Search Results for: SCRAPPY

Welcome to the sixth and last chapter of my ongoing account of how I helped introduce the character of Scrappy Doo into Saturday morning TV and animation history. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get around to this but, well, a lot of things seemed more important. Like sleeping once in a while.

You have two choices. You can read Part Six below or you can go over to this section of the website where I've reproduced all six parts in sequence. Take your pick. If you want to stay right here, Part Six starts now…

There finally came a day when no more revisions could be done to my script, the one that introduced Scrappy Doo. The show was behind schedule and production had to accelerate or they wouldn't make air dates. (That was not an unusual situation, by the way. During my days at Hanna-Barbera — and I gather this was constant — every show was always behind schedule. If a producer or story editor might verge on getting ahead of schedule, Bill Hanna would immediately adjust the schedule to put them behind. There was an ongoing fear that if a show wasn't behind schedule, someone might not work as rapidly as possible.)

Busy with other projects, I only wrote one other episode of Scooby Doo that season — it was called "Demon of the Dugout" and was about a ghost baseball player. Others wrote the other eleven episodes that were produced and the animation was farmed out to a subcontractor who did, in everyone's opinion, a less than inspired job. Years later, when the vast Scooby Doo library was programmed on Cartoon Network, execs would decide to omit for a time, the seasons with poorer animation. The first season with Scrappy was one of those. The theory was that kids would eventually tire of seeing the same episodes over and over…so when the poorly animated shows were finally reintroduced into the mix, audiences would be more forgiving of the poor production values.

I'm not sure that's logical. Scooby never, even in his best years, had very good animation. The appeal of the show was always, I thought, in the easy-to-watch energy of the characters, especially Scooby and Shaggy, and also in a certain cumulative effect. I don't think you could ever be much of a fan of Scooby Doo if you watch the occasional episode. No one episode is particularly memorable and some of them are quite silly and contrived, even by Scooby Doo standards. But watch enough of them and…I dunno. Maybe it's your senses atrophying. Maybe the characters become so much a part of your family that you'll forgive them anything. All I know is a lot of people really love Scooby…

…but not, these days, his nephew Scrappy. I'll get to that in a moment.

Scrappy did exactly what he was supposed to do: He got Scooby Doo renewed for another season. I don't think he was a good addition to the format and the fact that he could talk, while his Uncle Scooby sorta couldn't, tore the already-frail "reality," to use that word in the loosest-possible manner. Then again, the underlying premise of "there's no such thing as ghosts" was shredded somewhat during the seasons that the show had guest stars and so Scooby was teaming up with Speed Buggy (a talking car) and Jeannie (a genie). Later, of course, they gave up altogether on the notion that the supernatural did not exist and had Scooby and Shaggy chased by real werewolves and mummies and space aliens.

In his second season, Scrappy got a new voice. Here's how that happened.

You may recall that H-B went through half the Screen Actors Guild before they settled on Lennie Weinrib as his voice. Lennie was a brilliant, talented performer and a good friend of mine. I just loved the guy…but I have to admit he could be difficult to work with. Around the time he was voicing Scrappy Doo, he became very difficult. Some things occurred in his personal life that upset him greatly and while he always tried to conduct himself as a professional, he didn't — by his own later admission — succeed. In particular, he wasn't getting along with Gordon Hunt, who was then directing the voice sessions for Hanna-Barbera.

Gordon was (and still is) an absolute pro. A lot of what I know about how to direct actors and work with them, I learned by watching Gordon in action. One of the few actors he couldn't handle — maybe the only one — was Lennie. When it came time to start production on Scrappy's second season, Lennie informed H-B that he wouldn't or maybe couldn't play Scrappy for another year if it meant working with Gordon. Not unless they gave him a lot more money.

Bill Hanna was a giant in the world of animation and a very good man in many respects. He had, however, this fierce allergy to paying anyone a lot more money. He wasn't even that comfortable with paying someone a little more money. He decided that the solution was to bring in a new voice director…someone who could get along with Lennie. He called Lennie and asked him who he'd like in that position. Lennie suggested me.

