Shaggy, Scooby and Scrappy were the main focus. However, they ultimately were removed by the next season.
Īlthough still present in these episodes, the characters of Fred, Daphne, and Velma became less essential to the plot, and it became more of a concentrated effort to try and make them relevant, once the new character's presence shed light on it. Therefore, for its 1979–1980 season, Scooby-Doo was given a major overhaul, adding the character of Scooby's nephew Scrappy-Doo, voiced by Lennie Weinrib, and changing the name of the show to Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo. ABC was going to choose between two shows: Scooby-Doo or an unnamed pilot from Ruby Spears Enterprises. In addition, ABC began threatening cancellation for the show, as the show's ratings were declining and Fred Silverman, one of the show's biggest backers at ABC, had left for NBC in 1978.
SCRAPPY DOO SERIES
It was the last Hanna-Barbera cartoon series (excluding prime-time specials) to use the studio's laugh track.īy 1979, the staff at Hanna-Barbera realized that the Scooby-Doo formula was getting worn out, which gave them reason to parody it in a 1979 primetime special, Scooby Goes Hollywood, which was produced and finished before the series aired in September 1979. It aired internationally on BBC One in the UK from 1981 to 1984. A total of sixteen episodes were produced. It premiered on September 22, 1979, and ran for one season on ABC as a half-hour program. And his initial run of episodes was given out to a less than stellar animation house.The original thirty-minute version of Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo constitutes the fourth incarnation of the Saturday morning cartoon Scooby-Doo. Evanier successfully refuted their demands in a conference, but Hanna-Barbera would later cave and have another writer water Scrappy down. According to Evanier, Standards and Practices found the little guy “too independent” and wanted im to conform more with his uncle Scooby. Finding the right voice was a torturous process requiring multiple recordings of the entire episode, and a money and personality dispute ended up costing Scrappy his first performer after just one season ( Don Messick, Scooby's VA, ultimately got the part for most of Scrappy's run). But Scrappy came in for trouble before he ever made it to the air. The writers (at least some of them) even enjoyed working with the character. Scrappy did the job he was made for ABC didn’t cancel, and ratings improved. Daphne would occasionally rejoin the cast in certain incarnations, but for much of the 1980s, Scooby-Doo was a three-man team. So much focus was given over to them that, come second season, Fred, Daphne, and Velma were written out. Scrappy’s cries of “Let me at ‘em!” and “puppy power!” (apparently an ad-lib from a rejected voice actor that Barbera took a liking to) sounded relentlessly through every new episode, and the action increasingly focused on the trio of Scooby, Shaggy, and Scrappy. Only now, there was an irascible puppy that wanted to duke it out with the crooks instead of fleeing from them or solving the mystery. It was, at the end of the day, the same old story: spooky mysteries ending with a guy in a mask. On the strength of that script, the series was picked up. Evanier later had cause to doubt the executive's devotion to the Looney Tunes, but he duly took his cues from Henry Hawk and wrote the script for what amounted to an unofficial pilot for Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo.
Why Henry Hawk? Because the ABC executive who would decide Scooby's fate was allegedly enamored with the classic Looney Tunes and would approve cartoons based on their connections to the classics. Joe Barbera established the basic idea of a little nephew named Scrappy-Doo, animator Iwo Takamoto (probably) prepared a character design, and writer Mark Evanier developed Scrappy’s personality with Looney Tunes star Henry Hawk as a model. This was untenable to Hanna-Barbera, and they decided that what Scooby-Doo needed was a new star character. Repeition was such an issue even then that ABC was talking cancelation. In 1979, after three series and a range of gimmicks from celebrity guest stars to dimwit cousin Scrappy-Dum, Scooby-Doo was on its last legs. Those Scooby fans who turn their nose up at Scrappy and blame him for bringing the franchise down should know that Scrappy’s the only reason Scooby-Doo survived long enough to reach the age of modern media franchising.
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