Eager to build upon this success, Silverman contacted producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera about creating another show based on a teenage rock group, this time featuring teens who solved mysteries between gigs.

After learning the characteristics of a prize-winning Great Dane from her, Takamoto proceeded to break most of the rules and designed Too Much with overly bowed legs, a double chin, and a sloped back, among other abnormalities.

[7][14] Now without a centerpiece for the upcoming season's programming, Silverman had Ruby, Spears, and the Hanna-Barbera staff revise the treatments and presentation materials to tone down the show and better reflect its comedy elements.

The original voice cast featured Don Messick as Scooby-Doo, Casey Kasem as Shaggy, Frank Welker as Fred, actress Nicole Jaffe as Velma, and Indira Stefanianna as Daphne.

Eventually, the kids come to realize the paranormal activity is actually an elaborate hoax, and—often with the help of a Rube Goldberg-like trap designed by Fred—they capture the creature suit-wearing villain and unmask him or her.

Both series featured four youths with a dog, and the Famous Five stories often revolved around a mystery which invariably turned out not to be supernaturally based, but simply a ruse to disguise the villain's true intent.

[20] In the fall of 1972, new one-hour episodes under the title The New Scooby-Doo Movies were created; each episode featuring a real or fictitious guest star helping the gang solve mysteries, including characters from other Hanna-Barbera series such as Harlem Globetrotters, Josie and the Pussycats and Speed Buggy, the comic book characters Batman and Robin (adapted into their own Hanna-Barbera series, Super Friends, a year later), and celebrities such as Sandy Duncan, The Addams Family, Cass Elliot, Phyllis Diller, Don Knotts and The Three Stooges.

The Scooby-Doo characters first appeared outside of their regular Saturday-morning format in Scooby Goes Hollywood, an hour-long ABC television special aired in prime time on December 13, 1979.

Fred, Daphne, and Velma were dropped from the series, and the new Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo format now consisted of three seven-minute comedic adventures starring Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy instead of one half-hour mystery.

Heather North returned to the voice cast as Daphne, who in this incarnation solved mysteries with Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy while working undercover as a reporter for a teen magazine.

Animation, the show follows the format of the original series but places it in the 21st century, featuring a heavy promotion of modern technology (computers, DVD, the Internet, cell phones) and culture.

Evil from the Austin Powers series, and named after Vincent Price's character from The Abominable Dr. Phibes), then use different schemes to try to get the invention from Shaggy and Scooby, who handle the plots alone.

[27] The first Scooby series produced for cable television, Mystery Incorporated is a reboot of the franchise, re-establishing the characters' relationships, personalities, and locations, and expanding their world to feature their parents, high school, and neighbors.

The series also borrowed pieces from many parts of Scooby-Doo's long history, as well as characters and elements of other Hanna-Barbera shows to form its back story and the bases of some of its episodes.

The series, while still following the basic mystery-solving format of its predecessors, was broadcast as a 52-chapter animated televised novel and included elements similar to live-action mystery/adventure shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer[28] and Lost.

Guest stars included Halsey, Sia, Bill Nye, Mark Hamill, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ricky Gervais, Kenan Thompson, and Chris Paul.

The Live-Action Series, with Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg writing; and Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, Leigh London Redman, André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner, Jonathan Gabay and Midnight Radio's Adrienne Erickson executive producing.

These first four direct-to-video films differed from the original series format by placing the characters in plots with a darker tone and pitting them against actual supernatural forces.

and the Monster of Mexico (both 2003) were produced in a retro-style reminiscent of the original series, and featured Heather North and Nicole Jaffe as the voices of Daphne and Velma, respectively.

(2022), made headlines for portraying Velma as a lesbian (by showing her "crushing big time" on a female guest character), which was in accordance with long-held fan speculation but had never previously been depicted.

Directed by Raja Gosnell, the film starred Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, and Linda Cardellini as Velma.

[49] The film starred Nick Palatas as Shaggy, Robbie Amell as Fred, Kate Melton as Daphne, Hayley Kiyoko as Velma, and Frank Welker as the voice of Scooby-Doo.

Today, all manner of Scooby-Doo-branded products are available for purchase, including Scooby-Doo breakfast cereal, plush toys, action figures, car decorations, Barbie dolls from Mattel and much more.

[76] Science advocate Carl Sagan favorably compared the predominantly skeptic oriented formula to that of most television dealing with paranormal themes, and considered that an adult analogue to Scooby-Doo would be a great public service.

[77] Scooby-Doo has maintained a significant fan base, which has grown steadily since the 1990s due to the show's popularity among both young children and nostalgic adults who grew up with the series.

[79] As Fred Silverman and the Hanna-Barbera staff had planned when they first began producing the series, Scooby-Doo's ghosts, monsters and spooky locales tend more towards humor than horror, making them easily accessible to younger children.

"Overall, [Scooby-Doo is] just not a show that is going to overstimulate kids' emotions and tensions," offered American Center for Children and Media executive director David Kleeman in a 2002 interview.

[81][82][83] Such themes were pervasive enough in popular culture to find their way into Warner Bros.' initial Scooby-Doo feature film in 2002,[83][84] though several of the scenes were edited before release to secure a family-friendly "PG" rating.

[84] Series creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears reported that they "took umbrage" to the inclusion of such themes in the Scooby-Doo feature and other places, and denied intending their characters to be drug users in any way.

[90] Writing in 2020, Christopher Orr of The Atlantic queried why the franchise had remained popular for several decades, concluding that it was primarily due to the many differing ways in which the relationship between the main characters could be interpreted or used as a metaphor.