Before the afternoon was out, I was in Mr. Hanna's office being offered the job. I said, "Sure, if I'm not stepping on Gordon Hunt's toes." Mr. Hanna assured me Gordon would be thrilled to have me take over that one show. I went down to Gordon's office and asked him. He confirmed what Mr. Hanna said. When I got home, Lennie called and thanked me for taking the job. Everyone was happy…for about the next eighteen hours.

The very next day, Hanna realized that (a) they would have to pay me and (b) they couldn't deduct that amount from Gordon Hunt's weekly salary as the studio's Voice Director. And then Lennie's agent called up and said, "We're delighted that you're getting Lennie a director he can work with. But you know, he still wants a lot more money." And that was how Don Messick — who'd been the voice of Scrappy in the first place until they decided he wasn't right, you may recall — became Scrappy again.

Losing the gig was another blow to Lennie, though far from the biggest. Larger problems persisted in his life and a few years later, he decided he needed to change that life. He sold his jade green Rolls Royce and his mansion in Hancock Park and spent the rest of his life in peace and love with a newly-started family in Chile. That's right: Chile. He used to phone me at least once a week to chat and tell jokes, and he was obviously very happy there. He passed away in 2006.

Most of his last few years, he spent on the Internet, which he loved. Once in a while though, he'd Google his name and that would lead him to some website or message board where he'd read the rantings of some Scrappy-Loather. He'd send me links and I'd follow them to read how Scrappy had "ruined" the Scooby Doo series. I never quite understood the sentiment being voiced so long after Scrappy had done this alleged damage, and coming — as it often seemed — from people who weren't that wild about the show before Scooby's little nephew joined the team. Others seem to view the pre-Scrappy series as animation that compared favorably with Fantasia…but suddenly when this one character was added, it abruptly turned into a Saturday morning cartoon show.

I don't know why some people hate him so. I don't see that the show was any better the season before…and as I've explained here, his presence got the network to order another season. My read is that the folks who don't like Scrappy are few in number but loud in voice. When I watch one of those 1979 episodes, I can't possibly dislike Scrappy…because he makes me think of Lennie.

This is probably all I remember about the birthing of Scrappy Doo. I did not create him, as some report. He did not destroy the show, as others claim. He was born during a time at that studio when characters were treated a bit too much as a commodity and in that context, he served his purpose. And every now and then, I come across someone — usually someone a lot younger than I am — who absolutely loves Scrappy to pieces. That's great. I don't share the sentiment but I'm glad to have had a hand in giving those folks something they like.

It's been a long time coming but here's Part Five in our trip down Memory Lane with Scrappy Doo, nephew of Scooby and a somewhat controversial cartoon character. Since you've no doubt forgotten what came before, you might want to refresh your memory by reading Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. Once you're up to speed, we can resume…

Where were we? Oh, yes: Scrappy finally had a voice and my pilot script was recorded…and that was the end of it. Or so I thought, having failed to anticipate problems with the ABC Standards and Practices division. I know of no such oppressive force in children's television today…but back then, each network had this department that had to approve everything that got on the air. In other words, In-House Censors. In most instances, these folks had a simple, understandable function: Prevent the network from getting into trouble.

TV networks, because they reach so many people, are always being sued and/or protested, often over things you could never imagine would create problems. Most of the time, the network position is defensible and the outrage falls into the "nuisance" category…but even nuisance suits and protests can be a nuisance. And expensive to defend against. In kids' television, the stakes seem higher. A protester yelling, "This show is poisoning our children" will usually get more traction than someone bitching about a show for general audiences. The sponsors of kidvid are especially frail and known to atomize over very little negative feedback.

Censorship of broadcast television has declined greatly in the era of HBO, Showtime and DVDs…but in the early eighties, if you were creating a show for CBS, NBC or ABC you usually found yourself in the following dilemma. You had to please the Programming People who bought the show and prayed for ratings. They wanted your program to be edgy and sexy and full of action and excitement. And then you had to please the Standards and Practices People. They wanted your show to be nice and quiet and non-controversial. The two divisions rarely spoke with one another. In fact, in some cases, they hated each other too much to converse. Either way, they fought their battles by playing tug-o'-war with you and your show.

