The Scooby-Doo Show



The Scooby-Doo Show is the blanket name for the episodes from the third incarnation of the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon Scooby-Doo. 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 some were originally produced in 1977 and 1978. Reruns are currently airing on CBBC. 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

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

Home Media releases
The 1976 episodes were released on DVD by Warner Home Video with the Dynomutt episodes they originally aired with as The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour: The Complete Series on March 7, 2006. The 1977 season has not been released in a season set, but some episodes have appeared on DVD. This leaves five of the eight 1977 episodes that ran as part of Scooby's All-Star Laff-a-Lympics as the only episodes not yet released on DVD from this 40-episode incarnation. The 1978 episodes were released on DVD as ''Scooby-Doo, Where are You! The Complete Third Season from Warner Home Video on April 10, 2007, although only nine of those originally aired under the title Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in their initial run, and none of the 1978 episodes were presented under the Where are You! title for twenty-eight years following their broadcast debuts (the cartoons on the DVD set still feature the syndicated Scooby-Doo Show'' opening and closing credits). All forty Scooby-Doo Show episodes are available for purchase and download from the iTunes Store, as either individual episodes or a season set. The 1976 and 1977 episodes are grouped under The Scooby-Doo Show, while the 1978 episodes are listed under Scooby-Doo, Where are You!