The Scooby-Doo Show

***The Scooby-Doo Show*** is an American animated mystery comedy series. The title of the series is an umbrella term for episodes of the third incarnation of Hanna-Barbera's *Scooby-Doo* franchise. A total of 40 episodes ran for three seasons, from 1976 to 1978, on ABC, marking the first *Scooby* series to appear on the network. Sixteen episodes were produced as segments of *The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour* in 1976, eight episodes were produced as segments of *Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics* in 1977 and sixteen episodes were produced in 1978, with nine of them running by themselves under the *Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!* name and the final seven as segments of *Scooby's All-Stars*.

Despite the yearly changes in the way they were broadcast, the 1976–1978 stretch of *Scooby* episodes represents, at three seasons, the longest-running format of the original show before the addition of Scrappy-Doo. The episodes from all three seasons have been rerun under the title *The Scooby-Doo Show* since 1980; these *Scooby* episodes did not originally air under this title. The credits on these syndicated versions all feature a 1976 copyright date, even though series 2 and 3 were originally produced in 1977 and 1978. Outside the United States, reruns aired on CBBC in the United Kingdom until 2015. Like many animated series created by Hanna-Barbera in the 1970s, the show contained a laugh track created by the studio.

## Overview

When television executive Fred Silverman moved from CBS to ABC in 1975, the *Scooby-Doo* gang followed him, making their ABC debut in 1976 as part of *The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour*. This hour-long package show featured 16 new half-hour adventures in the original *Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!* format, with Scooby's country cousin, the Mortimer Snerd-inspired Scooby-Dum, joining the gang as a semi-regular character. In addition, Pat Stevens replaced Nicole Jaffe as the voice of Velma. The other half of the hour was filled by *Dynomutt, Dog Wonder*, a new Hanna-Barbera cartoon about a superhero named Blue Falcon and his goofy mechanical canine sidekick, Dynomutt. The Mystery, Inc. gang made guest appearances in three of the *Dynomutt, Dog Wonder* segments. The show was renamed to *The Scooby-Doo / Dynomutt Show* when ABC added a rerun of *Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!* to the show in November 1976.

In 1977, ABC had a programming block called *Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics*. The *Scooby-Doo* segment of this two-hour block included 8 new episodes of *Scooby-Doo* (two of which featured Scooby-Dum and one of which, "The Chiller Diller Movie Thriller", guest-starred Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Dum's distant female cousin, Scooby-Dee), plus reruns from the 1976–1977 season. The name of the block was changed to *Scooby's All-Stars* for the 1978–1979 season, when the program was shortened to an hour and a half, after the cancellation of *Dynomutt*. 16 half-hours of *Scooby-Doo* (featuring just the original five characters) were produced this season, and began airing earlier in the morning before the *Scooby's All-Stars* block as a third season of *Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!* in September. *Scooby's All-Stars* instead aired reruns of the 1976 and 1977 episodes for the first nine weeks of the 1978–79 season. By November, the early-morning airing of *Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!* had been cancelled, and the new 1978 episodes began airing during the *Scooby-Doo* segment of *Scooby's All-Stars*.

*Scooby-Doo* creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, by 1976 working at ABC for Silverman as production supervisors for the Saturday morning lineup, were involved in the development and production of the 1976–77 and 1977–78 episodes (in 1977, they formed their own animation studio, Ruby-Spears Productions, as a competitor to Hanna-Barbera).

## Cast

Main article: List of Scooby-Doo characters

* Don Messick – Scooby-Doo
* Casey Kasem – Norville "Shaggy" Rogers
* Frank Welker – Fred Jones
* Heather North - Daphne Blake
* Pat Stevens - Velma Dinkley
* Daws Butler - Scooby Dum