We quarrelled often and usually unproductively with these folks over what we called "action" and they called "violence." Sometimes, their definitions were insane. You'd write a scene where the good guy grabbed the fleeing bad guy and held onto him until the police could arrive and the Broadcast Standards people would react like your hero had chopped off someone's head. Criminals could rob banks and cops could stop them but neither could brandish weapons. One time, a writer friend did a script (a pretty good script, I thought) where the climax depended on the hero cutting a rope at a precise moment. The hero, it had been established, was a former Boy Scout…so my friend had the hero whip out his Boy Scout pocket knife and use it to cut the rope.

Well, that couldn't be allowed. Encouraging children to carry knives, even though the Boy Scouts do? You might as well have them packing howitzers and blowing bodies away on the playgrounds of America. There was much arguing and the scene ended up being staged with the rope being cut by the edge of a sharp rock, which was just silly. The rope was being used to lower a car. Given how sturdy it would have to be to do that, it was already stretching reality for it to be cuttable with a pocket knife. A sharp rock was ridiculous.

At times though, the bickering went beyond Broadcast Standards trying to prevent the network from being sued or having its advertisers shrink from advertising. Every so often, someone there got it into their heads that childrens' television could mold the youth of today into the good citizens of tomorrow. That's a questionable premise but let's say it's so. The question then becomes what you teach, how you mold. I found that those who approached the arena with that in mind had some odd ideas of what we should be trying to impart to impressionable viewers. Acts of extreme violence — like carrying a pocket knife — weren't as big a problem as what they called "anti-social behavior" and what I called "having a mind of your own."

Broadcast Standards — at all three networks at various times — frowned on characters not operating in lockstep with everyone thinking and doing as their peers did. The group is always right. The one kid who doesn't want to do what everyone else does is always wrong. (I rant more on this topic, and show you a cartoon I wrote years later for another show just to vent, in this posting.)

Scrappy Doo was intended, as per his name, to be scrappy — scrappy and feisty and in many ways, the opposite of his Uncle Scooby. Faced with an alleged ghost, Scooby Doo would dive under an area rug and you'd see the contours of his doggie ass shivering with fear beneath it. Scrappy, as I wrote him in his first script, would go the other route: He'd say, "Lemme at him" and go charging after the bogus spirit of the week.

Shortly after the last of many recordings of "The Mark of the Scarab" (that first script), it dawned on ABC Broadcast Standards that maybe Scrappy was a bad role model for the kiddos. He was — and one person in that department actually used this term to me — "too independent." Weeks after I thought that script was out of my life, I got a call: Joe Barbera needed me in the studio, tout de suite, to discuss rewrites the network was demanding. I hopped in the car, zoomed up to the H-B plant on Cahuenga and was directed into a meeting with Mr. B and a covey of censor-type people.

Scrappy, they said, had to be "toned down." He was too rebellious, too outspoken…I forget all the terms they used but I vividly recall the "too independent." I made all the counter-arguments you'd have made. Mainly, I pointed out that Scrappy, as written, was an effectual character. He got things done, always (eventually) for the better. Our heroes, Scooby and Shaggy, fled from danger, panicked, hid, trembled, etc. If they contributed to the resolution of the problem and catching the villain, it was only by accidentally crashing into him. "Why," I asked, "do you want to make that the role model Scrappy and our viewers should emulate?"

The debate went on for maybe half an hour…and usually in these, no one scores a TKO and you wind up compromising. In fact, a compromise is so often the resolution that we often write with some wiggle room, inserting more sex 'n' violence than we really want to put on the screen. That's so that when the censors censor and we wind up compromising, it gets us down to the level we wanted all along. This time though, I had not done that. I'd written what I thought the cartoon oughta be. And this time, I thought, I'd won the argument.

Suddenly, everyone in the room had said everything three or more times and my talking points somehow prevailed. One of the Standards and Practices people shrugged and mumbled, "Well, maybe Scrappy can stay as he is." Another said to me, "You sure talked us out of what we had in mind."

Mr. Barbera, who'd been largely silent throughout the mud-wrestling, leaned forward in his chair and said, "That's because Mark didn't grow up on shows that you people f*cked up." I think he even pronounced the asterisk.

