Another Stupid Thing on Wikipedia…

There's this thing called the Five College Consortium which is made up of four liberal arts colleges and one university in the Connecticut River Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. They're all close to one another and they often crossover with events.

Some folks have written to ask me about this, with appears on a Wikipedia page…

A popular urban legend among Five College students holds that the characters on the Saturday morning cartoon Scooby Doo represent the five colleges. The legend has Daphne representing Mount Holyoke College and Velma as Smith College, with Fred representing Amherst College, Shaggy as Hampshire College, and Scooby as UMass Amherst. Hanna-Barbera Productions, CBS executive Fred Silverman, and some of the show's writers have said that this story is false, and that the show was actually based on the radio program I Love a Mystery and the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Regardless, the fact that Hampshire College was founded a year after Scooby Doo's debut calls this folklore's veracity into question.

In other words, it's an urban legend. There's not much of a connection between the characters and the colleges they allegedly represent. Lots of people who worked on the show say the legend is false. No one who worked on the show says it's true. The Snopes site debunked it and the timing of when one of the colleges was opened makes it impossible that the story could possibly be true.

But we'll mention it just in case there might be something to it…