Back around 1967, Hanna-Barbera Animation Studios were developing a new Saturday morning cartoon show for kids, and a number of ideas were going into the hat.
The basic premise was that a group of teenagers would travel around solving mysteries. The mysteries invariably involved ghosts, spooks, goblins, or monsters, and at the end of each episode, it would turn out to be a guy we had met earlier in the episode who was in fact attempting to scare people as part of a scheme to make money somehow.
In the development process, the teenagers were originally fifties-style teenagers; the original working model based them on the cast of Dobie Gillis, with a stand up handsome clean cut fellow (Dobie Gillis), a beatnik/hippie (Maynard), a stylin’ chick (Thalia), and a less attractive girl who was in fact smarter than all of them (Zelda). At one point in development they were ALL hippies, and then NONE of them were hippies, and then they swung back towards the Dobie Gillis model, with one hippie, and everyone else styled up to the late sixties. Along the way, they acquired a dog, whose name was Too Much, who did not talk; his job was comic relief and reaction shots. Towards the end of the development process, the dog was permitted to talk, albeit with a speech impediment, and his name was changed to Scooby Doo.
The working title of the project was Mysteries Four, later Mysteries Five, after they got the dog. The title was later changed when the scripts started being produced and the dog became more of a major character.
The show was expected to last a year or two, as most Saturday morning cartoons did, before fading into obscurity and the pool of reruns for children’s TV.
It premiered in the fall of 1969, and has survived the death of its studio, its creators, and of Saturday morning cartoons themselves.
And if anyone asks what the cartoon’s NAME was, I’mma reach into this screen and slap somebody.