I left the meeting in the warm glow of triumph. I had saved Scrappy Doo's testicles, small though they might be.

The next day, someone (I don't know who) had another writer (I don't know who) rewrite a couple scenes in that first Scrappy script to tone him down, and the affected lines were re-recorded. The other writers working on Scrappy Doo scripts were told to adjust the character accordingly. Scrappy was still somewhat scrappy but nowhere near as scrappy as I thought he should be. For what it's worth, I suspect that the decision to capitulate was made within Hanna-Barbera. Someone, I theorize, feared that even if ABC would now accept Scrappy my way, at some point down the line, they might change their minds. And if they changed their minds, they might not rerun the episodes we were now doing and H-B would lose out on those revenues.

That's just a hunch based on other experiences. I never found out for certain. At Hanna-Barbera, those kinds of decisions would be made and you could have put everyone who could possibly have been involved under oath and they would all swear convincingly they hadn't done it. It had just been changed, apparently by no one. I used to think maybe the janitors at night would stop mopping floors for a while and do surreptitious rewrites on my work.

Anyway, that's how I lost the battle and Scrappy lost a little of his scrappiness.

I think I'm only going to get one more chapter out of this saga and it'll be along soon. In it, I write another episode, Scrappy saves Scooby's ratings, Lennie Weinrib gets replaced as Scrappy's voice and, years later, the world is blanketed with lying anti-Scrappy propaganda. Tune in whenever.

This is the long-awaited Part Four of my series on how the character Scrappy Doo came to be. Before you read it, you might want to go back and read Part One. You might want to go back and read Part Two. You might even, just to get really current with this, want to go back and read Part Three. But now here's our latest installment…

Okay, so where are we now? Oh, right: We had a script for the first Scrappy episode of the Scooby Doo series. It was an adaptation I'd written, in the grand Hollywood tradition of stealing from one's self, of a story I'd done a few years earlier for the Gold Key Scooby Doo comic book…a story about a comic book artist who is "haunted" by the super-hero he draws. But before it could be recorded, they had to find a voice for Scrappy Doo. Not as simple as you might expect.

For reasons noted, everyone's first thought was to have Mel Blanc play the scrappy one. Mel was contacted. Mel was interested. Mel was too expensive. The great Mr. Blanc did not come cheap and at times, by whatever decision-making process he used to manage his career, he'd suddenly decide to up his price a few notches. One day, Joe Barbera said to me, "We should have no problem getting Mel. He just did Captain Caveman and a couple other jobs for us." The next day, Mr. B. told me, "Forget about Mel."

We forgot about Mel. Auditions were held. Actors tried out. One of the many who read for the role of Scrappy Doo was a gentleman named Frank Welker, who has done more cartoon voices than any three other people in the business combined…and yes, even if one of those three is Mel Blanc. Frank was already a member of the regular Scooby Doo cast, playing the role of Fred. He gave a pretty good audition and during it, he ad-libbed a little bit where Scrappy yelled a few fanfare notes and proclaimed, "Puppy power!"

Joe Barbera thought this was a great little catch-phrase for the character. He recalled how in the audition for the part of Fred Flintstone, actor Alan Reed had ad-libbed the immortal phrase, "Yabba dabba doo!" It didn't sound to me like the same kind of lightning strike but I was told to insert the rallying cry of "Puppy power" into the script. Then, to thank Welker for his brilliant idea, the part of Scrappy Doo was assigned to…Don Messick. Messick, who was also the voice of Scooby, had given the best audition, they decided.

Okay, fine. So Don would play Scooby and Scrappy, and my script was recorded.

Everything fine, right? Nope. A few days later, the folks over at ABC listened to the track and decided that Scrappy had the wrong voice. Talented as Don Messick was, he just wasn't the perfect Scrappy. So they listened to all the other auditions again and I think they even did some more…and they decided that the right voice for Scrappy was one that Daws Butler had done. Everyone concurred so they called in Daws, and they called back all the other actors (including Messick to play Scooby) and they re-recorded the entire script with Daws as Scrappy.

