconned for consistency.

As a lifelong Scooby fan, that hyphen just looks wrong to me.  Whenever I watch any of the dozens of incarnations that followed my favorite cartoon, my crotchety old man persona comes out: Back in my day, after those bats flew out from that creepy old mansion, there wasn’t a dang hyphen in the cartoon’s opening sequence!  And we liked it that way!  When the bats flew away, the title flashing spookily on the screen was Scooby Doo Where Are You!  Not Scooby-Doo Where Are You!

Scooby Dooby Doo is his proper name, now and forever.  That said, if I could change anything about the cartoon’s title, the English major in me would trade the exclamation point for a question mark.  That’s proper punctuation, and no fan, however crotchety, can argue the point.  Also, I would’ve added the comma after Doo, as it appears in the brief animated sequence where Scooby and the gang run across the screen, right beneath each episode’s title.  As in:

SCOOBY DOO, WHERE ARE YOU! IN: GO AWAY GHOST SHIP

To sum up, the dog’s name should be Scooby Doo and the cartoon’s official title should be retconned to Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

But I digress.

THE 1970s – CARTOON NIRVANA

To me, the 1970s were the Golden Age of cartoons.  As a child, I spent Saturday mornings in the living room scarfing down Cap’n Crunch cereal in front of the family TV.  I could rattle off dozens of titles, but my favorites were Super Friends; Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle; Star Trek: The Animated Series, Jonny Quest, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets, Laff-A-Lympics, and The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour.

But the king of cartoons was Scooby Doo, Where Are You!  It was a crazy show, when you think about it.  A Great Dane and four teenagers ride around in a weird van, The Mystery Machine, solving mysteries.  Did these kids live in the van?  Go to school?  Did they have jobs?  Parents?  Responsibilities of any kind?  Apparently not.  All they did was hang out at malt shops and pizza parlors, drive around the country, randomly run into very dumb criminals masquerading as ghosts or monsters, catch said criminals in elaborate traps, and literally unmask them by the episode’s end.  Oh, and their Great Dane talked and usually played an integral part in solving the mysteries.

Crazy.  At the time, I didn’t realize I was enjoying my very first mystery series, though I use the term “mystery” rather loosely.  As a kid, it didn’t matter to me that the clues rarely made sense, or that the traps to catch the crooks defied the laws of physics.  Fred, the gang’s leader, could shoot a “monster” in the butt with a toilet plunger tied to a rope, then capture him by hoisting him up to the ceiling via a pulley.  Shaggy, Scooby’s best friend (I was going to say Scooby’s owner, but that’s a debatable topic), could devour a double triple-decker sardine and marshmallow fudge sandwich in one gulp…unless Scooby stole it.  “Danger-prone” Daphne, Fred’s girlfriend, could fall through a trapdoor and plummet to a dungeon’s stone floor without so much as suffering a hangnail, let alone broken bones.  And don’t get me started on Velma.  She was a walking, talking encyclopedia, a convenient deus ex machina who could pull out any clue or factoid necessary to wrap up the mystery.

The mysteries weren’t so much solved as they were resolved.  The gang gathered clues, sure.  But by the episode’s end, the clues didn’t really matter when all they did was construct an elaborate trap, catch the villain, and pull off his mask to reveal that the seemingly supernatural monster was, after all, a very human criminal.

For all its goofiness and inconsistencies, I was obsessed with this show.  I wanted to drive around in The Mystery Machine, eat Scooby Snacks with my talking dog, hunt for clues, catch crooks, and party at The Malt Shop afterwards.  I think the appeal of Scooby Doo for me—and maybe for everyone—was this: kids were solving crimes that confounded adults.  And that leads me to “Shane on the Scene,” my story in the May/June issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

“SHANE ON THE SCENE”

This story idea was born from an anthology call for private eye stories exploring 1960s America.  (Since my main character was an amateur sleuth and not a paid professional, turns out he didn’t qualify as a private eye.  Sigh.)  Anyway, the assignment was to take some culturally significant event from that tumultuous decade and use it as the background for a private eye story.  I’m sure there were lots of stories about Woodstock, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and other monumental historical events.

At first, I had no idea what to write about.  For one thing, I wasn’t alive in the 1960s, so I felt little connection to the decade I was researching.  But, as a child of the seventies, I came to realize I was very much plugged into the pop culture of the sixties through television.  That was my angle.

But what TV show should I write about?  Star Trek?  The Twilight Zone?  Those were two of my favorites from the sixties, and they were finding new audience members like me through the power of syndication.  As a kid, I didn’t necessarily understand the decade preceding my birth, but I did take note of the Cold War, Space Age, and apocalyptic storylines running through those shows.  Those lessons applied to my world in the seventies.  In Star Trek’s “A Private Little War,” I realized we were the Federation and the Russians were the Klingons, and our conflict was being played out in other countries instead of other planets.  In The Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough at Last,” I learned we lived under the threat of a nuclear holocaust…and to always carry an extra pair of reading glasses, in case the first pair broke.

But all of that seemed heavy and depressing.  What I remembered from the seventies was a brand of happy curiosity, a feeling of adventure.  I needed to capture a sense of childhood’s . . . mystery.

WOULD YOU WRITE IT FOR A SCOOBY SNACK?

When I hit upon the idea for Scooby Doo, I knew I wanted to model my mystery after the plot of a real episode.  My amateur sleuth, using lessons learned from a show he’d watched on a Saturday morning, would solve an actual crime.  With my premise chosen, I was excited to have my chance, through Shane, to vicariously become the hero I’d dreamed about. 

But which episode?  I started watching Scooby Doo, Where Are You! for inspiration.  Now, I’ve done all kinds of research for stories, everything from reading entire books to mapping out historical constellation patterns.  I’ve even bought a video game console just to learn Texas hold ’em, literally playing thousands of poker hands to master the game and get the details right.  As entertaining as that was, watching old episodes of Scooby Doo was by far the most fun I’ve had doing research.

While I enjoyed episode eleven, “A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts” (probably my favorite, since there are three monsters), I went with episode fourteen, “Go Away Ghost Ship.”  In my story, Shane watches that episode the Saturday it premiered on CBS, December 13, 1969.  Just as Scooby and the gang snag the Ghost of Redbeard and unravel an insurance fraud scheme involving ship manifests, Shane unmasks the perpetrators of a similar crime.

I hope you enjoy reading my story as much as I did creating it.  If you have a subscription to the streaming service Max, check out Scooby Doo, Where Are You! and the other incarnations of America’s favorite canine sleuth.  The kids in your life—and maybe the kid inside you—will thank you for it.