Where are you, Scooby Doo?

Oh, there you are. Or were. Last night. In a new live action movie on the Cartoon Network entitled Scooby-Doo: The Mystery Begins. So admit it. How many of the rest of you watched it, too? 😉

If you missed it and like the Scooby gang, you might want to try to catch it during one of the many reruns/replays they’ll be doing because they did a pretty good job of capturing the characters. I’d even stack it up against the two theatrical live action movies and say it might even be a better story than both of them. Maybe not as well-acted because the stars weren’t major actors but then again not as overshadowed by special effects either. Just a really entertaining piece of storytelling that hit it’s mark with a bulls-eye for this longtime fan and that’s saying something when you’re dealing with rebeginning a well-known set of characters like they were attempting to do.

Okay, I’ll fess up, next to Superman, my one extreme collecting weakness is Scooby-Doo. Heck, if I’m honest, old Scoobs might just surpass Supes in my heart. I’ve actually been a true fan of Scooby-Doo longer than I have of Superman because I didn’t start obsessing over the guy in blue until I started watching Lois & Clark in the 1990s. But, Scooby, well, he’s been around in my life pretty much continuously since 1969. (Saturday, September 13, 1969, on CBS to be exact. I would’ve probably tried to post something yesterday but decided since they were doing the movie last night I wanted to see it first. :D)

The amazing thing is Scooby-Doo has been around in some form or another since that time. Almost continuously. Some incarnations aren’t so great but he’s always beloved for some odd reason and both old and new fans keep coming back for more. And more. Ever wonder why? I found a couple of interesting things about that when I was doing some research on him this morning on Wikipedia: 

The influences of I Love a Mystery and Dobie Gillis were especially apparent in these early episodes; Mark Evanier, who would write Scooby-Doo teleplays and comic book scripts in the 1970s and 1980s, identified each of the four teenagers with their corresponding Dobie Gillis character: “Fred was based on Dobie, Velma on Zelda, Daphne on Thalia and Shaggy on Maynard.”[11] The similarities between Shaggy and Maynard are the most noticeable; both characters share the same beatnik-style goatee, similar hairstyles, and demeanours. The core premise of Scooby-Doo, Where are You! was also similar to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. Both series featured four youths with a dog, and the Famous Five stories would often revolve around a mystery which would invariably turn out not to be mysterious but a plot to disguise the villain’s true intents. 

I almost gasped when I read the part about Dobie Gillis. I think some where at some point, I may have read something about this before but it hadn’t stuck, apparently. This time, it hit and scored, big time. Yeah, I can definitely see the connection.

But the other part, I’ve never even heard of those Famous Five books by Enid Blyton and apparently they were extremely popular children’s books that ran from the 1940s through the 1960s. Wow.