So now they were done, right? Nope again. After the track for that cartoon was edited, they decided that Scrappy still wasn't right. Again, they listened to all the past auditions. Again, they had a few more done. This time, they decided that a lady named Marilyn Schreffler had the perfect sound for Scooby's nephew. So everyone trudged back into the studio and they recorded my script for a third time. That went so well that three days later, they were back doing it again, this time with Frank Welker playing Scrappy.

And then…

Well, around here is where I lost track. I'd go to the studio, walk into the producer's office and say, "Don't tell me…let me guess. Laurence Olivier? Marcel Marceau? Jayne Mansfield?" Scrappy was well on his way to becoming the first network TV cartoon character to have more voices than fans. There was one morning when they told me Paul Winchell had been chosen as the voice of Scrappy and then later, when I came back from lunch, Dick Beals was going to be Scrappy. I don't think Paul or Dick ever recorded because then, Mr. Barbera decided it was time to bite ye olde bullet and see if they could make a deal with Mel Blanc (who hadn't even auditioned) and they spent a few days haggling with him and simultaneously auditioning more actors.

They even went so far as to ask me who I'd cast…and back then at Hanna-Barbera, they had to be pretty desperate before they'd ask a writer anything like that. I had two suggestions, the first being Howie Morris. This was before I worked with Howie on another show and we became close friends. I thought he was a brilliant actor and from what I could observe, having him play Scrappy Doo was like casting Dom DeLuise to play a fat guy. Barbera loved my idea and I still don't know why it didn't happen. True, it was during a period when Mr. Morris considered himself banned from Hanna-Barbera for telling J.B. to have an intimate relationship with himself…but Barbera wasn't the kind of guy to let a little thing like that get in the way of getting a show into production. (A few years later, Howie was back working for the studio again.)

For whatever reason, he did not become Scrappy Doo and neither did my other suggestion, which was a writer-performer named Marshall Efron. I had a tape of him auditioning for another show and when I played it for everyone who had a vote, they all agreed he was ideal for the role of Scrappy Doo. And then they gave the job to Lennie Weinrib.

I still don't know why, although Lennie was pretty good in the part. He was so good that a whole week later, when I asked the producer who was Scrappy Doo now, he said, "Amazingly, it's still Lennie Weinrib." In fact, it continued to be Lennie Weinrib for the entire season…all the way until the moment when Lennie asked for more money, at which point the world went full circle and all of a sudden, Don Messick was Scrappy again. As he would continue to be for the rest of the little guy's animated life. All it took to make a firm decision was someone asking for above scale.

This concludes Part Four of The Secret Origin of Scrappy Doo. Tune in some day for Part Five in which the lady at Standards and Practices decides that Scrappy is a bad role model for children and must change his evil ways.

This is the third of an as-yet-undetermined number of parts. I'm serializing the tale of how Scrappy Doo became a part of the Scooby Doo cartoon show and I'm owning up as to what I had to do with that. If you haven't read Part One or Part Two you might want to do so before venturing into what follows, which is our third chapter…

Everyone in sync? Good. So I'd just written the script which convinced ABC to pick Scooby Doo up for its ninety-eighth (or whatever number it was) season. I was asked to story-edit the show but I'd accepted a job to serve as head writer for a couple of variety specials for Sid and Marty Krofft and had to pass. I still, however, had to do another rewrite on my Scooby script to address a few comments that folks at Hanna-Barbera and ABC had before it could be produced…and you'd think that would be simple. I mean, they all loved the script and it had gotten the show renewed for another year. So how many problems could it have?

As it turned out, plenty. Ordinarily, when you wrote a script for H-B, you got "notes" from one person at the network and maybe (and maybe not) someone at Hanna-Barbera. But this was a pilot, even if they'd denied as much when negotiating my fee. A pilot pays more because more people have input and they're always more concerned about teensy details. So I got notes. Boy, did I get notes. Johannes Brahms once wrote a piece called Ein Deutsches Requiem that runs seventy minutes in performance. It had fewer notes than I got.

Joe Barbera read the script, told me it was wonderful but he gave me notes in such volume that I found myself wondering how many I'd get if he hadn't liked it. The person who ran the studio's day to day operations gave me a set of notes that topped Barbera's in breadth and volume. The head of the story department gave me a pile of comments…and then there was a set from the fellow who was line-producing the Scooby Doo show and yet another from the team of writers who'd signed on to story-edit the series after I passed. That's five sets of comments and we hadn't even gotten to the network where the real power was wielded.

I got three sets from ABC — from different programming execs there — and another from the Standards and Practices Lady. I ignored the S&P Lady because…well, I always ignored her notes. But even then, I had eight sets and they could not be humanly reconciled. One set said, "Let's lose the joke at the top of page 19." Another said, "Love the joke at the top of page 19." Yet another said, "Hey, could we make that joke on the top of page 19 a running gag and do it a few more times?" Being a mystery, the story involved three suspects and one set of notes suggested switching whodunnit from Suspect A to Suspect B, while another set of notes thought all clues pointed to C. It went that way all through all the notes. I suspected the eight of them had gotten together and divided up my script in a devious plot to drive me insane. ("Okay, you'll hate the scene in the cave and I'll love it and Joe will tell him to change it to a Chinese restaurant…")

For maybe a week, I struggled with rounding off this odd trapezium my script had become. Finally, I went to the person I just mentioned who ran operations, laid eight sets of notes on this person's desk and said, "Pick any two." I was immediately told, "Throw out everyone's comments except Mr. B's" — "B" for Barbera — "and Squire's." Squire Rushnell was the Vice-President of Children's Programming at ABC, the guy who everyone said loved it when the new characters were inspired by Warner Brothers cartoons and voiced by Mel Blanc.

I went home, did a rewrite to please Joe and Squire, and the next day the script was marked "final."

A week or so later, I was in the Hanna-Barbera Xerox Room and I happened to see my script being mass-copied for distribution. I peeked to see if any rewrites had been done since it had left me and there didn't seem to be any. In fact, the script hadn't even been retyped. They were copying the printout I'd handed in, the one from my word processor.

But someone had typed a new title page and instead of saying, "Written by Mark Evanier," it now had my name plus that of another writer in the studio. In fact, the other writer was the son of an executive at the Hanna-Barbera studio.

Three minutes later, title page in hand, I barged into the office of that executive and you can pretty much imagine what I said. He explained that his son had been among the many writers who'd worked on Scrappy Doo before I'd been hired. He felt his son deserved some credit for all the hours he'd put in on the project. I said, "He may have put in many hours but he didn't put them in on this script. I wrote this script and you put his name on my work." The exec apologized and ordered the title pages reprinted…and I had yet another example to cite of how writers get abused when they work on projects not covered by the Writers Guild of America. That kind of thing would never have happened on a WGA show…or if it had, the Guild would have handled it in a jif.

Okay, so we had a script. Now, Scrappy needed a voice. In our next installment, whenever it appears, I'll tell you about the actor they selected as being the perfect voice of Scrappy Doo. And then I'll tell you about the actor they replaced him with. And the actor they replaced the second guy with. And the one who replaced the third guy. And the fourth guy and the fifth guy and so on. Scrappy's still quite some distance from being born.

This is the second part of I-don't-know-how-many detailing the creation of the cartoon character, Scrappy Doo. If you haven't read the first part, you might want to study it before proceeding with this one. Which you can do over on this page.

Now then. When we last left me, I was lunching with Joe Barbera at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood, being charged with my mission: To write a Scooby Doo script that would introduce the character of Scrappy Doo. I had to make Scrappy "work," at least on paper, so the good folks at ABC would invest in another season of the series. Mr. B. had sketches of Scrappy — mostly by Iwao Takamoto, I believe — and a rough idea of who the character was. As he told me what he had in mind, it sounded to me like he was trying to avoid saying two words. The two words were "Henery Hawk."

It is not uncommon for a new creation to start with what some might call a reference point or some element of inspiration. We all know about The Honeymooners turning into The Flintstones or Sgt. Bilko being a jumping-off point for Top Cat. Some are less obvious and there are also times in the development process when you start with one idea and by the time it reaches the air, it bears so little resemblance to that idea that it really qualifies as a new creation. The Scooby Doo show itself started out with the template of the old Dobie Gillis show and morphed into something altogether different.

There was at the time at ABC, a senior exec who (it was said) could best be sold a new series if he perceived some lineage to the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Years later, I discussed this with the exec and became convinced his passion in this area was greatly exaggerated. But at the time, many of the folks whose livelihoods involved selling shows to him believed it, and so would laden their pitches with WB references — "This character is like Daffy Duck crossed with Wile E. Coyote" or somesuch gobbledygook. There was also a special sales magic to obtaining the services of Mel Blanc to voice a new character.

Not long before, H-B had tried to sell a series to ABC featuring a hero whose body was mostly mustache, a la Yosemite Sam. The network was only semi-interested so more sketches were done and the concept was changed a bit…and the character got hairier and hairier. At some point, he was so hirsute that they decided to make him into a caveman and that's when ABC bought the show. Soon after, he made his debut: Captain Caveman…with a voice provided by Mel Blanc.

I was startled when an H-B exec told me this. The two characters have zero in common apart from hair and Mel. It's one of those cases where Yosemite Sam was a jumping-off point but he jumped so far that he became a wholly new entity. Still, the WB connection (and Mel) were of some import in the sales of the series.

As Mr. Barbera told me how he saw Scrappy Doo, I kept thinking of Henery Hawk. Barbera never said that name and may not have even realized he was describing the pint-sized chicken hawk from several WB epics. But that's what it sounded like they wanted. So I went home and wrote a short scene, imagining Scrappy to have Henery Hawk's voice and swagger, and when Mr. B. read it, he called and said, "You've nailed it. That's exactly what I had in mind."

So that was Hurdle #1. The next hurdle was to come up with a ghost and mystery for the script. For this, I decided to steal from myself. I looked back over the issues of the Scooby Doo comic book I'd written a few years earlier, selected a couple of my favorite ideas and typed up short summaries. Someone at ABC picked the one they liked best and I went ahead and wrote the script in about a week. The hardest part of it was that every day, some Hanna-Barbera exec or agent (though never Joe) would call me and try to convince me how vital it was that the script be strong enough to convince ABC that Scrappy was viable. They all had a way of saying it as if they expected me to go, "What? You want it to be good? Well then, maybe I'd better take out all the recipes I'm putting in and insert some jokes instead!"

I handed the script in on a Friday and it was simultaneously distributed to all the important folks at H-B and sent to the folks over at the network. Over the weekend, Barbera called to say he was very happy with it. He had a few notes but not many and he thought we were in very good shape. Monday morning, I got a call from a rival producer, the one for whom I'd done another pilot that ABC was considering for that season. He "jokingly" told me that I did too good a job for Hanna-Barbera. He'd just heard that the show I'd developed for him wasn't going to make it because ABC liked my Scrappy script. (I put "jokingly" in quotes because the truth is that the guy was pissed.) Later that day, someone called from Hanna-Barbera to say that I was a hero and that Scooby Doo was being picked up for another season.

I was happy, of course. Little did I know my troubles were only starting.

Tune in one of these days — I'm not sure when but soon — for more of the story of how Scrappy Doo came to be.

Among the perks of having a weblog is that if people keep asking you the same question over and over, you can answer it on your weblog and thereafter tell them, "Oh, I addressed that matter on my blog. Just go do a search for it." This is why over the next week or three or nine, I will be serializing the story of how the cartoon character of Scrappy Doo came to be, and what all I had to do with the birthing process.

People ask me if I knew at the time I was contributing to the creation of a such a hated thing as Scrappy Doo. No, I didn't and no, I still don't. I am aware that there are some folks out there who, given the choice of seeing the execution of Osama bin Laden or Scrappy Doo, would opt for Scrappy and wonder why you even had to ask. Such people are, I believe, a fairly recent faction, and I don't think they're as widespread as their noise level would indicate. I recall Scrappy being wildly popular the first few years he was on the scene. He certainly bolstered Scooby's ratings and kept the series on a good 2-3 years longer than it would have lasted without him.

Scrappy debuted on the Scooby Doo program in 1979 as a "new element." Scooby had been on the air for some time by then and the narrow formula of the series had become repetitive to the point where ABC was considering cancellation. One of the very real concerns was whether the writers could come up with the thirteen requisite ghost premises to do another thirteen episodes. Let me tell you how you sold a script to the Scooby Doo series in those days.

You'd go to the producer or the story editor and say something like, "How about a ghost who's an aardvark and he's been haunting ant farms?"

The producer or story editor would consult a list of all the episodes produced to date, and there was about a 95% chance he'd look up from it and say, "Did it in Season Four" or whatever season it had been in. Sometimes, they'd say, "Did it in Seasons Two, Four, Five and I have one in the works right now, same idea." But if you lucked into something in the 5% category, you had an assignment…even if you didn't have a clue who the aardvark would be when he took off his mask or why he was haunting ant farms. Didn't matter. You or someone else could figure that stuff out later. You'd done the hard part.

In setting the schedule for that year, it had come down to a decision between renewing Scooby or picking up a new series — the pilot script for which I'd written — from another studio. Joe Barbera called me in and said, approximately, "If this doesn't work, Scooby's dead. We have this new character that I came up with…" And he showed me sketches of Scrappy Doo, explaining that this was Scooby's nephew. We would add him to the show and this would make things just "fresh" enough, while still keeping the winning Scooby formula intact, that ABC would order thirteen more episodes. And thirteen more for the season after that, and then there would be the season after that…

I was not then on staff at Hanna-Barbera. Quite a few writers were and most of them had taken a shot in the previous months at writing scenes or an entire episode to establish Scrappy. The folks at network liked very little of what they'd done and were not about to green-light Scooby for another year; not without a finished teleplay that would show how Scrappy functioned, how he talked, where the comedy in the show would be with him around, etc. J.B. wanted me to write that episode. Even though it was competing with that other pilot I'd written, I said I'd do it. It was always very difficult to say no to Mr. Barbera.

The next thing that occurred was an unusually ugly negotiation between my agent and the gent in charge of Business Affairs for Hanna-Barbera. The latter took the position that this was not a pilot; that it was just another episode of Scooby Doo, so it should pay the same mediocre fee as all other episodes. My agent took the position that this was a pilot because (a) it was introducing a new character and something of a new format and (b) the network would or would not order episodes based on my script. I would also be going through several weeks of network meetings and extra rewrites, something that did not usually transpire on your average episode. Therefore, he concluded, it was a pilot and better pay was appropriate. The Biz Guy said no. My agent said, "In that case, Mark isn't doing it."

The Biz Guy said fine, Mark isn't doing it…or anything else for the studio, ever again. This was followed by the sound effect of the phone being slammed down. Then the Business Affairs guy called me at home and informed me that my days of writing for Hanna-Barbera were over. In fact, I should not bother trying to set foot in the studio again as I would be turned away. I pointed out to him that Scooby or no Scooby, I was still the editor of their comic book division. He said, "We'll see about that" and hung up.

Sure enough, I was banned from the studio for a good eighteen minutes, which is how long it was before Mr. Barbera phoned. He instructed me to — and I will clean up his language here a tad — "pay no attention to that damn idiot in Business Affairs." Before the sun set that evening, I had a deal to write the script that would introduce Scrappy Doo. The pay was sufficient (barely, of course) and there would be a small bonus if the show was picked up. The next day, I was to meet Mr. B. at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood so we could brainstorm ideas over lunch.

This concludes Part One of The Birth of Scrappy Doo. Stay tuned to this weblog for the next exciting chapter, one of these days. Whenever I get around to it. Maybe in the next week or so.

Our pal Harry McCracken has filled a shameful void on the Internet by erecting Scrappyland, the best place to learn about the long-forgotten (by most) Charles Mintz/Columbia cartoon character. It's also just about the only place but, hey, you gotta start somewhere. You sure can't go out and watch a lot of Scrappy cartoons, as the output of that particular studio isn't exactly exhibited with any frequency. One of these days, the boys at Sony will wise up and release piles of DVDs but right now, you're going to have to be content with Harry's site, plus artifacts like the Big Little Book cover at left and the poster at right. (You can see a much bigger version of said poster by clicking on it. Go ahead. Try it.) I don't quite share Harry's enthusiasm for the cartoons but they're quite watchable and it's a shame that anything like that is not available.